Death as a Way of Life

by David Grossman

  Every rational person understands that continuing violence, on both sides, is liable to send the region into disaster, into a historical tragedy whose outcome no one can now predict. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians will come out of it well. Maybe only the extremists among both peoples want it. They, in the final analysis, are the true enemies of the majority on both sides.

  The Palestinians who signed the open letter to the Israeli public, and the many other Palestinians and Israelis who believe in what I have written here, can still hold discussions among themselves. Of course they are not authorized to conduct negotiations, but at least they have the power to renew the dialogue. Perhaps we will be able to find creative and just solutions at the points where the politicians—for a variety of reasons—are not able to rise above their short-term needs.

  As an Israeli who seeks peace, I ask: Can we meet—yes, even in these times—on the border, both the metaphorical and the concrete demarcation, somewhere between Palestine and Israel, say, in a peace tent that we erect there together? Can we present an alternative of any sort to the rampant animosity, hatred, killing, and revenge? Can we halt the mad, violent whirlwind that threatens to sweep up all of us?

  Here, this is an invitation to dialogue.

  Point of No Return

  January 2001

  A major point of contention between Palestinians and Israelis continues to be the “right of return” of the Palestinian refugees. About 800,000 people who fled or were expelled from Palestine during the 1948 War of Independence between the newly established state of Israel and four Arab countries were kept by the Arab states in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip. After the Six-Day War, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, the refugees in those territories came under Israeli control. The ongoing dispute over Israel’s responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem has not been resolved, and no solution has been found. The number of Palestinian refugees today is estimated at 5.5 million people around the world.

  The “right of return” has been a central Palestinian demand for the last fifty-two years. Yet only in recent weeks has it penetrated Israeli consciousness as a concrete and threatening possibility. It now looks as if the Palestinian insistence on the “right of return” will lead even the most steadfast of Israeli doves—myself included—to the reluctant and disheartening conclusion that peace cannot be achieved at this time.

  Many Israelis live with an inner conflict between their moral and natural desire to repair a decades-old injustice and their profound apprehensions about the “right of return.” The prospect of the return of the Palestinian refugees, who fled or were expelled from Israel during and after the War of Independence, confronts every Jewish Israeli with the most problematic roots of Israel’s definition of itself as the Jewish state. The Jewish majority’s explicit desire to retain its numerical superiority is one that, when it comes down to it, beats in the heart of every nation. Every nation wishes to preserve its values and heritage and pass them on to the generations to come; such an aspiration is neither jingoistic nor racist. In the case of the Jewish people, with their tragic history, it is even more comprehensible, although it remains an unresolved discrepancy in the democracy they desire.

  In my view, accepting the Palestinian demand would be a dangerous move for Israel as a Jewish state, and as a political entity. Israel must accept its partial responsibility for the refugee problem, alongside the Arab countries that created the problem in 1948. Israel must help raise the funds to resettle the refugees, and must allow some refugees to return for purely humanitarian reasons. Likewise, Israel must recognize the refugees’ bonds to the places they were torn away from. But there is a great distance between an affinity to a place and the “right to return” there.

  The Palestinians have been trying to reassure Israelis by explaining that even if the agreement refers to the “right of return,” it will be only a formal right. In practice, they say, “only” a few hundred thousand refugees will resettle inside Israel (where there are today 5 million Jews and a million Palestinians). I don’t understand this distinction. A right is a right, and if a right is granted, it exists, in full. Anyone with a sense of responsibility for the generations to come must today consider how, fifty years from now, his great-grandchildren will explain to the great-grandchildren of today’s refugees that the “right of return” that Israel recognized was only a theoretical one, a formality.

  For decades the Israeli peace camp, together with the Palestinian peace camp, has worked to disseminate the concept of “two states for two peoples.” In other words, a Palestinian national state that will live in security and peace alongside the state of Israel, the Jewish national state. Yet the demand for a sweeping “right of return” will lead, in practice, to a situation in which the Palestinians have a national state, Palestine, while Israel becomes, instead of a Jewish state, a Jewish and Palestinian state—in other words, a political entity whose identity will gradually become blurred.

  Jewish villages and cities have been built during the last fifty years on the ruins of the villages in which the Palestinian refugees once lived. This is a heartrending fact for the refugees, but changing it would require tearing millions of Jews away from their homes, and to where? Let us not forget that the great majority of these Jews are themselves members of refugee families who fled ancestral homes in Europe and the Islamic world. Will committing yet another injustice bring the two peoples closer to peace?

  “What do you mean?” my Palestinian friends ask me when we blow up at each other during arguments, time after time, over this issue. “If Israel accepts the principle of the ‘right of return,’” they argue, “and the refugees indeed return, an entirely new reality will be created here, a reality of conciliation and mutual forgiveness, a reality of true peace.”

  If that could only be true. I desperately want to believe it can. It certainly fits my natural inclinations to dream, as they do, of a peace that will come to be despite the violence around and among us. I long for a world in which all the hate, hurt, and suspicion of the past are nobly set aside. But as one who lives here in this deeply divided, extremist, fundamentalist region, I know that a good solution is one that tries—at least in its early stages—to do everything possible to avoid friction between rival populations. It must be a solution that does not impose too difficult a test on our faith in the goodwill of either Jews or Muslims and their ability to rise above their instincts and fears.

  Many conflicts of the twentieth century were eventually resolved with compromises that did not include mass repatriation of refugees. Such was the case, for example, with the Sudeten Germans, and in the German-Polish conflict over the German refugees from the German territories, which were annexed to Poland in 1945. These former enemies understood that the return of millions of refugees was actually liable to destabilize the new reality. They preferred to dampen the pain of the past for the sake of an opportunity for the future.

  If we accept the “right of return” principle, hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of Palestinians will move into a country which they have for years sworn to destroy. Before long they will become the largest population group here. Yet their principal aspiration has been to fight Israel and its symbols, and it is this heritage that they have passed on to their children. Is there a country in the world that can agree, of its own free will, to take in such a population? Can Israel, whose civil society is fragile already, do so without falling apart?

  Furthermore, even if the Jews continue to remain a majority in Israel for another ten or twenty years, they will not be a majority for long. When they do become a minority, my fear is that they will be tempted—just like any nation that senses that its hold on its own country is slipping out of its hands—to establish a dark apartheid regime based on military might or on prejudicial and draconian legislation. This would inevitably lead to an explosion and the collapse of the country’s political framework.

  If,
on the other hand, an Arab majority rules and legislates in Israel, it will be able—by the most democratic of means—to eradicate the state’s Jewish character, to rescind its status as a land of refuge for the Jews of the world, and thus merge it with its sister Palestinian state. And is it possible to eliminate completely the ever-present threat of Arab propaganda from outside Israel, according to which every Jew who was not born in this country, or whose parents were not born here, will be forced to return to their country of origin?

  I’m sorry, but no thanks. I don’t want to be part of a Jewish minority in Israel. This, keep in mind, is the only country in the world that was established by decision of the United Nations, so that the Jewish people would no longer suffer from the anomaly of being a stateless minority dependent on the mercy of others. And I can only agree with Professor Edward Said, who responded quite honestly in a recent interview in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz to the question of whether a Jewish minority in a Palestinian state would be equally and fairly treated. “It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.”

  I believe with all my heart that the Israelis and the Palestinians can maintain good neighborly relations and heal the wounds that they have inflicted on one another in the past. But I also know, soberly and painfully, that this requires much time. If we can gradually heal the wounds of our wars, we will be able, in the future, to reach a situation in which, perhaps, national definitions will soften a bit and even borders will be no more than a formal line on a map. Perhaps then Israelis and Palestinians, who are much like each other in their natures and passions and, I also believe, pragmatism, will be able to mingle with each other naturally and normally. When that time comes, they will be able to live among each other, in Israel and Palestine, and serve as models of coexistence. In the meantime, we must make do with repairing what can be repaired, healing what can be healed, and trying to achieve a partial justice for both sides rather than absolute justice for either. Then we can finally set out on a new life for all.

  Hours Before the Elections

  February 2001

  Prime Minister Barak resigned from office on December 9, 2000, following a long struggle to maintain his coalition government. His pro-peace position was weakened by a growing support for the right-wing parties that called for exercising greater military force in repressing the Intifada. Ariel Sharon, leader of the Likud Party and a former general as well, promised voters in his campaign both peace and security. After months of terrorist attacks and dozens of Israeli victims, this is what the Israeli public was yearning for. Israel was about to vote for a new prime minister. There was no doubt as to the outcome of these elections.

  Today I ran into a reservist who served with me in the Lebanon War. Children were born to both of us back then. He sighed as we spoke. In 1982 Ariel Sharon led us into a trap in Lebanon. How awful it is to think that the children born to us then are the soldiers that he will lead tomorrow, should he win.

  There you have it, the whole story: Sharon remains; only the soldiers change.

  Sharon’s misconduct in that war led a national commission of inquiry to disqualify him from ever serving as minister of defense. In any properly run country he would have left public life and shut himself up at home. But in the Israeli political system one of the surest ways to success is to collect a large number of failures (and that will, apparently, be Ehud Barak’s only hope after tomorrow).

  A non-Israeli may have trouble understanding the secret of Sharon’s seduction of the Israeli public. But the average Israeli perceives Sharon as a “strong man” who has spent his entire life fighting the Arabs and has had the courage to face them down. Over a period of more than fifty years, Sharon has had a part in every important military and political campaign, and in many respects he is, for Israelis, one of the last living Sabra heroes, the native-born Israeli who is daring, rooted in the land, and prepared to fight for it to the death. In both his appearance and character he reminds many of a biblical figure—a man of great physical prowess and primal urges, cunning, shrewd, and brave.

  On the other side stands Barak. Until he became prime minister, he was considered Israel’s most courageous soldier. But now he is considered a man who lost his determination and nerve, groveling before the Palestinians, agreeing to all their demands. To most Israelis, Barak has been willing, in exchange for a tenuous chance at achieving an ambiguous peace, to abandon Judaism’s most holy sites and Israel’s strategic assets.

  Sharon’s plan is astonishing in its simplemindedness and illogic. He declares that he will not evacuate even the tiniest settlement in the territories. He announces that, as far as he is concerned, “compromise” means a willingness not to reoccupy the territories that have already been handed over to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, on top of all this, he promises Israel a “secure peace.” Apparently, most Israelis long to believe him, and will, most likely, vote for him.

  On second thought, this is no surprise, as Palestinians are murdering Israeli civilians almost daily. The average Israeli, who knows nothing about Palestinian suffering or losses, is certain that the Palestinians are only squeezing more and more concessions out of Israel, with their ultimate goal being not compromise but the destruction of Israel.

  So when Sharon comes along and promises that he’s got a solution, the despairing Israeli prefers to believe him rather than to come to terms with the fact that the present path, the frustrating path of negotiation, with its painful compromises, is the only path we have that can lead to peace.

  Sharon is selling Israelis a miracle cure—he says he won’t negotiate under fire. “If they shoot, we don’t talk.” To put it in simple language, Sharon is prepared to place the future of the peace process, Israel’s future, the future of the entire region, in the hands of every fifteen-year-old boy from Nablus or the Deheisheh refugee camp who’s got a Molotov cocktail hidden behind his back. Because if they shoot, we don’t talk.

  Sharon promises, with absolute certainty, to “wipe out terrorism.” Despite his decades of run-ins with terror, he has still not learned that it can’t be obliterated by military means alone. One can certainly not wipe out the struggle of a nation with a solid national consciousness, motivation, and both great hope and great despair.

  Do any of Sharon’s supporters really believe that he will have any more room for maneuver than Barak has had? Can anyone today seriously believe that Israel will always be able to do whatever it pleases in the Middle East, without paying a terrible price for it? Will Israel always enjoy American support for realizing its belligerent fantasies? Will there eternally be enough Israelis to follow their leaders into more wars that could have been prevented?

  This writer has much criticism to level against Ehud Barak. Against the way he acted, his style of interpersonal relations, his tactlessness toward both those close to him and his enemies. But I am certain of one thing: it would have been impossible to lay one’s hand directly on the deepest part of the Israeli-Palestinian wound—as Barak did—without causing an eruption of the kind that has occurred. It couldn’t have been done without awakening all the most primal fears, instincts, insults, and loathing, without shaking the cratons on which the two peoples, the Israeli and the Palestinian, live.

  I do not see today any other leader who would have dared to put the very core of this historic conflict on the table, raising all the most underlying questions about the Israeli and Palestinian identities, boundaries, and true existential concerns.

  Barak did it. Not with great enthusiasm, certainly, not with profound personal recognition of the need to concede and compromise. Most of all, not with respect for his Palestinian partner, or with real sensitivity for his suffering and his plight. But, little by little, by twists and turns, we saw him shake off the illusion of force, the harsh and narrow military view of the world.

  Do we now have no choice but to wait for Sharon to change as well? To wait for him to rec
ognize the limits of force, the limits of reality, and reach the same insights that Barak did? What price will we all have to pay for Sharon’s schooling? And who can promise us that this man will transform himself, his way of life, his character, to their very roots?

  Israel’s citizens have never before faced a decision that demands such responsibility and maturity, such a need to overcome their fears. The Israeli public must act against the wild instinct to vote from the gut, to punish the Palestinians, the left, Barak, and life itself, which demands such difficult and threatening compromises from them. But those who are not prepared to delude themselves, who live here in this tormented and turbulent region, know deep inside that there is no choice but to carry on with this difficult and frustrating process—to continue, while making concessions, to manage this complex conflict with wisdom and resolution, until finally, slowly, some years from now, the conflict fades away.

  In a few hours we will know—not only who Israel’s new prime minister is, but also to what fate we have condemned ourselves and the entire Middle East.

  After the Elections

  February 2001

  Ariel Sharon won an unprecedented landslide victory over Ehud Barak. Barak announced in his concession speech that he was resigning from the Knesset and party leadership. Later he rejected an offer to be appointed minister of defense. Sharon proceeded to create a unity coalition that included members from the defeated Labor Party, the right, and the center and religious parties. The resulting cabinet was the largest in Israel’s history, with twenty-eight ministers. The unity government was dismantled in October 2002, when Labor ministers resigned over the national budget debate.

  When Ariel Sharon made his victory speech on Tuesday night, his supporters whistled in contempt and loathing each time their leader mentioned Barak, the left, and the Palestinians. The Israeli public has clearly punished that triad in the most painful way possible. As one voter said, in naïve sincerity, “I’m not sure that Sharon is the best for Israel, but the Palestinians deserve him!”