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| Purchase by David Grossman. |
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David Grossman is one of Israel's leading writers. He is the author of four award-winning, internationally acclaimed novels, two powerful journalistic accounts, as well as a number of children's books, and a play. In December 1998, he was decorated by the French government with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. Grossman's groundbreaking work of nonfiction, The Yellow Wind (1988), is a personal account of his three-month encounter with Palestinians prior to the outbreak of the Intifada.
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By David Grossman
April 4, 2002
Originally published in The Guardian, April 2.
Six days ago, as Israel was celebrating Passover - one of the Jewish people's most meaningful holidays - more than a score of Israelis were murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber who planted himself in the centre of a room where they were seated around their holiday tables. Survivors relate that the man took a long, slow look around, examining their faces, and then calmly detonated himself.
In response to this, and several more deadly attacks that followed, the Israeli government ordered its army to call up 20,000 reservists and to launch a large-scale campaign against the Palestinian Authority. Today, Israeli tanks are surrounding Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah in an act that lacks any political reason. Suddenly, one bullet, accidental or deliberate, can change the face of the Middle East and catapult all of us into a war. Every day, meanwhile, Palestinians are exploding in the streets of Israel, killing dozens of Israelis.
There is not an Israeli who does not feel that his life is in danger, and the despondency and dread that this insecurity causes are again exposing the odd paradox of Israel's position. On the one hand, militarily and economically it is one of the strongest countries in the Middle East. Its citizens also have a powerful sense of sharing a common fate and a firm determination to defend their country. On the other hand, it is also an amazingly fragile country that is profoundly, almost tragically, unsure of itself, of its own ability to survive, of the possibility of a future for itself in this region. Israel is today a clenched fist, but also a hand whose fingers are spread wide in despair.
Excuse my dramatic exaggeration, but I'm writing this from the frontline - or at least one of them. That means that I'm sitting in the neighbourhood coffee shop, in the shopping centre near my house, in a suburb of Jerusalem. I'm the only customer in the restaurant which, until a few months ago, was generally packed around the clock. A few shoppers scurry past, their expressions indicating that they would rather be at home. They look from one side to another, constantly checking their surroundings. Any of the people nearby could be their murderer. That man over there, for example, who has been standing motionless for several seconds at the top of the escalator leading to the second floor. He's putting his hand in his pocket now, and I notice that around me other pairs of eyes are watching him nervously. Without even realising that they are doing it, people step back, towards the walls. What am I supposed to do? What does one do when it happens? What should I be thinking about? The man draws a box of cigarettes out of his pocket, that's all, just a little coloured box of self-destruction of a normal, comprehensible type. Smoke it in good health, my man, and the film that stopped in freeze-frame for a second continues to roll, until the next moment of panic.
There is, of course, a clear imbalance of power between the two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. But there is symmetry in their fear of each other and in their ability to send themselves and their neighbours sliding into the abyss. Each side bears its share of the responsibility for bringing us here - each side, when stood at a crossroads made the wrong choice.
The occupation itself resulted from a war that the Arabs began against Israel in 1967. The settlements that Israel began to build in the territories it occupied in that war created a situation in which it is almost impossible for Israel to detach itself entirely from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat made a fateful error in July 2000, when he categorically rejected the offer made by Ehud Barak. Arafat then set off the current Intifada, instead of continuing to negotiate. Ariel Sharon helped make things worse when he visited the Temple Mount, and with the aggressive and humiliating policy he has pursued against the Palestinians since being elected prime minister. Arafat bears heavy responsibility for having incessantly encouraged acts of terrorism and suicide bombings and for having released potential suicide bombers from prison. He is also responsible for the past month's unbridled spiral of violence. He could have lowered the flames had he responded positively to Israel's restraint in its response to three particularly deadly terrorist attacks that occurred in recent weeks.
Without minimising Israel's responsibility for the current deterioration and without ignoring the immense suffering that Israel has caused the Palestinians during 35 years of occupation, I feel today that it is the Palestinians who have brought about the current intolerable escalation of the conflict. It is the outcome of their choice to use the weapon of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
We must recognise this in order to be able to deal with the new situation we are facing. The suicide bombings have injected into an already complex conflict an element that is irrational, insane, inhuman from any perspective, immoral in a way that we have not yet seen, even in this grubby conflict.
Suicide bombing is a weapon that no one in the world knows how to confront. Its use, on such a large scale as to make it almost routine, is liable to lead to extremely dangerous Israeli responses. It may well lead Israel to stop thinking with the rationality that is so urgently needed in this sensitive situation.
So here it is. A series of mistakes, of mutual injustices and cruelties, has led the two peoples to the most dangerous juncture yet in the century-old conflict between them.
Today, as the Israeli army besieges Arafat's office, as another terrorist makes his way - of this we can be certain - to an Israeli street at this very hour, as in a scene from a convoluted epic novel, full of reversals, two men face off against each other: Sharon and Arafat, two crafty old men, wizards of survival, grand masters of a bizarre game of chess in which they cause the most damage to their own pieces.
Twenty years after Sharon trapped Arafat in Beirut in the war of 1982, and after Arafat slipped away to Tunis - striding along the dock at Beirut, in the crosshairs of an Israeli sniper forbidden to shoot him - the two are facing off again.
The sordid reality that the two of them have created for their publics is in their own image. Each of them has "succeeded" - each in his own way - in fanning the flames of violence, hatred, and despair among their peoples. Their opponents say that they have no policy and no vision beyond the will to survive. But look how today's reality is the inevitable outcome of their chosen paths, their deeds, their aspirations, and how much the present state of affairs reflects their warlike, suspicious and aggressive view of the world. For them it confirms, in a hermetic, circular way, just how right they have always been.
Now each of them plays the role he has perfected over so many decades. One is the super-warrior, a sort of gigantic military relic of the new Jewish history. The other is the persecuted, isolated, besieged martyr, wallowing in the desolation from which he knows how to draw a startling strength and forcefulness.
Both of them will fail just as they have failed in the past. Sharon won't succeed in eradicating terrorism. Even if he captures all its planners and strategists, even if he confiscates all the large quantities of weapons that the Palestinians now possess, he will not succeed in excising from the hearts of the Palestinians the thing that makes them do what they do. That is their despair, the sense of humiliation, and their hatred of Israel. It will only enhance all these and encourage further waves of terror that will make Israel's position even more precarious.
Arafat will not get what he wants - which is to draw the Arab countries into the conflict. They, no less than Israel, fear the internal unrest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes, and fear even more the Islamist religious extremism that Arafat encourages and which is liable to harm them as well.
The world continues to abandon Israel and the Palestinians to drawing each other's blood.
More seriously, Arafat's gambits, the encouragement he gives to the suicide bombers, his grotesque hope, as he recently stated, to himself be "a suicide bomber on the way to Jerusalem", only pushes the establishment of a Palestinian state further into the distance.
Evil things are happening to both peoples. Fear causes no less damage to the soul than explosives cause to the body. Israeli society is becoming more and more violent, aggressive, and racist, and less democratic. Palestinian society is undergoing an even more dangerous process. A society that becomes accustomed to sending its young men and women on suicide operations aimed at murdering innocent civilians, a society that encourages such actions and glorifies their perpetrators, will pay the price for this in the future. The price will be paid in their attitude towards life itself, life as an inalienable sacred value. It will also be paid in a more practical way - the minute that the possibility of such a horrifying action takes form in the consciousness of a nation, it will not disappear. It will rear its head again in the people's internal dialogue. It is not at all surprising that moderate Palestinians are no less alarmed by the suicide bombers than the Israelis are.
They know the bitter truth - the weapon of suicide, which has proved itself so effective against the Israelis, is liable to be used against them as well, when the Palestinians have a state and commence their internal struggles over the character and image of that state.
That's the way things are right now. It's a situation of despair and disintegration. How can we get out of it? Only through dialogue, through renewing negotiations immediately, without any preconditions from either side, through obdurate but pinpointed fighting against terror. Arafat must do this with all seriousness and intent, as he has never done before. Sharon must withdraw from the Palestinian Authority's territory and conduct negotiations with the same determination that he is now deploying the army.
Palestinian terrorist attacks will, unfortunately, continue for a long time to come. But if there is also, in parallel, a move towards peace, a process of concessions, of ending the occupation, of conciliation and recognition of the suffering incurred by the other side, there is room for the hope that the Palestinian public's support for terror will decline, and the Israeli public's confidence in a peaceful resolution of the conflict will grow. Is there a chance that this might happen? Every thinking person realises that Arafat and Sharon are incapable of creating this opportunity. What remains? To live through this nightmare to its end, to go from funeral to funeral and to try to survive each passing moment. Thoughts of peace, of mutual understanding, of coexistence between the two peoples now sound like the last signals of life from a ship that has already sunk.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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