The Israeli daily Ha’Aretz brought together Amos Oz and David Grossman, two writers committed to the peace camp. Together they discuss the disastrous situation of the Israeli left, terrorism, and the future of the country.
Amos Oz was born in 1939 in Jerusalem. He now lives in the “development town” of Arad, in the Negev desert.
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem in 1954 and still lives there.
Having reached the end of his forthcoming book, Une histoire d’amour et d’obscurité (A Tale of Love and Darkness), Amos Oz seems as if liberated and voluble. Across from him, David Grossman never sheds that attitude that makes him resemble a young prodigy before his rabbi. He seems to oblige himself to a reserve made of politeness and respect before the tribal elder. Six months ago, a small polemic had broken out between the two writers. Oz wanted to boycott José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature, while Grossman thought otherwise. It is an old story. Oz has always shown himself more of a centrist and more critical of Europe and of the left. But a serious conversation with the two writers shows that everything is a matter of subtle nuances. Both are voters of Meretz [the Zionist, secular, and pacifist left], reject the right of return of [Palestinian] refugees, and support the Clinton document. Oz professes a unilateral separation [from the Palestinians], while Grossman identifies more with the initiatives of the tireless Yossi Beilin [former Labor minister who has just rallied to Meretz]. Oz is a measured optimist and Grossman a lucid pessimist. Where Oz shows himself implacably logical, Grossman assumes healthy contradictions. Both have not yet recovered from the tragic events of these last twenty-eight months and seem still to wander among the ruins of Oslo [the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords of 1993]. Both seek a way to come to terms with a life now stamped with the seal of despair and terror.
The return of Jewish destiny
HA’ARETZ: My first question is simple. What horrifies you the most, and do you still have hope?
OZ: The good news is that, for the first time in ninety years of conflict, everyone now knows the one and only solution. The bad news was when the Palestinians were incapable of uttering the word Israel and the Jews of pronouncing the word Palestinians. Today, the Jews know that the Palestinians are not going to disappear and the Palestinians know that the Jews are not going to disappear. Everyone also knows the line of the future partition.
But then why this catastrophic vision?
OZ: The patient is more or less ripe for surgery, but the surgeons are cowards. There exists to this day no leader capable of saying: “Let us do what everyone knows and what must be done.” Everyone knows that most of the settlements will be dismantled, that a few blocs will remain in exchange for other parcels of land, and that there will be no right of return. So, what is everyone waiting for? The cause is what I call “Sharafat.” I am convinced that Sharon and Arafat prefer the present situation to the one that would result from a political solution. A new dawn for our two peoples would be their dusk.
David Grossman, do you share this vision?
GROSSMAN: I agree in condemning the political cowardice of the two leaders whose glory rests only on their physical courage. I also agree in considering that the solution is perhaps near, because it is known and because the Americans and the whole world are sickened enough to impose it on us. But I am more pessimistic than Amos. I fear that if we one day arrive at peace, this peace will not be rosy and eternal but punctuated by spasms of violence. Real peace, we will not know it in our lifetime. You were asking me what horrified us. For me, what horrifies me the most is that I am no longer sure of Israel’s existence. The doubt has always been in me; it is a nightmare common to all the Jews who live here, that Israel will one day cease to exist. But, for decades, we had at least managed to live rationally with this nightmare. Now, for two years, the prospect of a disappearance of Israel and an annihilation of the heroic experiment undertaken here has once again become concrete.
What suddenly made you feel this nightmare?
GROSSMAN: The scandals that marked the Israeli elections demonstrate that people have lost all moral sense. The minimal hypocrisy necessary for life in society has quite simply disappeared. To a certain extent, this is the consequence of terrorism. When your environment is made only of mangled bodies and shreds of flesh, you can no longer believe in anything. To maintain a certain culture and a democracy, it is necessary that individuals share an illusion and accept a social contract. All of that has been torn to pieces. We had come to this country to found a State where we would no longer fear for our lives. Today, this survival instinct is flying away and people no longer dream of anything but leaving for other skies.
OZ: I do not have the same feelings as David. My fears are no longer Jewish or Israeli; they have become globalized. First of all there is a wave of fanaticism that sweeps not only Hamas and the Kahanists. It is a global wave. It is flagrant that, of the 29 conflicts that bloody the planet today, 27 involve a Muslim actor. From Chechnya to Somalia, from Algeria to the Philippines. But Islam is not the only one. Christian fanaticism is at work in the new European antisemitism, while Jewish national-religious fundamentalism is gaining adherents. The postmodern era is one of a frightening relativism. Two extremisms feed one another: either there is only one truth and whoever does not share it must be killed, or everything is of equal worth and murderers too have the right to kill. As for globalization, it is in the process of infantilizing and instrumentalizing the human race. We are witnessing a brainwashing on a scale never before seen, a system of stimuli destined to produce cravings for things and objects, which replace everything we had known under the name of culture.
A human race for whom life now amounts to nothing more than selling and buying. At the risk of shocking, I believe there is no culture without hierarchy. There is no culture founded on opinion polls or market studies.
Unlike David, what frightens me is no longer the fear of a pogrom or of a destruction of Israel, but rather this world of the Fourth World War where a mere individual blended into the mass can annihilate hundreds of civilians with a chemical or bacteriological weapon, or even by radioactive contamination.
GROSSMAN: Amos, at the risk of passing for a paranoiac, I cannot ignore the fact that we are more and more isolated and detested. Since the start of the new Intifada and since the revival of antisemitic acts abroad, something has changed in us. For me, modern, universal, new-technology Israel is watching the tragic quality of Jewish destiny close back over it. I have the feeling that the Jew who came to this land of Israel to connect himself to a certain solid base, to a concrete existence, has become once more the symbol of something else. The Jew had always functioned as the metaphor of something else and was rarely perceived as such. We are witnessing a sudden return of this.
Human beings have always had trouble referring to Jews as human beings. There has always been a mixture of demonization and idealization, two forms of dehumanization. Zionism had at least cured us of this by reintroducing us into History. Today, we are little by little sent back to that symbolic place. This evolution is dangerous because it revives the persecutory, sacrificial, and traumatic dimension that Jewish culture contains. Our creativity, our vitality, our social solidarity, and our moral passion are fading away, opening the way to tragic sentiments about Jewish destiny.
Amos Oz, would David Grossman’s feelings be so foreign to you? Before the Intifada, your literature dealt with this, after all…
OZ: I have also always had the feeling that we were walking on a thin layer of ice, that we were on parole and that we benefited from the capital of the Shoah. On the other hand, I am convinced that whole swaths of the Arab world, indeed the Muslim world, have not yet digested the terrible affront that the creation of Israel, in 1948, represented for them. They saw in it the consecration of eight centuries of humiliation. Eight centuries during which they did not obtain even a single external victory. Not a single victory since Saladin. And now, this little mouse, this contemptible little thing comes and inflicts a defeat on them. That Jews could, repeatedly, inflict a defeat on them? Thus in the Arab-Muslim world it is clear: it is an affront.
In the Christian world, it is even deeper. Christianity teaches that someone killed God. Whoever achieves such a feat can only be strong, cunning, superhuman, diabolical. Every day, millions of little Christians open their eyes and the first thing they see is someone bleeding on a cross. When the Christian child discovers that it is God who is dying, he asks who is the culprit? This question works even on atheists, for even those who have joined the margins of the left were nourished on this milk at their mother’s breast. It is not antisemitism in the sense of wanting to kill every Jew; it is rather a mixture of fascination and fear. Sometimes, it leads them to set very high the bar of the moral sense required of Jews. It is as though, after finally being exonerated from all collective responsibility in the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews had to prove that they deserve this exoneration.
Apart from Israel, no country in the world lives under surveillance on parole. Israel is told: behave correctly and you will have the right to exist; otherwise, you will disappear, and this whole affair will have been a mistake. No one said that about Germany after the Second World War. No one said half will go to France and the other half to Poland, but there will be no more Germany. What frightens me the most is to see so many Israelis of the pacifist and enlightened left adopt this approach and consider Israel as a conditional State. A State whose existence depends on its acts. Thus you will find in Tel Aviv people who are against the death penalty for serial killers and against the death penalty for rapists and against the death penalty for terrorists, but who are for the death penalty for a State that does not behave well. For a single State that does not behave well. I think that is terrible. From a moral point of view, it is a terrible approach.
In your view, a part of the Israeli left would echo a Christian antisemitic vision of the Jewish State?
OZ: During the atrocities committed in Algeria and in Vietnam, French and American intellectuals, although full of rancor, never called into question their own right to exist. Among certain radical Israeli intellectuals, what I see is not only hatred toward the religious, the settlers, the right, or the nationalists, but a sly hatred toward the architecture, toward the music, toward the folk songs, toward the memory, toward all the achievements of Israel. Even toward the streets on which they walk. Toward the buses in which people travel.
GROSSMAN: You exaggerate.
OZ: Perhaps the word “hatred” is exaggerated; I should rather speak of disgust. But it is a sly disgust. And I really do see, among certain radical intellectuals, something that is linked to the general persecution which says that Israel exists only conditionally. If you are nice and gentle you have the right to exist. But then neither the kibbutzim, nor the Weizmann Institute, nor the poets, nor the writers serve any purpose. Why would they exist? No one says such a thing about Yemen. No one says that about Iceland. There is in this something implicit that wounds me more, the fact that it does not come from European Christian intellectuals, but from within Israel itself.
GROSSMAN: I think you go too far. The people you speak of are revolting against what is happening here, against the chasm that is opening between the dream and reality. Moreover, this left is not very numerous. For me, what poses a problem is the fact that, after fifty-four years of existence, we still doubt our existence. It seems to me that this is the key question. Is it that, as Jews, we have a particular gene that prevents us from staying in one place? Jews have always been inhabited by this question: are we a people inscribed in space or in time? In the diaspora, we had defined ourselves as a people inscribed in time, an eternal people. But even after settling here, we are still incapable of really considering ourselves as a people inscribed in a particular space.
Note the expression: the Promised Land. It is a grammatical form that continues to infinity. It is not the land of the promise or the land that was promised; it is the land that is eternally promised. It is a land that one never reaches.
Errors of the left, responsibility of the right
How was your political vision forged as members of the Israeli left? How have you evolved these last two years?
GROSSMAN: I was 13 when the Six-Day War broke out. I remember the anguish that preceded it. I remember how concrete the possibility was that we might be thrown into the sea. This feeling was so strong that I remember taking swimming lessons at the YMCA.
Then came the occupation. For my whole generation, there was a kind of fusion between the sexual energy of adolescence and the energy of the occupation. It was a sudden and violent penetration to break the taboo and to enter into the holy places of Judaism. There is something erotic in the relationship between the occupier and the occupied. I remember perfectly that physical sensation of power, but also the feeling of dread. It is this fear that pushed my parents, old Labourites, to slide more and more to the right. During my military service, I myself embraced the ideas of the Israeli right. I worked in the intelligence services and I discovered what the Arabs thought of us. That is why to this day the fears that the Israeli right expresses are not foreign to me.
But the real shock for me was the Lebanon War [1982], and I had completely espoused the slogan according to which we were going to war to eradicate terrorism. But, when I served as a reservist, in a small village in eastern Lebanon, I saw things I had not wanted to see before. And suddenly everything that had been repressed in me erupted.
There is a particular moment I cannot manage to forget. Some time after my return to Jerusalem, the bus in which I was traveling stopped beside a bus carrying Palestinians from Bethlehem or from the Deheisheh Palestinian refugee camp. Suddenly I saw them. I saw the despair on their faces. They looked like ghosts, as if their bodies had been emptied of all life. And I finally saw what an occupied person was.
When I wrote Le Sourire de l’agneau (The Smile of the Lamb) (Seuil, 1995), I tried to understand what the disease of the occupation was. I asked myself how it was possible that a nation I believed to be a moral nation could arrive at such a situation. And how the two peoples had learned to draw a veil of ignorance: for the occupied are ashamed of their situation and the occupiers prefer not to see what they are doing.
When I went to Deheisheh to gather the materials for my book about the occupation, Le Vent jaune (The Yellow Wind), published in Israel in 1987 (Seuil, 1988), I was truly frightened. I stood there for about three hours, surrounded by people who were very wary of me. Some children were seeing an Israeli without a uniform for the first time. It took an old woman to break the circle that had closed around me and to bring me into her hut for us to begin to talk. And it was there that a real emotional experience took place. After an exchange of all the arguments for us and against us, suddenly something happened. They cared very much that I recognize their sense of offense.
These last two years, what was your most violent shock?
GROSSMAN: The lynching [of two Israeli reservists] in Ramallah. For all of us, that was a breaking point. It brought back to the surface our most deeply buried fears and a disposition to submit to stereotypes, to tell ourselves that they are all the same. But I believe that to think this is to capitulate.
Although one must campaign for peace, I often tell myself that there is no prospect. I look at the map of little Israel, a country so small that one can hardly write its name without throwing a few letters into the sea… Everything that is happening around Israel is frightening. The fundamentalism that undermines these countries. The lack of democracy in the Arab States. And the fact that the Middle East has not really accepted us.
But, in the end, I feel it as a personal offense to yield to these feelings of abandonment.
I am not blind to the faults of our partner. I have no illusions about the goodwill of the Arabs and, let us recognize it, we have shown no more goodwill toward them. I consider that, with our military power, we must have the courage to come out of the vicious circle into which we have been sinking since 1967 and which makes us endlessly repeat the same mistakes. Before jumping onto the branch of peace, we should first jump off the branch [of the occupation?]. But it seems that we are still afraid.
In the final analysis, has the left failed? Was it mistaken, or did it make the right choice?
GROSSMAN: The left has clearly failed, but it is a failure I am proud to have taken part in. Those who had made the choice of Oslo knew what risk they were taking. They knew that it would be extremely difficult to resolve at a single stroke a conflict more than a century old.
The left made two fundamental errors. The first was its excessive faith in reason — it almost idealized rationality. The second was a poor assessment of the forces at play. From this point of view, the right has a better instinct as regards the forces in the region and understands the importance of deterrence. This is essential in the violent, fundamentalist, and dark region in which we live. But, in the final analysis, the errors of the left bore only on details, notably on the personality of Arafat, who seems to be a terrorist at heart. The right, for its part, was mistaken on the substance in believing it was possible to perpetuate the regime of occupation. That is why I have not the slightest hesitation about the position I occupy and about what must be done.
There is also something else. We long believed in our experience as victims while ignoring what that experience made possible. In reaction to the hostility toward us, we transformed the West Bank into an immense detention camp and conducted operations that grazed the boundary of crime against humanity and often crossed it. Our society put its enlightened values into a refrigerator. Our moral stature foundered. In the end, we almost confirmed certain antisemitic stereotypes that make the Jew a xenophobe, a manipulator, a lover of force, an unreliable individual, and an imperialist. All of this must stop. We must come out of this situation.
Amos Oz, these two and a half years, what was your most violent shock? Was there anything that called into question your worldview?
OZ: Listen, the Committee for Peace and Security was created more than thirty years ago, six weeks after the Six-Day War. It had the idea of two States as the basis of a peace between the Palestinians and us. I argued with others that if we followed the path we proposed, there could be peace between us and the Palestinians. I invoked this argument for more than thirty years.
Today, I no longer invoke it. If I still believe in the idea of the two States, I am no longer certain that this will bring peace. In the best of cases, it will bring peace. In the worst, it will create a situation where, rather than waging two wars — one of which is just — we will have only one to wage, the just war. This is a substantial change.
This also explains why during the 2003 electoral campaign the left no longer promises peace: withdrawal, but not peace.
OZ: For my own part, I have already mentally withdrawn. For me, faced with what Ehud Barak had proposed to them at Camp David [2000], the Palestinians should have made a counter-proposal. But never would I have imagined that, after being offered a solution founded on two States, two capitals, and the restitution of 92 to 95% or 95 or 97% of the Territories, the Palestinians were going to unleash a war against us. That was a very profound shock for me.
In retrospect, were the Oslo Accords a mistake?
OZ: Oslo did not enjoy a single day of grace. The ink was barely dry when some were preparing the jihad, and the brainwashing for the jihad, while others continued the colonization. Oslo did not fail; Oslo was simply never attempted.
I do not accept the idea according to which the left drew no lesson from the events. When the head of the Labor Party speaks of a unilateral withdrawal from the most populated occupied territories, that signifies a radical change from the positions this party defended before the Intifada. It is the right that has drawn no lesson. Not only since Oslo, but since the 1930s. From always, the right believes that it suffices to strike the Palestinians for them to calm down.
Sharon, Mitzna, Meretz, Shinui
What do you think of Sharon? Do you hate him?
GROSSMAN: I do not hate him. I simply believe that his worldview is very narrow and that he reduces everything to a single concept: force. He believes that we must use more and more force. He has no other solution to offer us, and he is totally inflexible. He is leading Israel into a very dangerous zone. His role as leader should be to guide us toward the future, but he does nothing but bring us back into the past. The most surprising thing is his popularity. He moves in the void. He is a Prime Minister without opposition and without coalition. He does what he wants.
Perhaps this is explained by the fact that, while everything is collapsing around us, Israelis want to cling to a person who embodies a kind of continuity, of tenacity, of political determination. As a writer, the feelings experienced by the partisans of the right are not foreign to me. Sharon gives off a feeling of force and power. Put a toga on him, he will look like a Roman emperor. There is something biblical in this character. This image, with its instincts of power, its brutality, and its history, apparently possesses something that pleases the people.
OZ: It is not as a writer or psychologist, but as a political analyst that I consider Sharon. He is popular because he is perceived as the one who defeated the Palestinians without provoking America’s anger. And if he is perceived as a victor, it is because he obtained in Israel’s name a definitive victory: today, the Palestinians are asking for what they rejected at Camp David. Public opinion sees in Sharon the one who dealt a fatal blow to the enemy and provided an answer to the frustrations provoked by the images of our mangled children, and that of the discotheque and of Passover in Netanya [sites of bloody attacks]. Sharon gives off a comfortable self-confidence, but he does not know where he is going.
Are there on the left successors to Rabin and Peres?
GROSSMAN: There is a void. Amram Mitzna says what needs to be said, and holds to it, but he pays the price of two years during which the Labor Party served as a fig leaf for Sharon without offering the slightest counterweight to his instincts. I have sympathy for Meretz. And it is for it that I vote. Its leaders, Yossi Sarid and Yossi Beilin, think two moves ahead. They refuse to contribute to the climate of despair and impotence. And they manage to sublimate an understandable desire for fear and vengeance.
OZ: I am also sympathetic to Meretz, and I vote for this party. I am for negotiations under fire, for attempting once again to negotiate with the Palestinians. If this attempt does not succeed, then it will be necessary to put a unilateral end to the occupation.
What do you think of the Shinui party?
GROSSMAN: It represents an authentic phenomenon that contains true feelings. But the original model of this party belongs not to Tommy Lapid [its leader] but to the [ultra-Orthodox] Shas party. The Shas, in its hatred of the Ashkenazim and its hatred for everything secular, forged this creature, which is in fact artificial and will end up breaking apart. The [political] platform of the Shinui is insipid. In the end a vote for the Shinui seems to me a wasted vote.
OZ: I think the Shinui’s program is bad. It is as if a person who arrives in an intensive-care unit during a terrorist attack were to set about replacing the plants in their pots with great enthusiasm. He prunes them and waters them, and all of that is very beautiful — but during this time the blood is flowing. I also think that the Shinui draws its strength from the Shas, and the Shas from the Shinui, and I would say that the two parties ought to sign an electoral agreement to divide up the leftovers.
GROSSMAN: I would like to propose a name for their joint list: Shisui [it means incitement in Hebrew].
[The Shinui obtained 15 seats and 12.3% of the vote, making it the 3rd party of the Knesset.]
Do you think the left will recover and lead Israel toward a reasonable future?
OZ: My friend Djoumous [“Buffalo,” Arabic nickname of Haïm Oron, leader of Meretz] says that what is happening in Israeli public opinion is comparable to an earthquake. When the tectonic plates shift, the lower plates slide to one side and the upper ones to the other. The elections of January 28 attest to a slide to the right. The polls show that, on the peace process, Israelis are more to the left than to the right.
Last week my aunt Sonia made the following remark: if Sharon had spoken to Golda [Meir] as he speaks now, she would have thrown him out of Mapai [the ancestor of the Labor Party] for leftism, as she expelled Lova Eliav. And that is true. Fundamentally the Israeli public is sliding to the left and not to the right.
That said, I am very worried about Sharon’s policy. After destroying the Palestinian Authority, he is in the process of destroying the Palestinian middle class. For one makes peace with the middle class, and not with religious fanatics or the mafia. I fear that, a few years from now, we will no longer have anyone to talk to. But I have confidence in the capacity of human beings to surprise us. Perhaps even Sharon will surprise us. And if not, it will be someone else. I do not doubt that the man or the woman who will end the Israeli occupation of the Territories — with or without peace — is already here, among us. I do not know who he is, and he himself does not know it either, but he is already here.
GROSSMAN: Today, the Palestinian leaders are ready to accept the “Clinton parameters,” I say this with full knowledge. But if no Israeli leader endorses them, I fear that Palestinian society will tip into extremism, and into “Hamasization.” If the privatization of terrorism continues, it will become a nightmare both for the Palestinians and for the Israelis. I have no illusions, however: even if peace is concluded with Arafat, terrorism will not cease completely. It will take years before it leaves our lives. But that is no reason to renounce the efforts for peace, for it is not terrorism that constitutes an existential threat to Israel. The true danger that lies in wait for Israel is the social fragmentation provoked by the present situation.
One must wage a summud [Arabic word meaning “to hold firm”] for peace. The State of Israel was born so that we would no longer be victims, so that my grandfather would never again be beaten in Galicia, so that we might come here to live a normal life and defend ourselves. What overwhelms me is that, despite our power and our 200 nuclear warheads, we continue to be the victims of our fears and our anxieties.
This is our great mission: to emerge from our fears and enter into life. We must confront our history without being its victims. Our energy must not be consecrated solely to building an armor that protects us from the outside. Because today I have the feeling that we are so obsessed with our armor that there is no longer a human being inside. My wish is that this armor contain a human being. That life be a life of human beings.
(A more abridged version of the Ha’aretz article of 6 March 2003 appeared in Courrier international of 19 March 2003, which we thank.)