I belong to the generation that celebrated its bar mitzvah during the Six-Day War. Then, in 1967, the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire country; the conquest, the confident penetration of the enemy’s land, his complete surrender, breaking the taboo of the border, imperiously striding through the narrow streets of cities until now forbidden, and the smells, the primal view, and that same erotic tingle latent in every first meeting between conqueror and conquered—ah, what a sensuous explosion of all the pent-up desire that was in us! And on a grand scale! With the entire country!
We were thirteen years old, and we reached maturity in a collective rite of passage together with the adults. Secret desires and fears broke out into the sunlight and became sensible. Only a month before, in May, we had watched a military parade of the Israeli Defense Forces in the streets of Jerusalem: because of the cease-fire agreement with Jordan, armor and aircraft could not be brought into the city, and so the representatives of those forces had to be satisfied with displaying cardboard cutouts of planes and tanks. What poor proxies they were!
Afterwards, everything happened.
And in twenty years, everything happens, and it is as if nothing happens at all.
Seven years ago, I felt I had to write something about the occupation. I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched. What happened to us? How were they able to pass their values on to me during these years? For two years I sat and worked out those thoughts and dilemmas of mine. I wrote a novel, The Smile of the Lamb, and the more I wrote, the more I understood that the occupation is a continuing and stubborn test for both sides trapped in it. It is the sphinx lying at the entrance to each of us, demanding that we give a clear answer. That we take a stand and make a decision. Or at least relate. The book was a sort of answer to the riddle of my sphinx.
Years passed, and I discovered that one does not have to battle that sphinx. That you can go mad if you allow it to torture you with questions day and night. And there were other matters, and other things to write about and do. Because there are other sphinxes as well.
So I also became an artist of sublimation. I found myself developing the same voluntary suspension of questions about ethics and occupation. I did not visit the territories; I did not even go to Old Jerusalem. Because I felt the hatred of the people there, but mostly because I cannot tolerate relations that are not on an equal basis. Like so many others, I began to think of that kidney-shaped expanse of land, the West Bank, as an organ transplanted into my body against my wishes, and about which soon, when I had time, I would come to some sort of conclusion and decision. Of course, that transplanted organ continued to produce antibodies in my consciousness. I also knew how to declaim the familiar words meant to satisfy old sphinxes: it cannot go on this way, the occupation corrupts us, we have created a system of masters and slaves, and so on. But the furnace which forged those words went out and cooled long ago, and I did not want to feel it.
I took on this seven-week journey through the West Bank at the suggestion of Koteret Rashit, an Israeli news-weekly, because I understand that my sphinx had become a spayed cat purring contentedly at my feet. Because the worn sentences that I used like so many other people, though true, seemed now to be something else: like the walls of a penitentiary that I built around a reality I do not want to know; like jailers I stationed in order to protect myself from a gray world now repugnant to me. Suddenly I discovered that some jailers and criminals create—after years of living together and becoming accustomed to each other—unholy alliances. But I am in great danger from this, too, so I wanted to go to the places which most haunted me. Into the heart of the harsh clash between Jew and Arab. To see things with my own eyes in order to write about them. At first I thought they were not so terrible. Maybe only a mountain shadow which seems to us to be a mountain. If so, it must be told. And if not, even more so. After sharing my experience, the reader may decide to stand by his previous opinions, but he will have to take note of the price he pays, and what he has until now been prepared to ignore.
* * *
In another thirteen years there will be two million Arabs under Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2010 their number will equal ours.
There are those who say it is possible to continue on in this way for years. That over the years the “fabric of life” (mutual acquaintance, economic links, and so on) will overcome enmity. That is idiocy, and reality proves it even now. As long as the present “fabric of life” continues, it is wrapped around an iron fist of hate and revenge.
The argument based on the “fabric of life,” which now seems sober, pragmatic, almost businesslike, is a very dangerous argument for us, the Israelis. It turns the matter of the territories from an immoral matter into an amoral matter. It corrupts and anesthetizes us. One day we will wake up to a bitter surprise.
I want to go off on a tangent and tell a little story about this “fabric of life.”
An Arab woman cleans the stairwell at the housing project in which I live. Her name is Amuna, and she lives in Ramallah. I talk to her from time to time. A three-year-old boy, the son of one of the neighbors, used to seeing her bent over a pail of water, heard us talking and was surprised—I saw it on his face. He asked her name and I told him. Afterwards, he asked what we had talked about in Arabic, and I explained. He thought a minute and said: “Amuna is a little bit a person and a little bit a dog, right?” I asked him why he said that. He explained: “She is a little bit a dog, because she always walks on all fours. And she is also a little bit a person, because she knows how to talk.”
End of story.
So what will be?
I can only guess, and be aided by what I know—not about the situation, but about people.
I have a bad feeling: I am afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another ten or twenty years. There is one excellent guarantee of that—human idiocy and the desire not to see the approaching danger. But I am also sure that the moment will come when we will be forced to do something, and it may well be that our position then will be much less favorable than it is now.
It is not a question of who is right, we or they, right or left. It is a question of facts and numbers, and a few other things beyond facts and numbers, things in the fuzzy area between dogs and people. Whoever does not agree to speculate in this way about the future need only glance backward. The history of the world proves that the situation we preserve here cannot last for long. And if it lasts, it will exact a deadly price.
When I left on this journey, I decided not to talk with Jewish or Arab politicians or officials. Their positions are well known to the point of weariness. I wanted to meet the people who are themselves the real players in the drama, those who pay first the price of their actions and failures, courage, cowardliness, corruption, nobility. I quickly understood that we all pay the price, but not all of us know it.
We have lived for twenty years in a false and artificial situation, based on illusions, on a teetering center of gravity between hate and fear, in a desert void of emotion and consciousness, and the passing time turns slowly into a separate, forbidding entity hanging above us like a suffocating layer of yellow dust. From this point of view, nothing matches the occupation as a great personal challenge. As a personal crossroads demanding action and thought. Sometimes you can gain in this way—for a split second—real mountain air.
Albert Camus said that this passage from speech to moral action has a name. “To become human.” During the last weeks, and seeing what I saw, I wondered more than once how many times during the last twenty years I had been worthy of being called human, and how many people among the millions participating in this drama are worthy of it.