David Grossman: Death as a Way of Life

Noise. That’s the first word that comes into my mind when I think of the last ten years. So much noise. Gunshots and shouts, incendiary words and mournful laments, and explosions and demonstrations, and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks, and calls for revenge and the throb of helicopters above and the screeching sirens of ambulances and the frantic rings of the telephone after each incident.

And within that whirlwind, in the eye of the storm, there is silence. It can’t be heard; it is felt, in every cell of the body. A silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it, between the blow and the pain.

This is the empty space in which every person, Israeli or Palestinian, knows with piercing certainty all that he does not want or does not dare know. There, within himself, he understands — even if he denies it at the top of his lungs, with shouts and gunshots — that his life is being dissipated, squandered in a pointless struggle, and that his identity and self-respect and the one life he has to live are being endlessly expropriated from him in a conflict that could have been resolved long ago.

It is too painful to admit. The thought is too intolerable. And that’s the source of the constant, overwhelming urge to flee that silence, to go back out into the familiar noise to which we have somehow — it’s hard to remember just how — become accustomed. We actually don’t function badly there. They (that is, “the enemies”) will not break us. Justice is on our side. There is no choice. We shall live by the sword, and die by the sword.

But there, in that quiet place, the noise from outside is silenced. There, laid bare, stripped of any national, religious, tribal, or social garments that protect him, a man sits alone, curled up inside himself, like someone who has perpetrated a truly horrible deed, and who comes to understand the crime he has committed, that he continues to commit, outside the silence, against others and against himself.

Few of us, Israelis and Palestinians, can be proud of what we have done during these past years, of what we have collaborated in, whether actively, whether in passive acceptance of the noise — the collaboration of turning away our eyes, of suspending our souls, of anesthetizing ourselves.

This book contains a few dozen articles and responses to particularly turbulent moments during the years since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. I am not a journalist — if I had my way, I would lock myself up at home and write only fiction. But the daily reality in which I live surpasses anything I could imagine, and it seeps into my deepest parts. Sometimes, writing an article is the only way for me to decipher, to understand, and to survive from day to day.

I also write articles because of the noise. Because I often feel suffocated, truly claustrophobic, caught between the deceptive, deceitful words that all interested parties — the government, the army, the media — are constantly trying to impose on us, their subjects who live in this disaster area. Sometimes, if we reformulate a situation that already seems beyond hope and set in stone, we are able to recall that there is in fact no divine decree that dooms us to be the helpless victims of apathy and paralysis.

I have to admit that I often feel that words can no longer penetrate the screen of horror. It is difficult to speak to another person’s heart when, all around, human beings are being blown up and children are being torn to pieces. At such moments, I very much want, instead of writing, to run through the streets screaming.

Some opinions and hopes I expressed, some assessments I believed in, have been proven wrong after they were written. I included these writings in this collection because they, too, reflect, or so I think, the process that many of us have undergone. I include them here because I do not want to deny what I — and not just I — have experienced. Nor do I wish to refute my hopes and wishes.

Sometimes, when I take a look at the map and see the thing that is at issue, I grow despondent. Here is the minuscule state of Israel, whose size on the map isn’t even large enough to contain its name, and whose central waistline measures less than seven miles. It’s surrounded by hostile countries and peoples, several of them drenched in a wave of fundamentalist Islamism, saturated with a hatred of Jews as Jews — explicitly declaring their desire to destroy the Jewish state. I feel, in my body, how dread and despair transform the fingers of an outstretched hand into a fist. It is not difficult to comprehend how, in this situation, the instinctive urge of Israelis is to raise their defenses even higher. It is easy to understand why they are tempted to follow aggressive, bellicose leaders; to hide inside a suit of armor, frightened, suspicious and scarred by past memories, in expectation of the next collision.

What awaits us? Who is wise enough to know? I tend to believe that for the foreseeable future, our lives here will be made up of a continual series of small and large confrontations. My hope is that, gradually, the fuses of the conflict will be neutralized, that weariness will overcome both sides, and that painful acceptance of truth will force Israelis and Palestinians to turn to nonviolent means of achieving their goals.

But even if we are doomed to years of violence and animosity, to fragile peace agreements that will be violated over and over again, we must still ceaselessly manufacture the alternative. We must reiterate the possibility, denied and repudiated today, of peaceful coexistence. Our two peoples must strengthen among themselves, and among the members of the other nation, those who are truly interested in peace, those who are already prepared for painful compromise. If we don’t do this, the entire arena will be wide open for the extremists, the violent, and the warmongers. If we don’t do this, our children will remember only dimly what is truly worth fighting for, what they can aspire to. It is frightening to see how easy it is to forget that. How quickly the dearest, most important things grow indistinct, and are swallowed up by the noise. This, perhaps, is the most depressing discovery of the last two years — the heady attraction of hatred, of hunger for revenge. In a single breath, it is as if a thin veneer of culture and humanity has been removed from the two peoples to reveal brutishness and barbarity. Sometimes, viewing the atrocities that these two peoples inflict on each other, a person not only loses his desire to live in this region, but also his desire to live at all.

The chance of extricating ourselves from these inner snares thus depends not a little on the ability to resist the way of thinking expressed by the phrases “There is no choice” and “There is no partner.” In this struggle, the battle lines today are drawn not between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather between those who are unwilling to come to terms with despair and those who wish to turn it into a way of life.

That struggle is at the heart of this book — thirty-four articles; one story, still being written.

David Grossman

Jerusalem, December 2002

September 1993

Following secret negotiations in Norway, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat signed, in the White House on September 13, 1993, a Declaration of Principles — known as the Oslo Accords. The sides “agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security, and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.” The Oslo Accords provided only a framework for a solution rather than a final determination of all conditions of peace, including borders and relations between the two peoples.