Dear Jeffrey,
I would like to apologize in advance if what I’m about to say comes across as too aggressive. As an Israeli, I tend to be rude even when I’m trying to be on my best behavior. And, anyway, after saying I loved your book, the natural tendency is for me to write more about its troubling aspects than about its many virtues. This might give the impression that I was not happy with it—an impression I would like to dispel and apologize for. Please forgive me. (And you, readers, go purchase the book!)
And now, let me start complaining.
A famous Israeli songwriter you’re probably familiar with, Meir Ariel, once wrote a wonderfully painful line: “At the very end of every sentence you say in Hebrew, there’s an Arab sitting with his water pipe.” Reading your book, I got the same itchy sensation I always get when I hear this song (called “Pain Song”). It’s this strange feeling of being a citizen not of a real, normal country, but of one that only exists in an imaginary political sphere: the parallel universe of the so-called Israeli-Arab conflict.
Actually, this is one of the problems I have with most books about Israel and with most newspapers covering Israel (including, sometimes, my own newspaper, Ha’aretz). Is there an Israel in which people live and die, work and vacation, commit crimes and make love? If there is, it is not the Israel you write about in your book. In the real-life Israel that I know—not the imaginary, journalistic Israel—not every day and everybody is dedicated to “the conflict.” A year ago, a friend of mine explained why he wasn’t reading the newspaper I write for: “When I get up in the morning, I think about the coffee machine I’m about to purchase today, not about the Palestinians.” Evidently, he thought that we are dealing too much with the Palestinians and don’t invest enough resources covering the flourishing coffee-machine market.
I write all this because I find it strange that you lived in Israel for a couple of years but don’t say much about it in your book. Not unless it has “a Palestinian with a water pipe” at the end of it.
Now, let me try and answer some of the questions you raised yesterday. You wrote, “I should ask you why you apparently don’t believe that reconciliation is possible.” I’m not sure that this describes my position accurately. I do believe that reconciliation is possible. I’m just not sure it is possible now. You also write that in August you “met a good-sized number of people [in Gaza] who, at this late date, believe in an imperfect compromise with Israel.” I’m sure that’s true.
I’ve met with such people myself, many times. Back in the early ‘90s, when I was writing for Ha’aretz about the implementation of the Oslo accords in Gaza and the West Bank, I spent some magnificent days on the beach talking to former intifada operatives, dreaming about the coming peace. I once wrote a column describing the mood in the taxi I shared with former rebels, singing together an Israeli hit from those days (“What a country, what a country, what a special, extraordinary country”). We thought the days of war were over.
But we were all mistaken, as you know better than anyone. And I think we were mistaken for two fundamental reasons:
First, the conflict is not personal, it is national, and we need to make sure there’s enough support for the details of a possible peace agreement, rather than the general idea of peace, before it can really materialize. That’s one thing you know in theory but sometimes forget as you sit and talk to Rafiq.
Second, I do sort of connect to your being “the naive American,” as you put it. It’s important to recognize that not every problem has a solution; that not every solution is available at the time of our choosing; and that some things can’t be solved, not even by well-trained American lawyers and diplomats ready to make a deal. I think this is something that is very hard for hopelessly optimistic Americans to accept, because it contradicts one of the more entrenched strengths of your society.
And your book contains all the material necessary to understand why it will be so difficult to achieve peace. In my first note, yesterday, I wrote that Prisoners invoked in me “many fears that no thinking Israeli can evade.” It is the hatred you find everywhere, a religious hatred, that scares me. I’m not sure what we can do to make that go away.
By the way—and this is yet another topic worth discussing—the blurred lines separating the Israeli from the Jew somehow disappeared in your narrative. You’re Jewish, but you were also, for a while, an Israeli. And the people you talk to keep ruminating about the Jews, not just about the political entity of Israel. That’s a disturbing, but also revealing, phenomenon.
So, have you thought of any tricks for how we can find a solution not only to the problem of the occupation (this is rather simple; Israel will be willing to give the occupied territories to the Palestinians) but also for the hatred that’s more rooted in the Arab world? Or do you think that ending the occupation will end the hatred as well?
Best,
Rosner
