Literature and War
Conversations with Israeli and Palestinian Writers
Runo Isaksen, translated by Kari Dickson

published 2009 • 6” x 9” • 256 pages
ISBN 9781566567305 • paperback • $18.00 • Read More

Click here to read Runo Isaksen's recent interview with Nextbook


Etgar Keret

“I was speaking to the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, who is a good friend of mine, and he told me that my book had sold out in Ramallah. I commented that people were probably just curious about Israeli literature. He replied, ‘No, they buy your books because your work is different from other Israeli authors and it’s what they want to see.’ As an Israeli author, I’m more interested in Palestinian literature that is not directly about the conflict. Similarly, Palestinians don’t want to read Israeli books that tell them who they are, but rather ones that might tell them who I am—that is what is interesting. Apropos of South Africa, Nadine Gordimer always tries to deal with the conflict and find solutions, and I tend to find her books rather uninteresting. But it’s quite the opposite with J.M. Coetzee. He really captures the complexity of the situation and that is a valuable contribution. I don’t need someone to show me what’s right and wrong, I know what is wrong. Instead I need someone who says, ‘This is reality.’ So what I would look for in the Israeli–Palestinian dialogue is something that is normally denied, something that people think, but don’t say. Because what we hear today is nothing more than a bunch of clichés. If you gathered together the work of all Israeli and Palestinian writers over the past 30 years, and fed their texts into a PC, you would see that 90 percent of the words they use are identical. I do it too. Every time I’m asked to write an article or an essay, the first thing I do is sit down in front of my computer and write a paragraph, before reading it through and discovering all the familiar words: ‘tragedy,’ ‘unbearable,’ etc. So many words that are supposed to describe the situation, but in fact what they do is build a wall between you and reality. Because the truth is—even now, during the second intifada—life here is not unbearable. It is tragic, but life elsewhere is tragic as well. There is no inherent difference between my fear of being blown to bits by a suicide bomber and your fear of developing cancer or getting fired. We’re both human and we’re both frightened of dying. But here the situation binds us together with a sort of chain of clichés.”

Amos Oz

“What is interesting and ironic is that both the Jews and the Arabs have been the victims in relation to Europe, but in different ways. The Arabs have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism, exploitation and degradation. The Jews have been persecuted, discriminated against, and the target of genocide. But the fact that both sides are victims of a common oppressor does not automatically mean that they love each other or will develop a sense of solidarity. Only in Brecht’s plays do the suppressed march together to the barricades. In reality—and this is something that everyone knows—some of the worst conflicts often arise between victims of the very same suppressor. When two children who have the same cruel father look at each other, what do they see? They don’t see the other one as a victim, but rather as an image of the cruel father. And that, broadly speaking, is the situation here. So obviously it doesn’t help that the Jews have a traumatic history. To expect Jews to be more sensitive to other people’s suffering because they have a traumatic history is a sentimental misconception. Okay, we know that some victims do develop a higher degree of sensitivity to others’ suffering, whereas others simply become more bitter, angry, and unreliable. Both these responses to suffering are very human, even if they are not equally humane. We have problems seeing the Palestinians’ suffering because, in times of trouble, people have a tendency to see only their own suffering. This is a general truth: when a couple fight, they are both blinded by their own pain.”


Zakariyya Muhammad

“It’s very difficult to be a writer here these days—if you want to be good. We are denied access to so much. We have no proper libraries, so doing research is hopeless. No proper cinemas or art exhibitions. No new books have been allowed in for a couple of years. And on top of that, we’re locked into a situation where we’re forced to be interested in politics, because politics is our life here. But I’ve always said, right from the start, that I would not let the occupation dictate the scope of my work. Because if all you write about is torture and checkpoints, it means the other side has won and is influencing your poetry. They can occupy my house, my street, my country, but I will not let them occupy my poems. I will write about what I want to write about. So I write as if I’m a poet anywhere else in the world, as if the occupying forces weren’t on my back. Why should a Norwegian poet have the privilege of writing about a rose, when I have to be satisfied with tanks? So, I’ve kicked the tanks out of my poems. And yes, I do absolutely belong to the generation of poets that has abandoned politics.”
 
From the interview with Sahar Khalifeh

Wild Thorns is about different ways of dealing with reality when you live under an occupation. The action takes place in Nablus in the 1970s, with two cousins at the center of a varied and polyphonic gallery of characters. One of them travels into Israel every day to work for a pittance, and the other becomes a dedicated freedom fighter. “His destiny was no longer a matter of personal choice or whim… he’d become a link in the chain of the cause.”
    I must just point out that the freedom fighter is called Usama—a strange precursor of the US war on global terrorism in general and Osama bin Laden in particular. Early on in the book, Usama stabs an Israeli officer, in front of the officer’s wife and young daughter.
    The reason that the novel was such an experience for me to read is that, time and again, it comes into conflict with itself, yet never once opts for black or white, but plays on a whole range of colors. One possible interpretation is that it is circumstances that decide whether a person becomes a murderer. But the book also says that people must fight for their humanity, despite their circumstances.
    With hindsight—and in reality—we of course know that the first intifada broke out eleven years after the book was first published in 1976. You could read the book and say: hate doesn’t grow out of nothing. If you look at what the occupation and Israeli oppression have done to the individual Palestinian, then the novel has probably the same message as The Yellow Wind, David Grossman’s report from 1986: that the whole thing is about to explode.
    However, Khalifeh does not agree that she portrays the Jew as a whole person.
    “Israelis are always minor characters in my books. Why? Because in reality we only come into contact with soldiers and other representatives of the occupation. We have minimal contact with Israeli civilians. How can I write about somebody or something I don’t really know? Despite my best intentions and feelings for them as fellow human beings, I can’t capture them as full-rounded figures. After all, what is literature? It reflects life, society, and the people who live there. Not in the same way that a photograph does, of course, since the author’s personal feelings and opinions will be blended in. An author also strives to transcend reality and make it more beautiful and valuable. You could say that I have one obligation in my writing and that is to reflect the lives of people living under the occupation. My literature is highly political, as our lives are dominated by politics. But it is not dry or rigid, as you might easily imagine. My characters are full of life. They are flesh and blood. You can feel them, smell them, and touch them.”

Click Here to view books by Sahar Khalifeh
 
 

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