Before we went our separate ways, Nusseibeh said he thought that Arab rulers, despite it all, had no taste for a multifront war, one that might pull in the United States. This was not the mid-century, when many Arab leaders still thought of Israel as temporary. But he was hardly optimistic—not in the short run, anyway. “I think people are crazy,” he told me. “Especially people in positions of power. They are crazier than the average person and can easily lead populations to war.”
On August 10, 2006, three Israeli novelists—David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua—called on the Israeli government to accept a ceasefire proposal to end the Second Lebanon War. Two days later, Grossman’s son Uri, a twenty-year-old staff sergeant in an Israeli tank brigade, was killed in a battle with Hezbollah. Grossman had been a peace activist for much of his adult life, speaking at demonstrations and publishing essays, alternately fierce and soulful, that were intended to pierce the indifference of his compatriots. “The Yellow Wind,” from 1987, was a collection of reported essays about the occupation (some of them published in these pages) which startled Israeli readers. When it was uncommon to do so, Grossman visited refugee camps and classrooms in the West Bank. While reporting on proceedings against Palestinians in an Israeli military court in Nablus, Grossman quoted the essay “Shooting an Elephant,” in which George Orwell wrote of an imperial police officer in Burma, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” The theme is common to both writers: in enforcing injustice, the colonist deceives, and destroys, himself. “To the End of the Land,” a 2008 novel imbued with the loss of Grossman’s son, is his masterpiece. I asked Grossman, who lives in Mevaseret Zion, in the hills outside Jerusalem, about his reaction to the events of October 7th.
“Of course, we felt something was wrong with the whole management of the country,” he said. “We felt that our Prime Minister invests all his time in his trials and doesn’t have enough time to take care of the country. But no one could anticipate this.” He went on, “We saw a process that could have led to Hamas taking over Tel Aviv. We don’t ever want to think about catastrophe, but thinking about catastrophe is my profession, and we were very close to that. I will tell you frankly, when I am confronted with such evil, pure evil, I don’t want to live in such a world that allows such monstrosities. Just to be exposed to such things, to see the murder of children, women, pregnant women, babies—it is impossible to absorb it. The fifty-six years of occupation is terrible. I’ve spent my entire life writing and acting against it, and I see some friends at American universities and elsewhere trying to achieve some sort of balance. But evils cannot always be compared. Sometimes, I tell my friends, objectivity is a nice way to cover up cowardice, to say, ‘We are bad and they are bad.’ By doing so, you spare yourself, you refuse to expose yourself to the atrocities in front of you.”
We spoke of the Palestinians who argued that they had been forgotten. “First of all, they are right,” Grossman said. “And yet there is something in the joy of killing, it just feels different. Hamas made a major mistake in 2005, when we evacuated. Around ten thousand settlers were uprooted. If, after our withdrawal, the Palestinians had started to build in Gaza using the financial support they were promised, if they had made Gaza a kind of test case on how to build a life again, if Gaza had become, if not the ‘Singapore of the Middle East,’ then at least a place where life could be developed, the next withdrawal would have come quickly. Instead, they chose another path. There were thousands of missiles aimed at us from Gaza in the next two years. And now, after they have done this, you start to think, Well, if you have such a neighbor, you had better be well equipped and suspicious all the time.”
In his view, the prospects for Israel, which just celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary of existence, were grave. “I think the task of being an Israeli will be harder now,” he said. “The need to protect this country will be an even more serious issue. We thought this was all behind us after signing agreements with various Arab countries and the Abraham Accords. But you cannot have an Abraham Accord and ignore the Palestinians. We shall see now how exhausting it is to be an Israeli, to be all the time on the alert for surprise and violence. Once more, we will have to be both Athens and Sparta. We will try to be tolerant and decent to our neighbors, not racist but pluralist, liberal, yet at the same time very tough militarily.”
In reality, Grossman knew, the political temper of the country was likely to grow increasingly distant from his view of the world. “I guess that Israel will become more and more right-wing, more and more religious,” he went on. “Jewish identity will be narrowed to self-defense. There will be more and more adoration of the Army, even though the Army has failed. My cry out to my Prime Minister is this: You have Israel in your hands, this precious thing. You are responsible for this unique country. If this country fails, will history be generous again?”
Sam Bahour is an American-born Palestinian who moved from Ohio to the West Bank in the wake of the Oslo Accords, a generation ago. Thinking he was building a future state, he helped establish the Palestine Telecommunications Company, travelling frequently between the West Bank and Gaza. He lives in Al-Bireh, the West Bank town his father came from, and when we spoke he was furious about the way that settler harassment and violence and seemingly random arrests of Palestinians were rising fast. “We turn on the radio every morning and we don’t hear about the weather,” he said. “We hear about arrests.” Even more alarming, there were reports that dozens of Palestinians in the West Bank had been killed since the Hamas attack, some by settlers.
For Bahour, there was nothing utopian about demanding a political solution; it was only its denial that was impractical, as well as unjust. “We don’t ask for the moon,” he said. “We ask for a military occupation of fifty-six years to end. My fear is that this round, as much as it’s doing tremendous damage, physical damage, to Gaza and to the people of Gaza, it is also exposing the hypocrisy of the West and the international community. And, if we go on doing that, it’s a free-for-all.”
In the West Bank and elsewhere, Bahour told me, “all the attention now is focussed on stopping the bombing in a small, intensely overcrowded place that is fifty per cent children. The entire civilian infrastructure is being torn up. I don’t know how anyone—an Israeli or a Jewish American or anyone—thinks this assault will make Israel safer. They are doing just the opposite. Ironically, what Hamas did could have the effect of saving Netanyahu, of keeping him in power. Everyone knows that the day that this war stops he will be out of government. So now he is someone with nothing to lose, much like the people in Gaza. And people with nothing to lose lash out.”
