April 7, 2002

“SIX months ago the journal Nature published a study about a dangerous mechanism in the human visual system. The study sought to explain why the brain sometimes refuses to see what the eyes convey to it. The scientists, from Israel’s Weizmann Institute, suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon is that the brain is flooded with a multitude of interpretations of every reality it faces and that it must, in the end, decide in favour of one of them and act accordingly. The fascinating part of this explanation is the hypothesis that, from the moment the brain decides in favour of a given interpretation of the images it is receiving, all stimuli that support any other interpretation simply ‘disappear’. The brain, as it were, refuses to relate to them.” Thus begins the article “We have garotted our own necks with a chain of violence” written by the ‘non-conformist’ Israeli writer David Grossman.

Ever since the Palestininan uprising and its Israeli backlash took a bloodier turn, I have often found myself thinking how the Israeli intelligentsia must be making sense of all this and what sort of political stand they must be taking about these happenings. Grossman’s name came to my mind almost immediately. A few days ago, while translating a part of Grossman’s account of his visit to the Dehisheh refugee camp on the West Bank from his book The yellow wind (Delta, 1988), I had come across a strange passage:

“Whoever has served in the army in the ‘territories’ knows how such rooms look from the inside during the night. Whoever has taken part in searches, in imposing curfews, in capturing a suspect at night, remembers the violent entry into rooms like this one, where several people sleep, crowded, in unaired stench, three or four together under a scratchy wool blanket, wearing their work clothes still in their sleep, as if ready at any moment to get up and go wherever they are told. They wake in confusion, squinting from the flashlight, children wail, sometimes a couple is making love, soldiers surround the house, some of them — shoes full of mud after tramping through the path of the camp — walking over the sleep-warm blankets, some pounding on the tin roof above.”

I had never come across a narrative of a midnight raid like this one — from the point of view of the one included in the raiding squad. And I thought it was going to stay with me for a long time. Intifada, however, was not the only thing on my mind when I felt a desire to find out how sensitive, fair-minded Israelis were feeling. The horrifying events of Godhra, Ahmedabad and other places in the Indian state of Gujarat were also inducing in me a sense of dread, as was the ugly feeling of belonging to the majority Sunni community when Shia doctors were being systematically eliminated in Karachi in a series of senseless cold-blooded murders...

I searched Grossman’s name on the web and found his article, published on December 19, 2001 in The Guardian. This is how he sums up his feelings, and those of others like him, on the continuing violence: “A small number, too small a number, are still capable of the mental and emotional effort that the complexity of the situation requires. Within the dread that I sense around me, I at times hear a sigh that says, ‘Let it end already, one way or another, even in war, but things simply cannot go on as they are now.’ This morning, in the face of the events coming one on the heels of another, there is no escaping this conclusion: the Israeli brain and the Palestinian brain, which have never known a day of real peace, have been conditioned to perceive one unambiguous picture of reality: that of the unending war, of the one-dimensional, stereotypical, monolithically hating, violent enemy.”

Living in a South Asian situation, where history — by which I mean the political abuse of history — makes it impossible for the two opposing sides to perceive themselves except as the opposite of the other, we, too, are familiar with this process of brutalization. However, to see the opposing points of view staring each other in the eye is not an everyday experience here.

Grossman writes, “The Palestinians have lived and suffered under Israeli occupation for 34 years (in the wake of a war that was forced on Israel). They respond with acts of terror in which hundreds of Israelis are slaughtered. Israel, for its part, responds by besieging an innocent Palestinian population (innocent just as the murdered Israelis are innocent). Each nation turns its darkest, most hateful, most bestial side to the other. Neither nation senses how deep hatred and violence have seeped into its innermost organs.”

It must take some doing to convince a whole population of a country, any country, even Israel, that the policy of aggression adopted by their government is justified on some kind of moral principle. How the people are made blind to reality has been described by Amira Hass, another dissenting Israeli voice, in an article “They don’t see the occupation” published in the ‘left-of-centre’ Israeli daily Ha’aretz, English Edition, on Friday, August 22, 2001.

She writes: “The Intifada broke out because the Palestinian public was tired of this situation of occupation that adopts other names, which are user-friendly for 21st century Westerners. But because the Israeli public does not see the occupation, it perceives the uprising as a unilateral and unjustifiable act of aggression, rather than an act of resistance, of a type that has repeatedly taken place throughout human history.”

The Palestinian uprising in 1987, the first Intifada, managed to make it clear to many Israelis that “Arabs” are not only interesting market places and cheap labour, but a civilian population whose life is conducted by Israel and its army, a population that pays taxes to Israel but does not have the right to vote and to intervene in the system that rules it. But the uprising was unable to convince most Israelis and their government that the Israeli presence in the territories captured in 1967 is something bad and should come to an end.

Amira Hass says: “The fact is that the Israeli entrenchment in those... territories has become stronger, through the expansion of the settlements and the increase in the number of settlers, who are the emissaries of the government policy of domination (and not, as we like to present it, an independent force that imposed its will on the governments)... Since the first days of the Intifada, the Israeli public has felt very close to their fellow citizens in the territories, who were the first targets of Palestinian demonstrations, stones, and later, shooting: The soldiers are our children; the settlers are our relatives. They are seen as a peaceful population, under attack in their homes. Palestinian frustration about the high price that is being paid for an Intifada that has not succeeded in making it clear to Israel and to the world that what we have here is occupation is winning people over to the tactic of suicide attacks inside Israel.”

In a situation where an official tunnel vision has been imposed on all, a desire to know how the other side see the reality can be attributed as much to curiosity as to fairness. The op-ed page of Ha’aretz on Sunday, March 31, 2002 carried an article “A few choice words from the neighbours” by Aviv Lavie. In it he discusses an initiative by an Israeli periodical, Zman Hasharon — the local weekly of the daily Ma’ariv in the Sharon district — of giving space to the voices from the opposite side.

Alon Sarfati, the editor of the weekly, explains that the decision to give the Palestinian mayors a platform “is not political but journalistic in character. The editorial board held stormy discussions on the subject. Some people asked why we shouldn’t let right-wingers also write, but as I see it, the Palestinians are not facing the right wing but all the Israelis, and what Israelis have to say you can read and hear every day in the media. We thought it was important to hear how things sound from the other side, especially because in our case the other side is so close.”

In the past few weeks, Lavie tells us, readers of Zman Hasharon, have been getting constant reminders that they live close to the 1967 Green Line: every issue carries a trenchant article by one of the mayors of the neighbouring towns that are groaning under the yoke of routine closures and encirclements in the West Bank.

Two weeks ago, the weekly’s front page was devoted to an article by the mayor of Qalqilyah, Ma’arouf Zaharan. “We are seven million Palestinians,” he wrote, “and even if you kill a hundred Palestinians a day, we will not be eradicated. Do you want to kill us the way Hitler killed you? I am a modern mayor, 45 years old, and this is the way I talk. What about those who are 17 and 18? You are generating hatred among them. We are only two kilometers from Kfar Sava. Do you think it is a problem for Palestinians to get to Kfar Sava?”

The reactions of the people whom the paper approaches are “astounding”, Sarfati says. “The impression is that they were just waiting to be asked to write, for someone here to want to hear what they have to say.” The reactions on the Israeli side are somewhat less enthusiastic. Many irate letters have been received from readers, some of which consist solely of curses — so at least the Letters to the Editor section has plenty of material.

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