Frozen in hopelessness and despair

A cornfield in Iowa: if Israel/Palestine had this much space could the people live in peace?

Tell Me a Story with a Happy Ending

On July 19th, just days after Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza, the Israeli-Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua published a piece in the Guardian, titled “Why I Have to Leave Israel.” Kashua, who was born in the predominantly Arab town of Tira, spent most of his life in Jerusalem. He devoted his weekly column in Haaretz to telling “the Palestinian story,” and he is the creator of “Arab Labour,” a popular sitcom that is a sendup of problems experienced by Israel’s Arab citizens.

Kashua, along with his wife and three children, had been planning to spend his sabbatical year in Illinois, but in light of the renewed conflict in Gaza and the anti-Arab violence erupting in Israel the trip had come to feel like a more permanent expatriation. “Twenty-five years of writing in Hebrew, and nothing has changed,” he wrote in the Guardian. “Last week I gave up. Last week something inside me broke. When Jewish youth parade through the city shouting ‘Death to the Arabs,’ and attack Arabs only because they are Arabs, I understood that I had lost my little war.”

Now living in Champaign and working as a Hebrew and writing instructor at the University of Illinois, Kashua recently exchanged a series of letters about life as an expat with his friend the Jewish-Israeli writer and film-maker Etgar Keret. Like Kashua, Keret has been unafraid to speak out against the Israeli government (during the conflict in Gaza, he wrote about Israeli society’s intolerance of criticism); his tragicomic, surrealist short stories often deal obliquely with the pain and contradictions of modern Israeli life. The two writers have known one another for more than a decade, and in their correspondence they help one another to think through their despair over Israel’s condition.

Letters

By Sayed Kashua and Etgar Keret, The New Yorker
October 13, 2014

Their letters are translated, from the Hebrew, by Sondra Silverston.

* * *

From Sayed Kashua

September 13, 2014

Hi Etgar,

How are you, Shira and Lev?

It’s so weird to be writing to you, you know. Just this week, I was thinking about you. I talked about you in my Hebrew class, and, in the end, I brought the students one of your short stories, “Hope They Die.” It took us an hour to read half of it. They’re nice, my students, but their Hebrew leaves a lot to be desired. But that wasn’t why I thought about you. I thought about you because of the winter that’s starting to show itself here. I mean, it’s not that winter has started, maybe it’s just the beginning of autumn, but it already feels like the coldest days of a Jerusalem winter. It’s cold in central Illinois, and almost everyone who meets me and knows that I just arrived feels obligated to warn me about the cruel winter that’s in store for us here.

This week, we had to buy warm clothes. As you know, we arrived here in summer or, maybe more accurately, we ran away to this place in summer, and except for a few short-sleeve shirts and a couple of pairs of pants we took almost nothing from home, and winter is almost here and the kids have nothing warm to wear.

“Go to T. J. Maxx,” some very helpful new acquaintances, who are making our acclimatization easier, told us. “They have good things there, and they’re pretty cheap.”

“Don’t buy in the mall,” the parents of an Israeli kid my son met in elementary school told us. “There’s a huge outlet half an hour away by car, terrific clothes at great prices.”

We listened to our new friends’ advice and bought the kids clothes from the outlets, until it came to coats. “On coats, we don’t compromise,” I told my wife. “Not in central Illinois, not for the kind of winter they promised we’d have.”

And you know, it’s because of you that I’m not being stingy about coats. You probably don’t remember, but when we once shared a taxi from Leipzig to Berlin, maybe fifteen years ago, you told me a story about your father, and one sentence is engraved in my mind: “He survived because he took a coat.”

“On coats, we don’t compromise,” I told my wife. “We have to buy the best, the most expensive.”

In any case, we’re in Champaign, Illinois. There’s not a lot to do here: there’s a university and endless cornfields, and except for that, I don’t know about much. Would you believe that a few months have passed and I haven’t gone out for a beer even once? I don’t know if they even have any decent bars here. I’ll have to find one really soon. Meantime, we’ve been busy getting the house organized, finding schools for the kids, finding my way around the university, and figuring out where to buy tahini and cucumbers.

Somehow, the kids have adjusted faster than I thought, and even though the language is new and completely foreign to them, and despite the weather and the food, and even though they had to leave their friends, they seem happy on the whole. I know because they hurry me to start the car in the morning and leave the house early, because they don’t want to be late for school. Somehow, my wife has settled in here, even though I was afraid she’d go crazy with boredom because she’s taking a vacation from school and work for the first time in twenty years.

And I, who was so happy that I left, that I took my family far away from that terrible place called Israel, that I removed them from the smell of gunpowder and blood, I sometimes feel that I’m the most miserable of all of us. I’m afraid to stay here, and I’m so afraid of the day I have to go back home, to Jerusalem, to Israel, to Palestine. Leaving was traumatic. I felt like a refugee running for his life, and the decision to leave quickly was made even before the war with Gaza began. On the day the Palestinian boy was burned to death in Jerusalem, I realized that I couldn’t let my kids leave the house anymore. That day, I called the travel agent and asked her to get us out as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, it took a few days, and that damn war, another damn war, had already started, and the racism that I’d seen taking off around the second intifada, at the end of 2000, was reaching terrifying heights. I was so afraid, and I felt really persecuted. You know, I was at the zenith of my success—with a film scheduled to come out this summer and a new series being shot during those first days of the war—and all of a sudden I felt I’d been turned into the enemy. All of a sudden, every runny-nosed journalist thinks they can vent their anger on me, all of a sudden I’m afraid of the water girl on the set, Etgar. All of a sudden, even the production assistant I never met thinks he can stand in front of me when I come in for the day’s shooting and tell me, with a clear sense of superiority, “We have to bomb the hell out of them, one by one.” And I’m afraid. I’m afraid of my kindhearted next-door neighbors, because they have a look in their eyes that I never saw before the war; I’m afraid of the barman who’s been pouring me beers for more than twenty years.

My wife always said that I was a coward with a paranoid-personality disorder, said that the situation was frightening but that I was exaggerating. But, I swear to you, Etgar, I saw the way that my closest Jewish friends started looking at me differently. Sometimes, they tried not to look me in the eye, and sometimes their looks were accusing, condescending, hating.

You know, I never pictured myself wanting to be a teacher, and when I taught in Israel I really hated it. But I’m so afraid of going back there that I’m thrilled to prepare and check lessons before every class here, hoping they’ll want me to stay another year and maybe another year after that. I’d been asked so often whether I was considering leaving Israel, but I never thought before about living somewhere else. I always rejected the possibility proudly: “What are you talking about? I have a war to fight here.” And, you know, this summer I realized that I’d lost. This summer, the last vestiges of hope in my heart were crushed. This summer, I realized that I couldn’t lie to my kids anymore and tell them that one day they’d have equal rights in a democratic country. This summer, I realized that the Arab citizens of the country would never have a better future. Just the opposite—it would be worse, the ghettos they live in would only be more crowded, more violent, and more indigent as the years passed. I realized this summer that I could no longer promise my kids a better future.

On the other hand, I’m so afraid to stay here; what’s here for me if I can’t write? And what will I do without Hebrew, the only language I can write in? At first, I thought I’d learn a new language, that I’d drop Hebrew for English, and, believe it or not, the first book I bought here was yours. It hurts so much to realize that, in my search for new language, I don’t even consider Arabic, my mother tongue, a worthy option.

Here I am, a Palestinian Arab who only knows how to write in Hebrew, stuck in central Illinois.

Even though I know that you and your wife had some bad days because you dared to voice a different view, opposing violence and the war machine, I’m still writing to you, maybe because I want you to give me a little hope. You can lie, if you feel like. Please, Etgar, tell me a short story with a happy ending, please.

Best

Sayed

* * *
From Etgar Keret

September 13, 2014

Hi, Sayed,

I was really happy to get a letter from you, and really sad when I read it. I hate to say it, but I know the Illinois town you’re living in pretty well. A few years ago, when Lev was still in kindergarten, I was invited to lecture at the University of Illinois and went there with my family for a few weeks. When we came back to Israel, each of us weighed a few kilos more, and we were all thankful that the airlines charge money for overweight suitcases and not for overweight people. That’s how it is when you live in a country where, instead of celebrating Yom Kippur and Holocaust Memorial Day, they celebrate Donut Day. (There really is such a thing, I swear.) Even now, Lev says that Rome and New York are fascinating cities but no place in the world comes close to Urbana, Illinois, and all because of the bowling alley and video-game arcade he remembers so fondly. (The thing that impressed him the most was the enormous number of soda-vending machines.) So I’m not surprised that your kids adjusted so easily—you have to limit their pancake and donut intake, or else it’ll end badly. When it comes to nutrition, American cuisine is worse than ISIS—and it’s easy for me to understand why you haven’t really found your place there. You asked me for an optimistic story with a happy end, so here goes, I’ll give it a try:

2015 was a historic year in the Middle East, all because of a surprising, brilliant idea that an Arab-Israeli expatriate had. One evening, the writer was sitting on his front porch in Urbana, Illinois, looking at the endless cornfields that spread all the way to the horizon. Seeing that enormous expanse, he couldn’t escape the thought that maybe the troubles in the place he came from stemmed from the fact that there simply wasn’t enough room for everybody. “If I could just pack all those fields in my suitcase,” he said to himself, “fold them very, very neatly, very, very small, I could fly back to Israel with them. I’d pass through customs on the green line for people who have nothing to declare, because what would I really have? It wasn’t as if I’d be bringing some subversive ideology in my suitcase, or anything else that might interest a customs inspector. All I would have would be some huge cornfields that I’d folded up very, very small, and when I got home I’d open the suitcase, take them out, and shazam! All of a sudden, there would be enough land for everyone, the Palestinians and the Israelis, and even some left over for a giant amusement park where both peoples would take all the knowledge and technology that they apply to developing weapons and use it to build the most amazing roller-coaster in the world instead.”

He was very excited when he went into the house and tried to share his thrilling insight with his wife, but she refused to get excited. “Forget it,” she said in a cold voice. “It’ll never work.” The writer admitted that he still had to figure out a number of logistic issues, like convincing the farmers in Illinois to give him all those cornfields, not to mention finding a method of folding that would allow him to squeeze all those fields into one large suitcase. “But,” he rebuked his wife, “those minor problems are no reason to abandon an idea that might bring peace to our region.”

“That’s not the problem, dummy,” his wife said. “Even if you managed to squeeze all the land in the world into that battered suitcase of yours, you’d never succeed in bringing peace to the region. On one hand, the radical ultra-Orthodox would say that God promised all those cornfields to them, and on the other the messianic racists would say that those cornfields were their birthright. There’s no getting away from it, husband,” she said, shrugging. “We were born in a place where, even though a lot of people want to live side by side in peace, there are still enough people on both sides who don’t want to, and they’ll never let it happen.”

That night, the writer had a strange dream, and in it there was an endless cornfield, and from that cornfield missiles were being launched and shot down by antimissile missiles as jet fighters flew past, dropping bombs from the heavens. The field went up in flames and the writer found himself wondering, still in his dream, who the hell was fighting whom? Because there were no people at all in the dream, just missiles, bombs, and burning corncobs.

The next morning, the writer drank his disgusting American coffee quietly, without even saying good morning to his wife—he was highly insulted that she had called him a dummy the day before—and after dropping the kids off at school and kindergarten he sat down at his computer and tried to write a story. Something sad, with a lot of self-pity, about an honest, good man whose life and wife had both been cruel to him for no reason. But, as he laboured over the story, a brilliant idea popped into his head, a hundred times better than the previous one, about how to solve the problems of the Middle East. If the issue wasn’t territory but people, all they had to do was update the “two-state solution” to a three-state solution, so that the Palestinians would live in the first, the Israelis in the second, and the radical fundamentalists, the racists, and all those people who just got their kicks fighting would live in the third. His wife was less scornful of this plan than she had been of his folding-up-the-cornfields idea, not to mention that Barack Obama, whom the writer bumped into in a diner at a gas station on the outskirts of Urbana Illinois, simply loved it.

In less than a decade, there were three countries side by side in that tiny corner of the Middle East: the

State of Israel, the State of Palestine, and the Republic of Force-Is-the-Only-Language-They-Understand

, a place where civil war raged constantly and which arms dealers and news broadcasters supported. The writer (who, in the story, is quite modest) politely refused the Nobel Peace Prize, packed his suitcase, and went back with his family to his old house in Israel. And each time Barack Obama came to the Middle East in another one of his unsuccessful efforts to bring peace to the Republic of Force-Is-the-Only-Language-They-Understand, he’d stop in for a visit to the writer who had managed, with his own hands, to bring peace to his people. They’d sit together in silence on the writer’s balcony, which overlooked a terraced valley, and eat heartily of the ears of corn resting on the plates in front of them.

That’s the story. I’m not sure it’s really a story, and I don’t know if it’s really optimistic, but it’s the best I could do. Take care of yourself, and, whatever happens, don’t cut corners when it comes to coats. A coat is an important thing.

Yours,

Etgar

P.S.: Be careful. A common occurrence among Israelis who immigrate to the U.S. is that they begin speaking Yiddish, and, in the case of Arabs, it might sound comical!

* * *
From Sayed Kashua

September 18, 2014

Hi, Etgar,

I read your letter at least twice, still looking for a sliver of hope, but without any luck, even though I’d be lying if I denied that ideas for possible solutions come to mind whenever I drive past those endless cornfields.

And, even with all the corn here, they don’t make pizza with corn like they do in Israel. They’ve just never heard of it here, and it’s the topping my kids like best when it comes to pizza. And Obama? You’d never catch me letting him eat corn on my balcony. That’s all I need, for the President of the United States to leave corn kernels on my floor.

Apart from that, what do you mean, there’s no room for everyone? Do you really think the problem is that the country’s too small? I don’t know, sometimes I think that the major problem is actually how to define this country. What exactly are its borders? When you say the country, do you include the West Bank and Gaza? I once thought that the day would come when we’d know what the borders of the country are. The Israeli government would hold a formal ceremony to announce the country’s official borders and declare that anyone who lives within those borders is a citizen with equal rights. That hasn’t happened yet, and this week I read that the country plans to annex another four thousand dunams of West Bank territories for settlements or state land or some other designation that means stealing Palestinian land for Jews. Tell me, Etgar, how scared are you about what the government does? I mean, how scared are you that the whole world is going to start officially treating Israel like an apartheid state?

It scares me very, very much. Would you believe that I still care about Israel? I don’t mean the government, God forbid, or its designation as a Jewish state. I mean the future of the place I lived in. I’m really not sure how much the country even sees its Arabs as citizens. It does everything to explain to us that we’re a remnant, a demographic problem, a fifth column. But I always insisted on seeing myself as a citizen of the country, and not only because of the Interior Ministry’s formal definition. I always claim that I am a citizen who cares about the country and that, as a citizen who has no other country, the future of that place is important to me, and I want the country be as good a place for my Arab children to live in as it is for my Jewish neighbors’ children.

You don’t know how frightened I am of the moment I will no longer be able to say that I’m a citizen of that country. At a conference I took part in recently, a woman in the audience asked me if I thought that the State of Israel was a legitimate country. I actually started to sweat. “Yes,” I answered. “I mean, the government does terrible things that aren’t legitimate, the occupation isn’t legitimate, the settlements are a crime, discrimination against Arab citizens is pure racism, and the country was established on the ruins of the Palestinian people, al-nakba, of course, and …” And the woman in the audience continued, “So? I don’t understand. You still claim that the country is legitimate?”

“But the people …” I tried to answer her, and maybe myself. “You see, there are people there, and …”

In short, Etgar, it really, really scares me. I know that in Israel people shout and carry on, How dare you compare us to South Africa? But what’s going on in the territories is separation based on race. The fact is, a settler can vote, move around freely, get Social Security and medical insurance, and a Palestinian can’t— that is separation based on race. And it’s not only in the territories but also inside the 1948 borders, when we’re talking about Arab citizens like me. How can you read in the papers this week that the Supreme Court has rejected a petition against the Admissions Committees Law, which is aimed at preventing Arab citizens from gaining access to state lands—state lands that were owned by Arabs not too long ago. (This has been happening for a long time, but now the practice has legal authority.) Is there any word but racist to describe the fact that a citizen can’t live wherever he wants in his own country, that an Arab citizen has no access to more than eighty per cent of the territory of his own country?

And, would you believe, despite that I say to myself, “But the people!” I know people there who are my friends and my children’s friends, my neighbors, my partners, basically good people, honest to God, they’re fine. I don’t even know why I’m dumping my political complaints on you. I think I know you well enough already that you’re not the one to whom I should be venting my political frustration, even though you’re an Israeli, a Jewish Israeli. You can see now that I’m doing what the average Israeli does when he asks me, “So, tell me, what’s with ISIS? What are they all about?” As if the fact that I’m an Arab means I must certainly know the gene, the mysterious gene that makes all Arabs behave the same way. It can be dormant, but you never know when it’ll spring to life, it’s just a matter of time. So I’m sorry for that, but still, Etgar, what’s the Israelis’ problem, why do they behave like that? Do me a favor, just don’t tell me that it’s fear, because that’s a quality I value and admire with all my heart, but fear doesn’t explain discrimination, and fear doesn’t explain settlements in the heart of Hebron or Silwan, and fear doesn’t explain why an Arab village is kept thirsty. So what is it, Etgar?

O.K., sorry for laying all this on you, but you’re the one who started with the corn and the idea that there’s not enough room for everyone. This is where I’d add a smiley face, and I really wanted to ask your opinion about smileys and all those other emoticons. You would think that, as a writer, I’d avoid using them in e-mails and text messages, because on the face of it it’s a second-rate writing style. But, on the other hand, I thought about the first people to use question marks and exclamation points, and how serious writers considered them to be some kind of cheap traitors who used drawings when they couldn’t express their feelings in words. What do you say? ☺

Warm regards to Shira and Lev from their uncle in America. Come visit, there’s room for everyone.

Yours,

Sayed

* * *
From Etgar Keret

September 19, 2014

Hi, Sayed,

Your last letter really was heavy going, but that isn’t your fault, it’s the fault of the situation, which weighs a ton. Just a few days ago, I stopped a very friendly taxi-driver on the street. After showing me pictures of his kids—“They got their good looks from their mother”—he offered me a mint and invited me to watch some clips of ISIS beheadings on his phone—“Be warned: it’s not for the squeamish!”—and then started talking about making a living. “People didn’t set foot out of the house during the whole war,” he said. “They were in a lousy mood. And when people are in a lousy mood I don’t make a living.” His monologue quickly turned to politics, and, surprisingly, he said, “Enough already. I’m sick of it. A war every year and a half. We’ll never be able to finish them off, so we should give them a country and let them choke on it. Just as long as they leave us in peace already.” Later on in the conversation, he said that in the last election all the candidates seemed like good-for-nothing swindlers, but, in the end, he voted Likud, and in the next elections he’s planning not to vote at all. Which probably means that he’ll vote Likud again.

You asked me to try to explain to you why the injustices you describe continue, and you added that I shouldn’t say it’s because of fear. So I’ll try to explain, even though I’m not totally sure that I understand, and I won’t say that it’s because of fear, because what I felt all around me during the last war wasn’t fear but a general sense of hopelessness and despair.

During the war, I read the results of a poll showing that close to ninety per cent of Israelis are in favour of occupying all of Gaza and bringing down Hamas, but the day before that I came across the results of a different poll, indicating that almost eighty per cent of Israelis don’t believe that occupying Gaza would lead to the collapse of Hamas. Simple maths shows that the majority of Israelis who advocate the use of force and more force don’t really think it’ll solve the problem, they just don’t believe there’s an alternative. “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” Isaac Asimov said, and in the last war, for many Israeli citizens, the collective desire to prevail through violence was inspired by the same urge that makes people kick a vending machine that swallowed their money without dropping a can of soda: not because they think it’ll help bring the refreshing liquid closer to their dry lips but because they can’t think of anything else to do.

The explanations I hear from so many of the people I know are: Islamic fundamentalism is growing stronger all over the world, the governments in the region are unstable, and all negotiations will end in the loss of territory without compensation, anyway, because there’s no one in charge there. And that’s only what I hear from people who are trying to be rational. Many others just reject any new idea or initiative by saying something like, “The Arabs don’t want peace, and they won’t stop fighting us until they get Tel Aviv and Jaffa, too.” But all of those dubious claims can’t hide one feeling: despair. And despair is a much more dangerous feeling than fear, because fear is an intense feeling and, even if it can be momentarily paralyzing, in the end it calls for action, and, surprisingly, it can also create solutions. But despair is a feeling that calls for passivity and acceptance of reality even if it is unbearable, and it sees every spark of hope, every desire for change as a cunning enemy.

It’s easy for me to understand why so many Israelis have chosen despair. The history of this conflict is endlessly depressing. We’ve seen so many missed opportunities, shows of distrust, and lack of courage on both sides throughout the years, occurring almost as persistently as a force of nature. But, even if everyone is to blame for the failure, we Israelis—sorry for dragging you into this, too, Sayed, but a thousand green cards won’t help you; to me, you’ll always be an Israeli—are the only ones capable of beginning a process that will rescue us from this inhuman situation. Israel is the stronger side in this conflict, and, as such, it is the only side that can truly initiate change. And to do that it has to part company with that despair, which, like many other kinds of despair, is nothing but an ongoing self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I believe that it will happen. I believe that this despair is temporary, and that even though there are quite a few political elements that would rather see us despairing, and even though it sometimes seems as if enormous forces are working to convince us that hope is just another word in our national anthem and not a powerful force that can lead to change, people feel deep down that the terrible situation we find ourselves in is not really the only dish on the regional menu. When I look around, apart from the minority of Jewish messianists cavorting on the hilltops and in the Knesset, I don’t see people who are happy with the existing situation and are willing to accept it. Only some of them have a moral problem with the occupation, but even the ones who don’t realize that until the Palestinian people have a country no one’s going to have an easy time of it here. War is expensive, as our Minister of Defense reminded us recently, and each person in this country is personally invested in the next war, with a son, a father, a brother, or a friend who will go into Gaza for the umpteenth time. And the fact that all those people who are not happy still haven’t found an effective plan of action or a worthy leader they can follow is only a temporary situation. Yes, this temporary situation is terrible, but, paradoxically, the worse it gets, the more inevitable change becomes.

I know, Sayed, I know that whenever I get excited about something I start to sound like some drunk hippie, so I’ll close this letter with a slightly depressing story to balance things out.

A few days ago, Shira told me that Lev said he wanted us to stop talking to people about wanting peace. When Shira asked him why, he was surprised. “Mom, didn’t they teach you anything in school? You know who said they want peace? Rabin, Sadat, John Lennon, and they were all murdered. I want peace, too, but I want parents even more.” When Shira told me that, I got chills all over my body. Here’s this smart and curious kid, eight and a half years old, who last year took part in a much publicized anti-racist Ministry of Education program, and the only truth he managed to extract from the world running wild around him is that wanting peace is dangerous. Sorry, correction: wanting a nonviolent future in which all the inhabitants of the region have self-definition and can exercise all their basic rights is O.K., but saying it out loud or, God forbid, trying to do something about it—that’s too dangerous.

Take care of yourself and your family, friend, and I promise to come to visit you soon in Urbana, Illinois, which Lev thinks is the best place in the world.

Etgar

P.S.: And if we’re already talking politics, zalma, tell me, what’s this business with ISIS all about? ☺

Etgar Keret’s latest collection to appear in English is “Suddenly a Knock at the Door.” His story “Creative Writing” appeared in the magazine.

Sayed Kashua is the author of, among other books, “Dancing Arabs,” “Let it Be Morning,” and “Second Person Singular.”