Telling a story about Israel / Palestine
Fiction and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Deborah Maccoby
March 21, 2015
In recent years, a number of writers living outside Israel and Palestine have portrayed the conflict in novels and plays. What are the main advantages and disadvantages of presenting the issue in such a way? There are a few examples to choose from; but I propose to discuss this question with particular reference to David Hare’s acclaimed 1998 play “Via Dolorosa”, Howard Jacobson’s novel “The Finkler Question”, which won the Booker Prize in 2010, and Michelle Cohen Corasanti’s very popular 2012 novel “The Almond Tree”.
A major and obvious advantage is that novels and plays raise awareness by bringing the conflict to life. Instead of reading analysis, information and statistics in books and articles that are often difficult to take in and appeal mostly to people who are already interested in the subject, novel readers and play audiences are drawn into a human story that catches the imagination. I have many problems with “The Almond Tree” (of which more below) but it has to be acknowledged that its author has performed a useful service in causing people who would otherwise be hostile or indifferent towards the Palestinians to be aware of their suffering.
Sir David Hare’s play “Via Dolorosa” played to packed houses in London in 1998 and certainly brought the conflict to life. Sir David was the only actor in his play, delivering from memory a 12,000 word, 90-minute monologue about his experiences in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But the actor-playwright was also an audience, an observer from a British Christian background presenting the real-life drama being enacted by Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews in Israel and Palestine. It is as though, having gone to the region to write a conventional play, Sir David decided that the situation and characters that he found there were themselves a drama. And certainly, when I saw “Via Dolorosa” in 1998, despite the presence of only one man on the stage, the whole society seemed to be there with him: a mad family in a West Bank settlement, with whom Sir David spends Shabbat; the Israeli secular left, helpless and angry; bitter, intense Palestinian intellectuals amid the despair and squalor of Gaza.
I found “Via Dolorosa” to be witty, clever and thought-provoking, but ultimately it seemed to me that Sir David was too much of a detached observer who finds a terrible situation to be a riveting spectacle, with characters, ideas and conflicts offering fascinating and amusing dramatic possibilities. He seemed to me to be too much engaged in making an entertaining stage performance out of a real-life situation which may be a drama, but which is actually a real-life tragedy. In a way, I felt Sir David was exploiting the conflict for his own artistic purposes.
In contrast to Sir David Hare’s aesthetic detachment, Howard Jacobson, in “The Finkler Question”, has spoilt the artistic value of his book with crude political propaganda. The book includes (as a major part, though many reviewers hardly mentioned it) what is evidently meant to be a satirical attack on Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) and other groups and individuals, all lumped together, with no regard at all for strong differences in viewpoint, and labelled by Jacobson with the title of “the ASHamed Jews”.
Deborah Maccoby
All the different Jewish groups and individuals attacked by Jacobson reject this label entirely. On the contrary, we are asserting a universalistic and prophetic Jewish identity of which we are proud and which “The Finkler Question” repudiates. Instead, Jacobson retreats into a tribal persecution complex. The extreme paranoia about British antisemitism and the exploitation of the charge of antisemitism to condone Israel’s atrocities are worthy of satire themselves. Thus the big British national marches in the winter of 2008-9 against Israel’s massacre of over 1,200 Gazan civilians (including over 300 children) in Operation Cast Lead are invariably seen as antisemitic in “The Finkler Question”. For instance, one character – with evident authorial approval – thinks about “those who had taken to the streets of London again, ready with their chants and placards as though they woke to speak violence against the one country in the world of which the majority was Jewish….” The author writes of his main character, Finkler (who starts as a leader of the ASHamed Jews, but later turns against them): “Gaza didn’t do it for him”. Jacobson continues with evident approval – indeed Finkler stops being a character and becomes just a mouthpiece for Jacobson’s own political views:
The philosopher in him recoiled from all the talk of massacre and slaughter on the streets. You keep the big unequivocal words for the big unequivocal occasions, Finkler thought. And there was an illogicality in charging the country he didn’t choose to name with wanton and unprovoked violence while at the same time complaining its bombardment of Gaza had been disproportionate. Disproportionate to what? Disproportionate to the provocation. In which case, the operation had not been unprovoked.
Jacobson here ignores the deliberate Israeli provocation on November 4th, 2008, the date of the US presidential election. Since the ceasefire had begun on June 19th, 2008, Hamas had not fired a single rocket (a limited number of rockets had been launched by Islamic Jihad and other small groups). On November 4th, when the eyes of the world were on the election of Obama, the Israeli army broke the ceasefire, invading Gaza and killing six Hamas fighters – a provocation that inevitably led to a barrage of rockets from Hamas and Israeli casualties, thus providing a casus belli for Israel to attack Gaza.
It might seem unduly political to point out these facts when discussing a novel – and of course, as a member of the Executive of JfJfP, I am biased against “The Finkler Question” – but if Jacobson chooses to spoil his novel with large chunks of undigested and intemperate political propaganda, he issues an open invitation for his work to be judged in political and indeed moral terms.
“The Almond Tree” lacks both the professional accomplishment of “The Finkler Question” and its overt political partisanship – on the contrary the “message” of “The Almond Tree” is one of global peace and harmony. To sum up the book very briefly: though the author is an American Jewish woman, the novel is narrated in the first person by an Israeli-Palestinian man in his sixties, Ichmad Hamid, who relates the story of his life from his boyhood. His family goes through terrible experiences – among other disasters, two baby sisters are killed, the family home is demolished and the father is wrongly imprisoned. The mother is implacably opposed to Israeli Jews as a result of this suffering. In contrast, the father is a saintly figure who refuses to hate his oppressors, only saying: “if they only could realize that we’re all the same”. Ichmad’s younger brother, Abbas, identifies with the mother and ends up in Gaza as a member of Hamas. Ichmad, in contrast, is very much influenced by the father. Ichmad is a genius at maths and physics and wins a competition, which means that he gets a scholarship to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. There he makes friends with Israeli Jewish students. He initially has a terrible relationship with his tutor, Professor Menachem Sharon (a name that seems intentionally to be a mixture of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon). But Ichmad and Menachem begin to work together on discoveries in nanotechnology and become close friends. They go to America together and in the end they are awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Corasanti writes of her novel: “the message is clear: we must work together to advance humanity”. Ichmad and Menachem are extolled as having “advanced humanity” by their discoveries in nanotechnology. But I am left wondering whether nanotechnology really does advance the human race. Many scientists have pointed out the dangers to humanity in nanotechnology. And is this really a great cultural step forward for the human race – to quote from the speech given at the end of the novel by the presenter of the Nobel Prize: “the atomic storage they developed for the individual atom allows us to store 5,000 full-length movies or more than 1,000 trillion bits of data, in a device the size of an Ipod”? The vision behind this novel is disturbingly close to that of books such as Shimon Peres’s “The New Middle East” or Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat”: a world in which national identities are subordinated to US-led globalised technology and business.
An interesting character in this respect is Yasmine, Ichmad’s second wife, a young Palestinian girl from his village who comes to live with him in America. She has been chosen for him by his mother, who, as the book progresses, becomes a more and more negative figure, symbolising all the forces that the novel is against: hatred, intolerance, tribalism. At first, Ichmad identifies Yasmine with his mother and compares her unfavourably with his first wife, a blonde Jewish American peace activist called Nora, who, like Rachel Corrie, has been killed by a bulldozer while trying to prevent a house demolition (Ichmad’s mother had been adamantly opposed to her son’s marriage with a Jewish woman). Though Ichmad had been enraptured by Nora’s embroidered Palestinian-style dresses, he disapproves of Yasmine’s traditional robes – “she wore a black robe with red geometric embroidery on the front panel – just like Mama’s” – and insists (with evident authorial approval) that she should wear Western clothes. Only then is he struck by “how pretty she looked”.
At the end of the book, we are told that the middle-aged Yasmine is wearing a “bright yellow ruffle-collared raincoat that she had bought in Paris and….tight black trousers. Thanks to Pilates and power yoga, Yasmine remained fit.” Yasmine goes into business with Justice, Menachem’s American Jewish peace activist wife: “Ten years earlier, Justice and Yasmine had opened a Middle Eastern bakery called ‘Pastries for Peace’. They donated all the proceeds to a programme they’d developed that granted micro-loans to Palestinian women interested in starting businesses.” Not that Palestinian women shouldn’t start businesses – but taken together with everything else, this seems part of the general globalised vision. For all the author’s genuine empathy with the Palestinians, it is clear that Yasmine symbolises the mother – and by extension all Palestinian women and indeed the whole of Palestinian culture – remade in the image of US-led globalisation. Even the saintly father’s words “we’re all the same” fit into this homogeneous vision; after all, we are not all the same; we are all shaped by our different cultures and identities and this is what makes the world an interesting place. At the end, the novel advocates a unified “secular democratic state” solution, which again underplays national and cultural differences.
So here we see how the overt message of peace and reconciliation and sympathy with the sufferings of the Palestinians – however sincerely felt – is unconsciously undercut by a vision that ultimately denies the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and free expression of culture and identity. “The Almond Tree” is essentially an unsophisticated fairy-tale driven by an unconscious ideology that undermines the author’s conscious intentions.