The People on the Street: a writer's view of Israel
Linda Grant Virago, 214pp, £9.99
ISBN 1844082547
Literature, declares Linda Grant, is not in the business of making statements. Instead it should create ambiguity, doubt, discomfort and confusion: "At the end of reading a novel or a poem, you should feel your mind is chaos." Journalism, on the other hand, has a duty to bear witness; journalists believe that their craft can and should change the world. And in this quest, they often, or so Grant suggests, fall into the trap of labelling things -isms and -ologies and other unattractive slogans.
So she insists that her impressions of Israel are those of a novelist, even though she happens to be a journalist, too. A non-religious British Jew, she was not particularly interested in Israel as a young woman, though she paid the young state a brief visit when she was 16, mainly because it was the only place where a "pampered princess" might find boys to kiss. Then, in her forties, having become an established writer, she travelled to Tel Aviv to write a novel (which she failed to do) and to try to find out about Jews and about herself. This slight but beautifully written and often funny book is the result.
Feeling almost at once among family, she has a lot of fun chatting with clever people in Tel Aviv cafes where the talk is of wine, good food, books, philosophy, football and everything else bar politics. She asks questions of everyone - where they come from, what is their family's history (all too often horrific) and what it feels like to be an Israeli. She is helped by the absence of a Hebrew equivalent for "Mind your own business"; a friend tells her that "an Israeli minding his own business is an oxymoron". She tries to avoid venturing her own opinion because, as she remarks, opinions in Israel have become so debased a currency that they would hardly buy you an orange.
She obtains nice answers to her perpetual question - "What is a Jew?" - if no great insight. Ma'or, a surfer and cafe manager, suggests that "the Jew is an experiment. He is the first human being. God wanted to know what happens . . . He tries everything on us first." Someone else relates the joke about the lecturer who begins by telling his audience, "The essence of Judaism is disputation," at which a voice responds, "I beg to differ."
Though determined not to be the kind of political analyst she scorns, Grant is nevertheless pulled by politics away from the delights of cafe life. Unlike most of the Israelis she talks and jokes with, she is keenly alive to how, only a few miles away, Palestinians are penned into cruel conditions. Travelling around the country, she is worried by Israel's visceral lurch to the right, shocked by the monstrosity of the wall, horrified by the casual brutality and thieving of young soldiers at the checkpoints. Yet she looks at the soldiers' youth and stuffed toys and half excuses them: she notes the ringing of cellphones that permanently connect "the army of occupation with the army of the hysterically preoccupied, their mothers".
Knowing that she should taste Israel's diversity, she visits a couple of Gaza settlements just before they are forcibly evacuated. In one, an isolated little secular settlement, she meets a much-travelled woman who wants to stay where she is ("the rest of the world is only scenery"). Yet when the time comes to leave, most of the non-religious settlers have made amicable deals with the government for reasonable alternatives.
Not so the religious settlers. They may have come originally to Gaza to make a better life for their families, but once there, writes Grant, they found themselves part of the great struggle of the Jewish people for survival: "they saw themselves as links in a chain that stretch back across the millennia, to the covenant God made with Moses . . . To be a settler in Gaza was not just a right but also a duty." As she listened with understanding to the defiant Israeli settlers, Grant was aware that a few metres away, on the other side of a great concrete wall, was the pitiful town of Khan Younis, packed with Palestinian refugees. The two worlds, she writes, were in watertight compartments, with a no man's land separating "California and the third world".
When Israeli journalists asked people on the Tel Aviv streets what they thought about the disengagement from Gaza, most answered that they weren't interested or didn't care. The general mess of existence caused by the second intifada, says Grant, has driven Israelis into a bu'ah, or bubble: small, self-enclosed worlds of their own. Not necessarily peaceful bubbles - Israel, as she writes, is "a society floating on boiling anger, fear, anxiety . . ."
Although, to most Israelis, the Palestinians are more or less invisible, many feel they see "armed shadows on the road". So it is, in a way, with this book. Bright with revealing anecdotes that capture the ambiguities of Israel, it is shadowed by the grey hopelessness of a Palestinian situation that the author, quite understandably, doesn't really want to write about. But she finds herself unable to ignore it, and rightly so.
Barbara Smith is a former Middle East correspondent of the Economist
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