Suicide Bombings, Fear and Almost No Palestinians: The Second Intifada Transformed Israeli Literature

Literary heavyweights like A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman found different ways of representing the uprising – but very few offered a Palestinian voice in their terror-strewn narratives

David B. Green, Haaretz 10 October 2020

When the second intifada began in September 2000, A.B. Yehoshua was working on the novel he would call “The Liberated Bride.” An intricately plotted and richly detailed story, like all of Yehoshua’s books it has a well-meaning male protagonist whose obsessions and misapprehensions keep landing him in trouble.

In this case, the hero is Yochanan Rivlin, a lovable but slightly buffoonish professor of Middle Eastern studies who, during the course of the novel, attends the wedding of an Israeli-Arab graduate student at her Galilee village, and later crosses into the West Bank to attend a poetry festival in Ramallah.

However strained and unequal relations are between Jews and Arabs in the book, who take advantage of countless opportunities for mutual misunderstandings and slights, the very fact of these interactions makes it an optimistic tale that revels in the cultural and social diversity of a land that’s home to two peoples that have been so long at war.

Today, looking back two decades, Yehoshua recalls the bewilderment he felt as the second intifada ignited and then, rather than being quickly extinguished, exploded into an inferno of violence that even threatened briefly to turn into a full-fledged civil war between Israelis and Palestinians on both sides of the border.

“I said to myself, O la la, what are you doing? There I was, writing a book about a festival of love poetry in Ramallah, while in Ramallah there was this terrible lynching,” he says, referring to the brutal murder of two Israeli soldiers by an angry Palestinian mob on October 12, 2000.

Yehoshua says that when he started writing “The Liberated Bride,” he was infused with the optimistic spirit of Oslo, the 1993 peace accords between Israel and the PLO that had been intended to end the state of war between the two peoples and lead to an eventual resolution of the issues dividing them.

“There I was writing a book full of hope, of relationships and also humor. And then along came the intifada.” Fearing that it would be “ridiculous” to publish such a book under those circumstances, Yehoshua says he considered putting the manuscript aside. Instead, though, he says he decided: “I will finish it, this kind of relationship will come again.’ Because I had confidence that what was achieved with the Oslo agreement, this cannot be destroyed.”

“The Liberated Bride” was published in Hebrew in 2001 (and in English two years later), and it was only with his next novel that Yehoshua produced his “intifada book.”

“A Woman in Jerusalem” (2004) is the story of the journey – both physical and emotional – of the personnel director of a large Jerusalem bakery to attend to the body of an employee who has been killed in a suicide bombing. Initially, the victim is unidentified and traced back to the bakery because of a pay slip found among her belongings.

Once the unnamed manager connects her body to her name, and discovers that she was a recent, lone immigrant from one of the former Soviet republics, he takes it upon himself – initially reluctantly, eventually with dedication and passion – to track down her family and return her body to them for a proper burial.

Yehoshua says he took his inspiration from a TV documentary whose creators undertook to establish the identity of a body of a suicide-bombing victim that lay unclaimed for weeks in the medical examiner’s office.

“What astonished me in the second intifada was [the phenomenon of] this anonymous death of victims. That there would be a bomb – in a bus, or a restaurant, or a mall – and among the victims, there were one or two who nobody could identify,” Yehoshua tells Haaretz. They could be tourists or new immigrants, but more often they were foreign workers.

“I remember a Chinese worker who was in the hospital morgue for a year until they could identify which village he came from in China. This gave me the idea to write ‘The Mission of the Human Resources Manager,” he explains, using the book’s original Hebrew title. He describes the change of attitude of his title character, in which he goes from saying “It’s not my business, it’s the state that has to take responsibility,” to throwing himself wholeheartedly into bringing Yulia Ragayev’s body to proper rest as “a kind of moral revolution, a moral conversion.”

Yehoshua successfully recreates the shell-shocked atmosphere of Israel during those years of fear and horror, when no one knew when another bomb would detonate and who would be its victims. As with the current situation, in which the country has been besieged by a pandemic, only someone who never ventured from home could be confident of remaining safe.

Yet, much as “A Woman in Jerusalem” is an intifada book, none of its characters are Palestinians, and there is little reference to Arab-Israeli politics or to the conflict. And when one looks at the small number of other works of Hebrew fiction that relate directly to that dark period, this turns out to be the rule, not the exception….

Read the full article here.