OBITUARY - The Times July 30 2022
AB Yehoshua

Acclaimed Israeli novelist who called for a two-state solution in his homeland

AB Yehoshua had a tendency to pontificate loudly in restaurants, expounding sometimes controversial views about his homeland, Israel.

“At the heart of antisemitism lies Moses,” the celebrated but slightly dishevelled Israeli author told The Independent in a loud, heavily accented voice while rather alarmed fellow diners in a London restaurant looked round in 2004. “Moses said we Jews could remain a people without a land. He said we don’t need territory to hold on to our identity. This was a disaster. It placed us in constant conflict with the world. It led directly to the pogroms and the Shoah. This is why I am a Zionist: because diaspora leads to genocide.”

Though he was a passionate Zionist who urged the Jewish diaspora to “come home”, Yehoshua was also long regarded as Israel’s liberal conscience in a country that had lurched to the right after the collapse of the Oslo peace process in the mid-Nineties. As such, he staunchly defended the rights of Palestinians and had for many years advocated a two-state solution.

In his literary canon over more than 50 years, Yehoshua anatomised Israeli identity and Jewish identity within: Jew and Arab, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, secular and ultra-orthodox.

His most acclaimed novel Mr Mani (1989) was a multi-generational Jewish saga that flitted between time and place over two centuries through the monologues of five characters giving different perspectives on turning points of Jewish history. He used the device of multiple voices to express the mood of an Israel that “was cracking, dismantling to many voices”, helping him to democratise them all. In this and his dissection of family relationships and conjugal neurosis he was inspired by the American writer William Faulkner, whom he described as “the greatest writer of the 20th century”.

Though he talked rapidly in taut sentences, his prose was less strident. “Yehoshua’s novels are often gently paced, meandering tales of quotidian Israeli life, in no hurry to yield their secrets,” wrote Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian in 2016. “Their characters regularly include people returning home, keen to excavate or interrogate the past, hoping it might provide a guide to the perplexing present and future.”

Yehoshua drew on his Sephardi background that was rooted in Arabic, Greek, north African and Judeo-Spanish culture to write The Lover (1977), which describes an affair between an Arab and a Jew, and The Liberated Bride (2001), about an Arab student at Haifa University. Indeed, his father was fluent in the language and had worked as an Arabic translator for the British colonial and Israeli governments. As a child Yehoshua made friends with many Palestinians and said it was his duty as a writer “to make the Arabs flesh and blood, to make them real”.

As well as interracial love, he did not shy away from the dispute about the land. In his early short story Facing the Forests an Israeli army reservist is guarding a wood, planted by the new state of Israel, along with a mute Palestinian Arab, whose tongue was cut out in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The Palestinian burns down the wood to reveal the ruins of the village where he was born. The book exemplified his commitment to the moral and political involvement of Israeli writers, along with Amos Oz (obituary, December 29, 2018) and David Grossman.

Avraham Gabriel Yehoshua (he was later known as AB on account of the nickname Bulli that was conferred on him by two girls at school and stuck for life) was born in Jerusalem in 1936 into a family of Sephardi origin.

His father, Yaakov Yehoshua, who was born in Greece, was a historian of Jerusalem who came from a family of rabbis; AB would self-identify as secular but was steeped in Talmudic scholarship. His mother, Malka (née Rosilio), was from Morocco and immigrated to Jerusalem with her parents in 1932. He attended Gymnasia Rehavia municipal high school in Jerusalem and while still a teenager began three years as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, taking part in the Anglo-French-Israeli operation to retake the Suez canal in 1956 before international pressure forced a withdrawal. In the Israeli defence forces he met a fellow soldier, Rivka Kirsninski, who would become his wife. A clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, she died in 2016. Yehoshua recalled espying her from the third floor of a university building and quickly proposing. He submitted to being “psychoanalysed for 50 years”. He is survived by their children, Sivan, Gideon and Nahum.

Yehoshua studied literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He published his first book of short stories, influenced by Kafka, in 1962 and became a teacher in Paris. When the Six Day War broke out in June 1967 he returned to Israel to offer his services to the military. At the same time he co-founded the left-wing activist group Peace Now that advocated a two-state solution in Israel, giving land to the Palestinians to establish their own state in return for recognition of the state of Israel.

“You must never forget that in 1947 Israel acknowledged the existence of the Palestinian people and recognised their right to have a state of their own,” he said. “They sought the division of the land; they wanted justice for Palestinians, and the Arab leaders rejected it. The tragedy is that the Israeli right ignored the wishes of the founding fathers for division of the land in 1967. Now the occupied territories are Israel’s drugs. The country is addicted to the territories.”

From 1972 he taught comparative and Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa, a city where Arabs and Jews had historically mixed peacefully. He became a writer-in-residence at St Cross College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Princeton. All the while he retained his post at Haifa and, given his attempt to foster greater understanding of the interwoven history of the peoples of Israel and Palestine, was deeply hurt when the University and College Union in the UK staged a cultural boycott of the university.

Later novels included A Woman in Jerusalem (2004), Friendly Fire: A Duet (2007) and The Extra (2014). Not unlike Graham Greene, he had a fine eye for engineering intriguing situations and juxtapositions, such as the troubled Jewish film-maker who attends a retrospective of his work in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and asks a Catholic priest to hear his confession, in his 2013 novel The Retrospective.

His books were translated into 28 languages and Yehoshua was shortlisted for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. His final novel, The Tunnel (2020), which dealt with the subject of dementia, was a vintage Yehoshua allegory about Israel’s refusal to learn from the past.

Over the years he watched as his dream of a two-state solution died, which he attributed to a combination of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and the policies of Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (obituary, November 11, 2004): “The dream we on the Israeli left have been trying to realise since 1967, the establishment of a Palestinian state, fell apart because of him. We were so close at Oslo . . . He threw it away.” Yehoshua had advocated talks with Hamas after the hardline Palestinian organisation was elected to govern the Gaza Strip in 2006. However, in recent years he abandoned his dream of a two-state solution. Palestinians should be given full voting rights in a binational state, he said. He wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2018: “This vision is no longer viable in practice and we must try to examine the situation with intellectual honesty and think about other solutions. I don’t see any possibility of evacuating 400,000 Jews in the West Bank or the partition of Jerusalem.”

He was nonetheless optimistic about the future: “We have done the peace with Egypt and Jordan. I think with the Palestinians we will find a way if we give them equality . . . we can find a modus vivendi with them.”

AB Yehoshua, author, was born on December 9, 1936. He died of oesophageal cancer on June 14, 2022, aged 85