Haaretz December 17 2021

For most of his life, the writer A.B. Yehoshua, who turned 85 earlier this month, lived in mixed – Jewish-Arab – cities: Jerusalem and Haifa. Yet at more or less the same time he moved to Givatayim, one of Israel’s most homogeneous cities, he made a breathtaking U-turn. After supporting the two-state solution for 50 years, he announced, in a number of opinion pieces in this paper, that he considers that solution unviable. What needs to be done, he wrote, is to give all the Arabs of the West Bank and East Jerusalem citizenship within the framework of a single, joint Jewish-Arab state. In 2016 he suggested that Israel immediately begin to grant residency status and citizenship to the approximately 100,000 Arabs who live in Area C of the West Bank (which is under Israeli control), thereby giving resonance to the plan of the former director general of the Yesha council of settlements, Naftali Bennett, who is today prime minister.

It’s not every day that a person of 80-plus changes his opinion, and not every society has experienced a revision of approach like this on the part of its greatest living writer, much less on the issue that has split society from the state’s inception: the conflict with the Arabs. The astonishment is all the greater if we take into account the fact that in his writing – in his essays and fiction alike – Yehoshua frequently expressed himself fiercely against the idea of blurring boundaries in general, and between Jews and Palestinians in particular:

“After the Six-Day War, the border, which is the cornerstone of every [example of] sovereignty in the world, began to become blurred. Although we did not annex the territory we conquered… we nevertheless annulled the physical existence of the clear border that stood between two different peoples, and we started to disperse ourselves in settlements – once again emulating the Diaspora – within the fabric of life of another people… Today [in the second intifada] we are paying the price of a non-border in grim, blood-drenched form, because every day, an enemy enters the circulatory system of our being, without our even being able to identify him…

“The Palestinians are in a situation of insanity reminiscent of the insanity of the German people during the Nazi period. I look with dread at the depth of suicidal hatred with which the Palestinians relate to us. The Germans, too, related to us with the same type of hatred. That is something that needs to be clarified: what is happening between us and other peoples among whom we live. What it is that brought the Germans and what is bringing the Palestinians to possess such hatred of us… The substantive, almost anarchic, absence of boundaries in the Jewish identity that nestles within a different identity, naturally arouses resistance.”

As these quotations (from a 2002 talk) show, the new stance is not only a shift on Yehoshua’s part. Indeed, the very thing he pointed to as the problem – boundary blurring, non-separation between Jews and Palestinians – he now advances as the solution!

Until only a few years ago, Yehoshua presented the incursion into the other’s sphere and the absence of a clear boundary between one’s self and the other as a source of enmity and violence. That is also the explanation he offered for the antisemitism that targeted the Jews in the Diaspora: Precisely because the Jews were so adept at integrating into the surrounding society, they generated fear and hatred among the gentiles, who feared the devious and clandestine penetration by a foreign body within them. (It’s interesting to note in this context that Yehoshua’s 2005 children’s book “Tamar and Gaya’s Mouse” is about the incursion and “naturalization” of a mouse in a family’s home, and describes the mouse in terms that recall the stereotype of a Diaspora Jew: “little mouse-boy,” “very clever mouse,” “shrewd mouse” and also “very wretched.”)

Indeed, not only Yehoshua the essayist but also Yehoshua the fiction writer attributes immense and positive importance to the notion of boundaries. Yehoshua’s novels and short stories are replete with trespassing, invasions and incursions by individuals into forbidden areas and places. There is hardly a work of his without a character who tries to cross some threshold, enter an unfamiliar room, gain access to a site that is barred to them, violate privacy, or contaminate or desecrate some sort of sacredness by their very presence.

In the novel “Friendly Fire” (2007), the protagonist is asked, “Why is it you Jews can penetrate all sorts of foreign places and settle into other people’s souls?” That concept is also highly apposite for the Arab youth Na’im in Yehoshua’s first novel, “The Lover” (1977), particularly toward the end of the book, when Na’im completes his integration in camouflage into Jewish society, while displaying mastery of the work of the Jewish national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik.

In an interview with the American-Jewish monthly Sh’ma, Yehoshua maintained that his longest novel, “The Liberated Bride,” from 2001, could also have been titled “Borders.” The novel describes a bilingual production, at a poetry festival in Ramallah, of “The Dybbuk,” the paradigmatic Jewish work dealing with the danger of the penetration of a foreign body into the self.

Overall, Yehoshua’s literary career is characterized by a recurring engagement with boundaries. Draw borders before a disaster happens, Yosef Mani implores his Arab neighbors in “Mr. Mani” (1990), “Get ye an identity before it is too late!” Yosef, however, does not heed his own advice and fails to safeguard the borders, when he decides “to penetrate a place that Jews were barred from”: Yosef is killed by his father on the Temple Mount, namely Mount Moriah, the outstanding example of “a place that Jews were barred from.” The image from the essays of the lethal mixture of different bloods resonates at the beginning of “Mr. Mani,” when an infant who receives a transfusion dies apparently from “incompatible blood types.”

One of the signs of dementia of Luria, the protagonist of Yehoshua’s 2018 novel “The Tunnel,” is his tendency to enter places he should not be in and to open forbidden doors (such as that of the opera house). It’s not by chance that he cooks indeterminate and boundary-breaching dishes such as “a quiche of noodles intertwined like the human brain.”

Similarly, Zvi, the narrator’s friend in the 1965 story “Three Days and a Child,” trespasses on the narrator when he invades his apartment, which almost leads to his death, when he is bitten by a snake that had been set free there. Zvi’s intrusion into the relationship between the narrator and his partner, with whom Zvi is in love, evokes the oedipal intrusion of a child between its parents and makes clear the primeval and universal nature of invading forbidden territory. Like many of Yehoshua’s fictional characters, the narrator of “Three Days and a Child” infuses this dangerous tendency to encroachment with a national-local aspect when, on his own initiative, he takes his class on a hike in pre-June 1967 Jerusalem and crosses the border with them.

What can account for such an extreme transformation of approach? Yehoshua, for his part, offers two explanations: recognition that the two-state solution is not feasible, and concern for the moral images of both Jews and Palestinians. From a purely logical point of view, these reasons may be sufficient. However, such a dramatic change of heart might also have deeper roots, as Yehoshua, who’s always drawn on psychoanalytical motifs in his work, would undoubtedly be the first to acknowledge.

As the psychologist Amos Prywes, who writes an online column in Haaretz Hebrew edition, has noted, psychoanalyst Emmanuel Gant viewed the aspiration to breach the boundaries of our self and return to a state of primary unity with the world as a universal human impulse. Yehoshua, in his new stance in favor of one state shared by Jews and Palestinians, is fulfilling the traditional role here of the spiritual mentor in Far Eastern cultures, the person who guides us in this process and assists us to dismantle our ego walls – or a literal wall in the Israeli-Palestinian case. Thus, in 2002, at the height of the second intifada, when he wrote the strident remarks cited above in condemnation of the breaching of boundaries, Yehoshua told the poet Yotam Reuveni in an interview: “The Arabs of the Land of Israel are part of my identity. They are a component within the identity of this land. Accordingly, I feel for them human warmth and even a certain intimacy… They are not total strangers even when they are enemies. I feel them also within me.”

In other words, what Yehoshua prohibited was actually – as is often the case with many prohibitions – what he yearned for perhaps above all else. In “A Journey to the End of the Millennium” (1997), the protagonist, Ben Attar, enjoys marriages with two women, who contentedly share the same husband – as the Jews and the Palestinians are meant to share the same state. Additional hints of the desire for intermingling can be found in the 1994 novel “The Return from India” (titled “Open Heart” in English), which is filled with diverse attempts to dissolve the boundaries of the self and to merge with the other, “in accordance with the gentle Buddhist philosophy that we were not two souls entering into an eternal bond but only two rivers, each secure in the depth and independence of its own current, and would not be endangered if our waters intermingled slightly.” In a reversal of the story of the infant in “Mr. Mani,” in “Open Heart,” Einat’s life is saved thanks to a blood transfusion provided by the protagonist.

The passion for unity is particularly blatant in “Molcho” (“Five Seasons” in English), a 1987 novel in which the protagonist is haunted by images of the Berlin Wall and of divided Jerusalem. Following the death of his wife, who had been so meticulous about boundaries and not lodging in strangers’ homes, Molcho unburdens himself and does just that. The death of his beloved wife, however tragic and saddening, also releases him to give free rein to his hidden desires, among them the universal impulse spoken of by the analyst Gant, to breach the boundaries between self and stranger.

Unity of extremists

However, as Prywes notes, “There is a thin line between discovering yourself in the other’s world and losing yourself in it. Between expanding and making pliable the boundaries of the self, and the feeling that they are being burst and swallowed up. Between the experience of giving oneself and of submitting.” In this connection, we should recall the 2015 novel by Michel Houellebecq, “Submission,” whose title is both a literal translation of the word “Islam” and a nightmare scenario in which a secular-Christian country loses its identity and its liberal values due to a rise in the power of the fundamentalist Muslim migrants within it.

In regard to loss of identity, Yehoshua has contradicted himself. In his 2018 Haaretz article espousing one state, he wrote, “Jewish identity (however it is interpreted) existed for thousands of years as a small minority within large, powerful nations, so there is no reason for it not to exist also in an Israeli state even though it contains a Palestinian minority so large that it can be termed a binational state.” However, this differs from what he told writer Dror Mishani that same year, in an interview upon the publication of “The Tunnel”:

Mishani: “In the story of the shabazim [an acronym for Palestinians living in Israel without authorization] in the Nabatean ruins, are you hinting that if we were to make less of our ‘identity,’ if we were to forget about it and allow it to crumble, a new identity would emerge here? Just as there is no Nabatean identity today, possibly in the future there will be no ‘Israeli’ identity?”

Yehoshua: “Without a doubt. Look how we try clinging to Jewish identity and how it eludes us. We need to deploy for a different way of thinking about our identity in the binational state we already are in, whether we like it or not.”

The one-state idea posits a danger not only for Jewish identity but also for the Jewish (and Palestinian) body – the danger of a Bosnian or Rwandan, Yemeni or Syrian reality: a lethal, blood-drenched civil war, with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands killed. It’s true that anything is possible, so maybe we Jews and Palestinians will get lucky and succeed in leaving behind the bloody past and in putting an end to the wars and the cycle of reaction and revenge. But what if that doesn’t happen? Isn’t the risk too great? What image will the one-state assume once it has an Arab majority, a Palestinian prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff? How will the millions of new Palestinian citizens react when rockets are fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel? Will they not use their democratic right to decide to grant the right of return within the boundaries of the Green Line to millions of Palestinian refugees? And what moral image will such a state possess, in which Jewish and Arab chauvinists, religious zealots and homophobes will constitute a solid majority of the population?

For we need to remember: The union that is being proposed here is not only between A.B. Yehoshua and Sari Nusseibeh, but also – and indeed mainly – between Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Elor Azaria, on the one hand, and their fired-up Palestinian counterparts who continue to be funded by Iran. Why mainly? Because the chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Every spat between neighbors, road accident or act of rape involving individuals from the two peoples in the single state could deteriorate into general chaos.

At this point in the discussion, intellectuals from the radical left usually rise up and explain, in the tradition of Karl Marx and others, that concerns about a civil war between Jews and Arabs are irrational fears inculcated in us by the state – the result of lies of the Zionist education system, Holocaust traumas that were exploited by manipulative, power-hungry leaders, and cultivated by the ratings-hungry media, incitement by Benjamin Netanyahu and other acts of brainwashing aimed at creating obedient subjects in the service of the Israeli colonial project.

This is apparently not the view of Yehoshua, who is aware of the dangers his plan contains and has admitted them frankly. For those who are scornful of the fears of a one-state solution, it’s worth recalling that no one can foresee the future, while recommending they read the Hamas Covenant and other statements by its leaders. Hamas today has the support of the majority of the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – namely those to whom Yehoshua wishes to grant citizenship and the right to vote in the joint state.

And apropos Marx: He would be the first to understand the feebleness of optimism about the prospects for peaceful life between Arabs and Jews within a one-state framework, in light of the vast economic disparity between the peoples; after all, the per capita GDP in Israel is nine times that within the Palestinian Authority. In a witty, recently published novella, an Italian driver explains to the Jewish daughter of a wealthy family that the fact that the Jews sometimes excel more than the Catholics, doesn’t make them more loved. The novella is titled “The Only Daughter,” and the name of its author is A.B. Yehoshua (English version forthcoming in 2022). The difficulty of realizing the one-state vision thus also has an economic dimension, of which the author is well aware.

Yehoshua published his one-state vision in 2018, and since then, reality has provided another refutation of his analysis. At that time, three years ago, Yehoshua wrote in Haaretz: “Still, it appears that the citizenship that was forced on or granted to the Palestinians in Israel upon the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1949 created a stable, concrete base for relations between the majority and the minority in the Jewish state, with its large national and non-territorial minority of 20 percent. Even an outside observer with a lofty sense of human morality would give both sides – Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians – high marks for the wisdom of coexistence they’ve developed during the state’s 70 years of existence.”

The riots, lynchings, torchings and other disturbances that erupted during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May showed that Arab-Jewish coexistence within the Green Line boundaries rests not on a “stable, concrete base,” but on thin glass, which can be easily shattered – and was, indeed, shattered. In this connection, it’s worth quoting what Sami Abu Shehadeh, leader of the Balad party – a faction in the Joint List – said a few weeks ago in reference to the riots by Israeli Arabs last spring: “The Jews lost because the young men of Lod decided that this time they were united… The attacks on Al-Aqsa and in [the East Jerusalem neighborhood of] Sheikh Jarrah rocked all of Palestine… But the boys of Lod broke their nose.” Does the move that’s needed to heal the broken Jewish nose entail increasing dramatically the Arabs’ share in the state?

Indeed, the solution of a Palestinian state existing beside a Jewish Israel appears to be unviable for the foreseeable future. But from the temporary impossibility of a particular solution (two states), the conclusion that there is another solution (one state) that is possible, or even preferential, does not follow. Yehoshua is right in saying that the existing situation is intolerable in terms of security, humanity and morality. He deserves high praise for trying to find new answers, displaying the sort of creativity, flexibility and a readiness to revise an approach that are not typical even of those who are far younger than him. Many elements of his plan, including the need to halt the expansion of the settlements and to stop abuse of the Palestinians, are undoubtedly correct.

However, flexibility is not always loftier than stubbornness. In the context of the Palestinian conflict, it’s preferable to adopt the emotional, even anti-intellectual statement of Yehoshua’s friend and colleague, writer David Grossman: “I have sumud [Arabic for “steadfastness,” a Palestinian strategy] for peace.” Not peace now, not one state, but patience and forbearance. The peace camp, too, does not fear a long road. It’s a camp that believes in peace between Israel and a Palestine alongside it, not inside it – peace which, though it may tarry, will surely arrive. And if not tomorrow, then the day after.

Avi Garfinkel is a writer and lecturer on culture.

Email: avi.garfinkel@gmail.com