It can’t go on, it goes on

Since Sept. 11, it has often seemed as if the whole world is in the grips of an Israeli-style madness, a kind of mental illness in which not just a person but a whole national entity boldly flings itself into the one series of actions that most goes against its long-range interests. This makes David Grossman’s new collection of essays, “Death as a Way of Life,” a peculiarly, one might say eerily, useful and enlightening book to read right now, not just for the usual crowd of fanatics who are chronically obsessed with the Arab-Israeli conflict but for a far more general audience. In it, one of Israel’s great contemporary writers shows us what lies ahead for the Western world if force is the only weapon we choose to wield.

As its title would indicate, “Death as a Way of Life” is a primer in the logic of the absurd. Has there ever been a conflict more amenable to the laws of Beckett, the unreason of Kafka, than that between the Israelis and the Palestinians? The locked, motionless quality of the desperate battle, the unerring ability of both parties to plunge into realms of self-destruction, the dark, dark, darkness of it all (especially the uniquely inexorable tool of suicide bombing as well as the killings of babies), the seeming endlessness and no vision of the future -- what struggle could be more conventionally modern, even postmodern? What clash more existential on both sides? Who are -- behind all the rhetoric and theatrics -- better contemporary analogues of Vladimir and Estragon than Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat? It’s as if Grossman were writing from a Middle Eastern Alcatraz, writing out of sheer exhaustion and despondency: Perhaps someone somewhere will someday see the message in the bottle.

In a series of short essays written as events unfolded, the new book addresses the 10 years of Arab-Israeli conflict that followed the signing of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn. There is progress in the history Grossman sketches out: progress from hope to despair, from possibility to futility, from the rational to the absurd. Reading the book from cover to cover is something akin to watching Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat come away from the Historic Handshake only to find that what they had hidden in their grips was not an olive branch but knives, bombs, tanks and every other tool of betrayal and death.

Like Amos Oz, Grossman is a particularly perceptive writer when he turns his novelist’s eye from fiction to the real world of Israel. We should all thank heaven that the world has such writers in it, because as artists and essayists, they are allowed beyond the usual boundaries of journalism, and outside these borders, art and observation and emotion can interact, giving these writers the ability to get to the human core.

Explaining the rifts in an Israeli society torn by controversy over the peace process, Grossman gives us an anecdote, a snapshot, that exposes the situation in all its complexity. In the days after Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Israeli zealot, Grossman sees a man “get out of his car and quickly peel off it a black-and-red bumper sticker inscribed ‘Rabin is a murderer.’ ” The incident takes place in the green secrecy of the Jerusalem Forest.

“What will this man say to his children today?” Grossman asks. “How will he explain to them why he put the bumper sticker on his car and why he tore it off today?” But it is not just privately observed moments Grossman is capable of encapsulating for us. He takes events seen by the world and shows us their meaning. Surely all who pay even the slightest attention to events in the Middle East will recall the day when a boy named Muhammad al-Durrah was killed in an ugly cross-fire between the two sides in Gaza.

“[F]or the last year and a half,” Grossman wrote in October 2000, “[Ehud] Barak and Arafat have not stopped talking about the need to make peace, for the sake of the children. But they are apparently speaking of some abstract peace, of figurative children.

“A twelve-year-old boy now lies between them, a boy with a name and a face, a face contorted with fear. A very tangible dead boy.

“Were Barak and Arafat braver, really brave, this boy might still be alive.... Who knows how many more innocent people will die in the days to come, until the two sides understand that the look that was in the eyes of that boy before he died will be the look we all have.... “

It’s too bad that there is not more commentary like this coming out of areas in crisis. Grossman’s sympathetic and perceptive writing goes to the very heart of the most complicated dilemmas in the Arab-Israeli crisis. He confronts the bloodletting squarely and doesn’t let anyone get away with it.

As you read these essays and hear his voice become more desperate, more heartbroken, more deeply pessimistic, the amazing thing is that -- even as bombs are exploding on buses and in crowded hotel dining rooms and in nightclubs and bars and coffee shops -- he never loses sight of the humanity of Israel’s enemies. He knows that behind the suicide bomber lurks a real people trying to deal with an impossible situation, a people trapped in politics and history, not unlike the Israeli people.

The Palestinians, in Grossman’s eyes, are real, suffer real wounds, bleed real blood, have legitimate complaints and demands. Grossman insists on knowing them. Here and there, throughout the book, Grossman chats on the phone with Palestinian friends -- parents, intellectuals, politicians -- and all seem to share his sense of doom and to understand that the Israelis are real people too. One could wish to hear as publicly from these Palestinians as one does from Grossman; you want to hear Grossman’s friends from across the Green Line talk about, say, very tangible dead bus riders, very tangible dead college students, very tangible dead 3-year-olds in their strollers, very tangible dead pizza eaters.

Meanwhile, Grossman offers some important thoughts. Elite Palestinian uneasiness with suicide bombings, he says, is not so much a result of the grotesque and cruel effects of those killings and maimings. Rather, rejection of the method by the Palestinian political and intellectual class comes because, Grossman says, they know that “a society that becomes accustomed to sending its young men and women on suicide operations aimed at murdering innocent civilians, a society that encourages such actions and glorifies their perpetrators, will pay a price in the future.... The minute the possibility of such a horrifying action takes form in the consciousness of a nation, it will not disappear. It will rear its head again in the people’s internal affairs.... The Palestinians know the bitter truth -- the weapon of suicide, which has proved itself so effective against the Israelis, is liable to be used against them as well, when the Palestinians have a state and commence their internecine struggles over the character and image of that state.” No special status protects Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas from the fate of Rajiv Gandhi. And as anyone who has studied the Middle East knows, moderates are the preferred targets of extremist violence there, as elsewhere.

Ultimately, though Grossman places plenty of blame at the feet of both the Palestinian and the Israeli peoples, it is their uncourageous, pusillanimous, sightless leaders whom he finds most at fault. Both Sharon and Arafat, Grossman writes, have “ ‘succeeded’ in fanning the flames of violence, hatred, and despair among their peoples.... Look how today’s situation is the inevitable outcome of their chosen paths, their deeds, their aspirations, and how much the present state of affairs reflects their warlike, suspicious, and aggressive view of the world. For them, it confirms, in a hermetic, circular way, just how right they have always been.” Theirs is the righteousness of the damned.

It’s easy, too easy these days, to characterize Grossman’s political thinking as “leftist” and “pacifist” and to reject it out of hand -- in Israel and especially in the American Jewish community of today. But to categorize him is unfair. Taken together, Grossman’s essays and occasional pieces are documents not only of great anguish but also of great, coruscating, prophetic anger. His essays are not like Amos Elon’s, which march ineluctably on, armed with historical fact and glittering witty brilliance, to a far-reaching and illuminating conclusion. No, Grossman is something that is perhaps even more useful and precious in the current debate: a humanist who speaks in a human voice about the deathly conflict that can only be solved by human means -- understanding, empathy, communication and will. For his continuing courage in squarely addressing the bloody situation, Grossman should be respected, and honored.