The Israeli newsweekly Koteret Rashit last year asked Novelist David Grossman to contribute an article about the nation's 20-year occupation of the West Bank, the territory won from Jordan during the Six-Day War. Grossman spent seven weeks there before writing of the daily lives of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers, who call the conquered lands Judea and Samaria. His well- turned personal reportage, which in book form became an Israeli best seller, restated an old controversial question: At what political and moral cost does Israel take under its iron wing the lives of some 1.5 million Palestinians, many of whom are landless and jobless refugees from the war?
By dramatically suggesting that the price is too high for a small beleaguered democracy, Grossman became the new focus of an ongoing wrangle. To hard-liners he was just another yefei-nefesh, or beautiful soul, the Hebrew equivalent of "bleeding heart." For better and for worse, this is true. The Yellow Wind puts a human face on the enemy whom many Israelis would rather not look at. Grossman talks to a member of the outlaw militant Jewish underground in the West Bank town of Ofra, and concludes, "He does not want to think even for a minute about the situation of the Arabs around him, because he is caught up in a struggle with them, at war . . . and were he to allow himself to pity, to identify, he would weaken and endanger himself."
The Jews and Arabs who found their way into Grossman's book no longer worry about who cast the first stone, who knocked out the first eye or the first tooth. The etiology of the conflict has long since been rendered moot by reciprocal violence and the hardening of mutual hatreds. As read in the West Bank, history comes with a curse. A conversation between Grossman and a young Palestinian teacher in the refugee community of Deheisha:
" 'You don't want to leave here for a better place?'
" 'Only for my homeland . . .'
" 'And you don't dream sometimes, only dream, that you might live in a better place?'
" 'Dreams?' She laughs. 'I have a responsibility,' she says, 'to the suffering my parents endured, and to my own suffering.'
" 'And because of responsibility to suffering you won't try to achieve even limited possible happiness?'
" 'I can't. I don't want to.' "
Elsewhere, the Palestinian lawyer and author Raj'a Shehade refines this sullen fatalism as sumud, a word he uses to express his determination to endure and outwait Israel: "Of the two ways open to me as a Palestinian -- to surrender to the occupation and collaborate with it, or to take up arms against it, two possibilities which mean, to my mind, losing one's humanity -- I choose the third way. To remain here. To see how my home becomes my prison, which I do not want to leave, because the jailer will then not allow me to return."