We have faith in the future.” It is the year 2004 and La Vanguardia has brought together the great Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939-2018) and the Palestinian historian Sari Nusseibeh, newly awarded Premi International Catalunya ex aequo, to talk about culture and peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There are two debaters, but there is only one holder. And they agree on a short sentence that now, in the midst of total war, sounds more distant than ever: “We have faith in the future”. Both are then involved in peace projects, one of which is explained and signed house by house. And they are betting on the two-state solution, the return to the borders of 1967, an agreement on the holy places in which the majority of settlements will have to be abandoned. The vast majority of refugees will have to return to the new Palestinian State.
At that time, another great Israeli writer, Abraham B. Yehoshua (1936-2022), author of books such as Viaje al fin del millenio and founder of the Peace Now initiative already in 1977, pointed out that “the agreements with the Palestinians are necessary We will never be neighbors like Switzerland and France and there will be some tension, but we have already moved from total war to dialogue, a big step. Despite the problems that remain, the important thing will always be to maintain this dialogue”. He even imagined the possibility, now pure science fiction, of achieving peace with Syria with an agreement on the Golan Heights. “The definitive peace”, he summed up.
Two decades later, in March 2022, the acclaimed Israeli author of graphic novels Rutu Modan published Tunnels (Windows/Salamandra) in Spain and recalled, on the other hand, that if in the nineties after the Oslo agreements there were hope, “today no one talks about solutions”. In his good-humored book, the tunnels that were already dug in his country centuries ago to hide in the cities conquered by the great invading armies are crossed with those that are being dug today in Gaza and the West Bank, and they also cross the raised wall for Israel in front of the Palestinians and the ark of the covenant. “There was even a far-right group that proposed digging a country underground as a solution to the current conflict. Imagine who would live below”, he explained.
“Everyone is digging the country but at the same time talking about life in the sky. Everything seems connected: the ancient past, a very complicated present and the distant future when the messiah comes. The Israelis think: ‘We can’t solve it now, but time is on our side’. You can find the same thinking in the Palestinians.” And, he admitted, there is an obstacle to reaching an understanding: “The ancient kingdom of Israel is in the West Bank. It was tragic to understand: it will never be abandoned, because if there was any justification for coming to the Middle East, it was for this area”. And yet, he ventured: “One theory says that the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea, with their own history and mythology, were forced to coexist in the same territory and ended up creating the Jewish people and a book of great success thanks to its contradictions: the Hebrew Bible. Maybe something like this happens again. It is a fantasy to think that the Israelis or the Palestinians will leave here”.
Perhaps it is also to think that a conflict will end with a cruelty that could not fail to be reflected in the world of culture, in its novels, its comics, its cinema or its music. It couldn’t be any other way because it marks lives. It can be summed up by the experience of the Israeli Etgar Keret, author of titles such as the stories of Pizzería kamikaze Keret remembered how the military service, mandatory and three years in his country, is a profound and transformative experience that changed his life and that of his brothers. “The biggest one was on the right, and one day he brought down a Syrian fighter: he killed the pilot and the co-pilot. And he became an activist for human rights on the anti-Zionist left. My sister was an artillery guide, she fell in love with a colleague and he was killed in Lebanon. She took refuge in religion. I was going to be an engineer, I was studying at university with my best friend, and he died in the army. I couldn’t continue studying and I started writing.”
Ari Folman instead threw himself into screenwriting and film direction, in films such as the animated film Vals con Bashir, which won the Bafta and the César for best foreign film and in which he remembers the his experience at the age of 19 as a soldier in the Lebanon war, of which he has erased all memory and for which he will discover, when he looks for them, a difficult reality around the massacre of Sabra and Xatila. Israeli cinema won its first Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival with Lebanon, by Samuel Maoz, an anti-war film told from the point of view of four soldiers locked in a tank and starting from his memories of the 1982 war as a young gunner, aged just 20, of one of the first tanks to enter the country. He dedicated the victory “to the thousands of people in the world who, like me, return from the war safe and sound. Apparently they are fine, they work, they get married, they have children. But inside the memory remains like a dagger in the soul”.
The conflict has transcended the culture in numerous creations. From Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestina (Planeta Cómic), a key piece of historiographical journalism in which he travels through Gaza and the West Bank in the early nineties, and Notas al pie de Gaza (Reservoir Books), in which he immerses himself years later in the daily life of Rafah and its neighboring city, Khan Iunis, uncovering a terrible episode from more than half a century ago, to current Israeli series of global success such as Fauda (chaos, in Arabic), whose seasons can be seen on the Netflix platform and which ranks first in Arab countries despite criticism. In this series, an Israeli agent pursues a Palestinian fighter whom he thought was dead. Its creators are Lior Raz, also the protagonist, ex-bodyguard of Schwarzenegger, who fought in operations against Palestinian terrorists of the Israeli army, and the journalist Avi Issacharoff, who also belonged to a covert military unit and who is a harsh critic of Netanyahu, as he has opposed his judicial reforms. Issacharoff points out that Fauda “is a series about the price of occupation, both for Israelis and for Palestinians” and a few months ago he stated that “the question is not if the Palestinians will explode, the question is when”, because “we have in Israel a radical right-wing Government that opposes any kind of concession to the Palestinians and is waging an aggressive campaign to build more Jewish settlements. These policies could lead us to an explosion.” In view of the attack by Hamas on Saturday, he has declared that it is the “11-S of Israel” and that “if it does not lead to a ground operation, it will be the end of the Government”. “I think they wanted to kidnap a few people and negotiate with them. Not even Hamas imagined that they would manage to get this far. But they will pay a very high price”, he warned.
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was built on the possibility of peace, created in 1999 by two friends: conductor Daniel Barenboim – born in Argentina in a family of Jewish origin who moved to Israel when he was ten years old – and the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, author of the classic Orientalism (Eumo / Debate). An orchestra in which the core is made up of young Jewish and Palestinian musicians and which has been demonstrating for decades that coexistence is possible. Edward Said, who died in 2003, said that “humanism is the only resistance we have against the inhumane practices and injustices that disfigure human history”. Daniel Barenboim issued a statement yesterday indicating that he has followed “the events of the weekend with horror”.
“Hamas’ attack on the Israeli civilian population is a heinous crime that I fiercely condemn,” he continues, adding that “an Israeli siege of Gaza constitutes collective punishment that violates human rights.” And concluding that “Said and I always believed that the only path to peace between Israel and Palestine is a path based on humanism, justice, equality and the end of the occupation rather than on ‘military action, and today I believe it more strongly than ever.’
