Saturday, 23rd of September, 2006

I’m sure I’ve talked about the amazing Israeli author Etgar Keret before here (oh yes - in relation to his exchange of letters with Palestinian author Samir El-Youssef). I just wanted to link to a fantastic interview with him in The Believer, which gives a really interesting insight into life in Israel, especially for people of our generation.

In this sense, it’s hard for me to know the differences between disliking Israel, disliking the region, and disliking human nature in general, because the rhetoric used in Israeli politics and in many political systems says, “Life is good, everything’s great, but those guys are assholes.” Many of the problems in Israel are not unique regional problems. They’re widespread human problems that in Israel are kind of extreme. Being xenophobic or irrationally violent — the Middle East didn’t invent this.

But if you ask me if I’m disillusioned by the Zionist idea, I must say that I was born disillusioned by the Zionist idea. Maybe my parents have been disillusioned, but I never shared the Zionist idea. If you ask me if I’m disillusioned by the corruption, I’m not very surprised by the corruption. If you ask me if I accept the situation, I don’t accept it. If you ask me if it could be better, yeah, it could be better. If you ask me if in the end it will be good, I’ll say to you that in the end it will be bad. There is no contradiction there. If I have any message to try to pass, it’s that the only way to deal with this is to be able to contain the ambiguity, to be able to live in an extreme, harsh reality and still not dehumanize any group of people in it.

and:

I try to stress when I do political debates that there is no contradiction between having very firm ideas of what you want to do and still being able to understand where the other is coming from — to humanize them. In Israel if you support one idea, you dehumanize one group, and if you support another idea, you dehumanize the other. It’s completely tribal. When people read my stuff, they say that I’m confused or I don’t care about things, because if you talk about the reality in Israel at the moment and you introduce any ambiguity to it, people think you are doing something wrong, that this is not the way you’re supposed to use the rhetoric, like you’re an opera singer who whispers.

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