What kind of solution can solve the problem of Israel and Palestine?
The international community seems to be no closer to finding an answer than in 2014, when the extraordinary novel “The Book of Disappearance” (Syracuse University Press, trans., $19.95), by Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem, was first published in Arabic.
Eleven years later, as the region (and the rest of the world) has been upended by the Israel-Hamas War and the ensuing developments, the book’s new English translation was longlisted for the British International Booker Prize. It remains a book well worth reading unless you want to ignore the extraordinary ethical crisis that Palestine represents for the world.
In it, Azem imagines a situation in which all of the Palestinians in Israel disappear overnight. Her book reads like a satire by Jonathan Swift, told by someone who knows Kafka but who has also read the “Left Behind” series about the hypothetical post-rapture earth.
The ancient city of Jaffa, where Azem sets her story, lost nearly 100,000 inhabitants amid the 1948 Arab-Israeli War prompted by the creation of the Jewish state after World War II. Tel Aviv, built by Jewish immigrants, grew next to Jaffa and the contrast between the two dominates the author’s reflection about where she was born.
Alaa Azaf, a Palestinian who works as a cameraman, and Ariel Levy, an Israeli Jewish journalist who writes a column for an American newspaper, are the main characters. Their “friendship,” a weird symbiotic relationship, is the thread that allows Azem to give both the Israeli point of view and a Palestinian counterpoint.
At first the Israelis think it is some kind of strike. But even the Palestinian prisoners are gone, and no camera evidence of mass immigration can be found. Suddenly, only Jews are in Israel. Ariel, a liberal Israeli, is confused and conflicted about the disappearance. Upon discovering Alaa’s diary, chapters alternate between the diary and Ariel’s wanderings in Tel Aviv searching for answers to a puzzle the government cannot solve.
Many Israelis fear invasion from Arab countries, others are convinced that the Israeli military have pulled off an almost magical solution to the perennial conflict between Arabs and Jews, and still others think that there has been a divine intervention.
The media resounds with satisfaction about the new situation. One character says, “Let’s be honest now. What’s happening solves all our problems.”
The strange disappearance parallels the diary’s recounting of how, at Israel’s founding, Arabs left and Jewish immigrants moved into their lands. The old woman of Jaffa had to leave her home like many Arabs and her city became an almost ghostly thing of the past. Street signs were changed from Arabic to Hebrew, Arab names were substituted by Jewish ones.
Azem’s novel reminded me of two other books. One is a little-known Israeli work, “Khirbet Khizeh” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans., $17) by S. Yizhar, a harrowing story of a group of Israeli soldiers who in 1948 evict the residents of an Arab village for suspected rebellion against the State of Israel. The narrator says what happened to the people of that village “haunted” him “ever since.”
When the soldiers in the story shoot at some men leaving the fields around the village, Yizhar has the narrator say, “We were getting excited. The thrill of the hunt that lurks inside every man had taken firm hold of us.”
In a chilling dialog, one soldier says to the others: “ ‘The devil take them. What beautiful places they have.’
“ ‘Had,’ replies another. “It’s already ours.’ ”
The narrator becomes conscience stricken and says, “I wanted to discover if among all these people there was a single Jeremiah mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stifled tones to the old God of heaven, atop the trucks of exile.”
The other novel is Elie Wiesel’s “Dawn” (Hill and Wang, $13). Written after the world-famous Holocaust memoir “Night,” “Dawn” is set in British occupied Palestine. A Jewish survivor of Buchenwald, Elisha, has joined the Zionist underground “terrorist” organization whose aim is to “get the English out” by means of “intimidation, terror and sudden death.” The book tells the story of Elisha’s long night waiting to kill a kidnapped English officer as retaliation for the Mandate’s hanging of a Zionist for terrorist activities.
Wiesel’s irony is searing. The camp survivor becomes a killer. The ghosts of his parents, his Hasidic master, a boyhood friend, and even of his childhood self crowd the room as he contemplates how he is going to kill the prisoner. The world’s silence as the Nazis killed so many Jews is the reason Elisha is now to kill a man: “We can rely only on ourselves. If we become more unjust and inhuman than those who have been unjust and inhuman to us then we shall do so.”
Wiesel was a spiritual genius besides being a writer of tremendous subtlety and skill. A blurb on my paperback copy of the novel states “Dawn” is about “the anguish and loss of the moral Jew who has placed himself on the other side of the gun.”
All three novels represent an emotional punch to the stomach, with beautiful writing, exceptional command of conflicted human psychology, and a sense of intellectual doom.
Following recent developments in Iran, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, today’s geopolitical scene in the Middle East looks a little different from when the books were written. But the problem remains the same. The brilliant Israeli writer and peace activist Amos Oz argued the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about real estate, not religion or culture. It will take some kind of higher geometry to work out how two things can share the same space, I am afraid.
Azem has nothing to say about Hamas in the novel. In fact, at one point Alaa muses that “There are good Israelis and bad ones. … Moreover, the victim should not lose his higher moral ground.” Which Hamas did not think of, apparently. But the persistence of the problem is not about the painful radical violence promoted by some. It is deep and challenges both the intellect and the spirit. I recommend all three novels, but “The Disappearance” still seems like the book of the hour.
In “Main Currents in American Thought” (Harcourt, Brace, $68), Vernon Louis Parrington said about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Bantam Classics, $6.99) that, despite its “blemishes,” it is a great human document that stripped away the protective atmosphere from the sacred institution [slavery] and laid bare its elementary injustice. It brought the system home to the common feeling and conscience.”
I cannot help feeling that “The Book of Disappearance” has done something very much like that.
