David Grossman’s The
Yellow Wind – A Retro-Review[1]
David Grossman did the interviews for his book, The Yellow Wind, in May 1987, six months
before the first Intifada. Not only did
the book show that particular decade’s oppressive reality of Israel toward
Palestine, it illustrated the causes of that Intifada, and sadly, the one that
followed and those that will come because of Israel’s continuing oppression
that is now wed with expanding settlements on Palestinian land in what is at
the very least the closest, present parallel to the Bantustan states in
apartheid South Africa. Although
somewhat confounding, Grossman did not himself define Israel as the oppressor
and Palestine as the oppressed.
“Defining Israel’s position as wrong in principle and the Palestinian
position as entirely righteous, is simplistic and false,” he said. Grossman’s book is compelling, however,
because he relies on the voices of “ordinary” Palestinians and Israelis, not
politicians or officials, living in the West Bank at the time. And the people that he spoke with clearly do
signify – the oppressor and the oppressed.
The fact is that when I wrote the
book I had no intention of suggesting a solution. I am a writer not a politician, and the writer’s
job, I believe, is to put a finger on the wound, to write anew, in a language
that the reader has not yet learned to insulate himself against, about the
intricacies of the existing situation, to shatter stereotypes that make it easy
not to deal with the problems. The
writer’s job is to remind those who have forgotten that humanity and morality
are still important questions and to warn of the future implied by the present.
(Intro/NP)
Traveling for seven weeks in the West Bank, Grossman spoke
to Palestinians and Israelis. He met
shopkeepers, soldiers, farmers, widows, children, oppressors, victims, and
more. For the purpose of this review, we
will re-visit the words of some of the Palestinians whom Grossman portrays in
the book. The underlying question, of
course, is why hasn’t Israel, the United States, the World, paid more attention
to these voices.
The Yellow Wind first presents stories from Palestinian
refugee camps – one of a thirty-year old man in Balata who had spent ten years
in the Ashkelon and Nafha prisons. He
had been found guilty of belonging to the PLO but told Grossman:
I didn’t actually take part in
operations. They only taught me to
shoot. Before I went to jail, I didn’t
even know I was a Palestinian. There
they taught me who I am. Now I have
opinions. Don’t believe the ones who
tell you that the Palestinians don’t really hate you. Understand: The average Palestinian is not
the fascist and hating type, but you and the life under your occupation push
him into hatred. Look at me, for
example. You took ten years of my life from me.
You exiled my father in ’68. He
hadn’t done anything. He wasn’t even a
PLO supporter. Maybe even the opposite. Maybe at the beginning I didn’t hate and only
feared. Afterwards, I began to hate. (11)
The second chapter of the book is entitled, “I Want to Shoot
Jews.” Included are discussions with two
teachers and children. The first teacher
thinks as little of Arafat as she does of the Israelis, “Arafat is
bourgeois. He drives a Mercedes. He doesn’t feel the suffering of
refugees. All the Fatah commanders have
houses in Syria and the Gulf states.
Arafat has no supporters here.
Only we can represent ourselves.” (22) She continues saying, “We are
against Arafat, because Arafat wants peace.
We want a solution by force. What
was taken by force will be returned by force.” (23)
The second teacher speaks about the children:
The children know everything. Some of the children here are the fourth
generation in the camp. On any night the
army may enter their house, right into the house, conduct a search, shout, turn
over the blankets and slash at them with their bayonets, strip their fathers… A
little while ago the military governor visited the kindergarten and asked if I
teach the children bad things, against Israel and the Jews. I said that I don’t. But that his soldiers do. (23, 24)
Grossman asked a four-year old girl about the soldiers. She said only the words “search and beatings”
and then told him that Jews equated to the army. A young boy, one of her classmates, when
asked about the Jews said, “They took my sister.” His sisters, plural, were in jail. “’They did not throw stones’, he says
angrily.” Dialogue followed;
Suddenly a little boy gets up,
holding a short yellow plastic stick in his hand, and shoots me.
‘Why are you shooting me?’
He runs to the teacher, peeks at me
from behind her arm and laughs. He is
two years old.
‘Who do you want to shoot?’ The
teachers ask, smiling, like two mothers taking pride in a smart child.
‘Jews’
Their lips make out the answer with
him.
‘Now tell him why,’ they encourage
the little one.
‘Because the Jews took my uncle,’
he says. ‘At night they came in and
stole him from the bed, so now I sleep with my mother all the time.’ (24, 25)
There are four further examples from David Grossman’s
conversations with Palestinian people in 1987 that are important to revisit
before turning to some of his talks with Jewish settlers. He spent time in the Deheisha refugee camp,
with a man he calls Taher in a village near Hebron, with a “terrorist’s”
father, and finally with the lawyer Raj’a Shehade, the author of The Third Way. In Deheisha, a fifty-year old woman said:
You are always with your head down,
waiting for the next blow. After a few
years there you have nothing left but fear and poverty. You become like a dead person: you do not
want anything and you do not hope. You
wait for death. Even the children there
are old. They are born with fear. Here, children are like children they almost
do not know what the army is. Only the
Mustawtanin, the settlers, are frightening. (67)
Also in Deheisha Grossman speaks with a woman named Wadha
Ishmail and her daughter Hanan. The
mother’s story is terrifying but connects to many other memories of Palestinian
people, historically and presently.
After they expelled us from the
village, we would come back to work our land.
The Israeli Army pretended not to see us. They would have maneuvers up on the mountain,
and we would work the land in the valley.
We would come every day by donkey from Hebron in order to work our
land. One day I came here with my
father. I was young then, almost a
girl. We worked a few hours, and we
started on our way back home. Suddenly
the Israeli soldiers surrounded us and separated me from my father. I saw that they blindfolded him with a rag
and pushed him into some bushes. I
remember that he still had a chance to turn to me once and call to me through
the rag. Immediately afterwards I heard
shots. Many shots. I began to cry. The soldiers who had stayed with me asked me:
Who is that man to you? I said: he is my
father. They said: Go to the garden down
there, and you’ll see that he is harvesting lettuce and eggplant. When I was some distance from them, I glanced
back and I saw one of the soldiers aiming his rifle at me. I was frightened and bent over. His bullet hit my neck and came out on the
other side.
I don’t know what to say to her,
and she interprets my silence, apparently, as disbelief. Look, she says, and her work-hardened fingers
undo her kerchief, and she smiles a sort of apology about having to bother me
with her wound. I see an ugly scar in
back, and another ugly scar in front.
Young Hanan cries. It seems that
Wadha is her mother. Every time I hear
that story, it is as if it were the first time, Hanan says.
Wadha lay among the bushes and
played dead. The soldiers distanced
themselves from her and then left the area.
She rose, oozing blood and bound her wounds with a handkerchief. Afterwards, she found her father on the
ground, his hands tied behind his back, a large rock on his neck. There were thirty bullets in his body, the
village elder, Abu harb, told us later.
Wadha, who is for a moment a girl once more, describes with movements of
her body how she walked and tripped through the valley, at night, s cared that
the Israelis would shoot her from behind, or the Jordanians from in front. She concluded her story as she began it,
quietly, with no tone of accusation, and her daughter Hanan stood and cried for
all of us. (69, 70)
Taher is described in the book as middle-aged and he was
resigned to the fact, after the Six-Day War, that Israel would occupy the West
Bank for many years – he was right! He
took it upon himself to study Hebrew in Jerusalem and his assertions were
philosophical, political, and psychological.
First, he spoke of the need for what he called respect from the
Israelis. Translation might simply mean
some sense of humanity.
Start thinking about us not as your
Arabs, asses that anyone can ride, people without honor. Start thinking about us as your future
neighbors. In the end we will be the
people with whom you will have to live here and come to an agreement with and
create ties with, and do business with, and everything, right? … Even if there are five more wars here, the
children of my grandchildren and the children of your grandchildren will
finally get wise and make some sort of agreement with each other, right? So I say: Change your attitude a little, make
some effort in our direction. Even try –
and I know that it is probably hard for you, right? – try, God forbid, to
respect us. (93)
He continued with exemplary directness on what Israeli
actions say, psychologically, about Israelis.
You also have much to learn: not to
get into our souls, for example. Why do
your soldiers need to stop me five times when I go to buy a sack of flour in
the main street of Hebron? Why do they
need to humiliate me at a roadblock in front of my children, who can see how
the soldiers laugh at their father and force him to get out of the car? Of course, you have to behave like
conquerors. I don’t deny that. That’s the way history is: you won the war
and we lost. I say, all right. Be conquerors. Push us, but with delicacy. Because sometimes you push so hard that we
see how scared you are… You should know that you’re in a bad position. When I return from Amman, from visiting my
brother, and one of your soldiers tells me to undress, and pokes his fingers
down there, and checks my underwear, my hair, I look him in the eyes and think,
My God, look how the entire Israeli government and the entire Israeli Army are
scared of you, Taher. (95)
And an example of Israeli disrespect, and also terror, is
portrayed in a chapter titled “The Terrorist’s Father.” The IDF detained the father of what they
referred to as a terrorist and questioned him for a week saying, “We’ll bring
your wife here and we’ll fuck her in front of you.” (189) They then ordered him
to bring his wife and daughter in law to the police station every day and
eventually they bulldozed his house to the ground. They eventually killed his son and put him in
jail for four months after beating him.
He recalled the treatment.
Officers pass us the whole time and
spit on us and say, Tfu! You are dogs and the sons of dogs, and every day they
would leave us there until nine at night, and every day we had to take a taxi,
and when we came home at night, the mukhabarat would come again, at four in the
morning, and enter the house, and pull everything out of the closets, wake up
the children, and they would bring big dogs with them and say, We want your
children to see the dogs and go crazy from fear of them. (189)
The voices of both the adults and children quoted are all
very much a part of the life experiences of Raj’a Shehade. As already noted, Shehade wrote a book called
The Third Way – or samud
(endure). He explained that the choice
for Palestinians was to surrender, fight, or endure. He chose the last option but his choice did
not imply idleness.
I do not despair. I only fear for the future. The occupation is steadily destroying
us. It destroys the entire fabric of
civil and traditional life. We are
caught in a totally false reality, and are beginning to think that it is the
truth. That is a great danger. But I do not despair: there are so many
things to fight for. There are so many
things to improve! From looking after
mental-health institutions to the effort to set up a law school. There is not a single law school in the
entire West Bank. There are a million
things that a person can devote himself to.
You can’t give up. Independence,
for me, is not only a piece of paper or a declaration. You have to work hard to achieve it, and it
is possible to do so much even now. (157)
On the settlements:
In my eyes they are criminals. Criminals and lunatics. Sometimes I have to meet htem. They are racists. Look, racism is hard to diagnose
precisely. There are many things that
seem to be racism but are not. Real
racism is when you don’t see another person as human. They ask – with deep inner conviction – why
the Arabs don’t accept what they want to do here? They don’t understand that, as human beings,
the Arabs desire everything that any human desires. They simply are not willing to understand
that! (150)
On Israel as a colonial nation-state:
You should understand: the Israelis
are not satisfied with having conquered us.
They want to turn us into a colony of theirs, in every sense of the
word, culturally as well. That means
that they don’t want only to confiscate land, but also to impose themselves on
the soul and thoughts of the conquered.
It is very important for Israelis – in a sometimes touching way – to
impress us. To convince us how much
Israel is superior to us. And by the
way, there is a huge difference between the propaganda that Israel directs
toward the West Bank, where it wants to appear omnipotent, and the propaganda
it directs toward the West, in whose eyes it wants to appear as a victim,
surrounded by powerful enemies. (154)
On the falsity of Israeli superiority:
It seems to me that the long term
is more dangerous for Israel than for us.
The Arab world is now in a miserable state, there is no denying
that. It is a world that is bad to live
in. a world of oppression. But Israel is founded on so many
contradictions, and on so many opposing forces, that its existence is always in
great danger. For example, there is a
huge gap between the self-image of Israelis and reality. You think you are omnipotent, because of your
success in controlling such a large Arab population. But the truth is that foreign support is the
decisive factor. You remind me of the
spoiled son of a rich man, who thinks he can do anything, until he has to face
life on his own and discovers a few hard truths. (155)
The stories that Grossman tells of Palestinians are a pedagogy of the oppressed while those of
the settlers he spoke with are the tales of proponents/apologists of oppression
– politically, socially, culturally, and psychologically. And they still exist today. There is much less time spent with Jewish
settlers than with Palestinians. David
Grossman’s meetings with other Jews, however, left him very troubled. He quoted very little, but he did ponder his
visit to the settlement of Ofra. The
chapter was titled “Don’t Pity Them too Much.”
Grossman commented on Gush Emunim.
Hooliganism echoes in everything
the leaders of Gush Emunim say. A
smooth, sharp hooliganism, but hooliganism nonetheless. With television cameras in the gymnasium,
every speaker makes sure to give lip service to the need to work within the
law, but they pronounce the words like someone spitting a rotten pice of apple
from his mouth. (206)
His reflections on the people in Ofra are much more analytical
and correspond to the arrogance he found during his time in the village. He wrote his thoughts after a meeting with
residents:
At the end of twenty years it seems
to me that all the arguments, both rational and emotional, have already been
made. Only on extremely rare occasions
do we hear a crushing new argument, one which requires you to reevaluate your
opinions, and in Israel the reality is that it is easier for a man to change
his religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his
political opinions. Renounce your
opinions – and it is as if you have announced the total replacement of the
structure of your soul, and have taken it upon yourself to proclaim that, up to
now, you lived a perfect lie. So each
bunker peers with its periscope at the bunker across the way, and sees there
the reflection of the shining iron of its own immovability. So much for debate. (36)
During his short stay in Ofra, Grossman understands that the
settlers don’t even see the Palestinians.
“Were he to allow himself to pity, to identify, he would weaken and
endanger himself,” (40) he realizes. But
it goes further:
Who are these people, I ask myself,
who maintain an almost utopian bubble of a society of values, making great
demands on individuals, atop a mountain of injustice, impenetrability, and
ignorance of their fellow men?... They, after all, see the Bible as an
operational order. An operation that,
even if its time is yet to come, will come and, if it does not come soon
enough, will need to be brought. I fear life
among people who have an obligation to an absolute order. Absolute orders require, in the end, absolute
deeds, and I, nebbish, am a partial, relative, imperfect man who prefers to
make correctible mistakes rather than attain supernatural achievements. (46,48)
Then real life magnification comes two weeks later when the
leader of Jewish settlers in Hebron, Rav Levinger, says: “Fifty years ago our
opponents argued about Jaffa; today they argue with us about Alfei Menashe; in
another fifty years they will argue with us about Amman. That’s the way it is.”
It appears that in 1987 – from the time David Grossman began
researching his book, through the people he spoke with, his perspectives on
Israel and Palestine changed. He still
presented caveats to blame in the introduction of The Yellow Wind, but he concluded with grave warnings that he
addressed to Israeli Jews – not Palestinians.
Grossman warned that “the reader may decide to stand by his previous
opinions, but he will have to take note of the price he pays, and what he has
until now been prepared to ignore.” (213) And then he concluded even more
strongly – unfortunately it was a foreshadowing of the present.
I have a very bad feeling: I am
afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another
ten or twenty years. There is one
excellent guarantee of that – human idiocy and the desire not to see the
approaching danger. But I am also sure
that the moment will come when we will be forced to do something, and it may
well be that our position then will be much les favorable than it is now… I
quickly understood that we all pay the price, but not all of us know it. (215)
[1] It is important to emphasize that David Grossman’s view of
Israel’s occupation of Palestine has changed greatly over the years. While that is the topic of a different essay,
consider this one comment from 2010 when he joined weekly protests of expanding
settlements. “Sometimes, it's not
possible to sit and be silent. Settlers and the political right aided by the
government, the legal system, and economic powers abuse the Palestinians in
1,001 different ways. They complicate
the situation to such an extent that a peace agreement becomes impossible and
in a general way, destroy our future."
