Cain's Field

"Exactly right. Matt Rees is now a friend of mine, but I read the book before we were friends. What struck me about it was, in many ways, what struck me about The Yellow Wind . He tells a series of stories, some about Israelis, some about Palestinians, and again he is very good at letting the characters speak. The style is a kind of ‘new journalism’ style, so he writes this narrative in which he makes you think that he actually knows the inner thoughts of his characters at every stage, and that’s a tricky one to pull off. He does it very well, but more to the point he lets you completely empathise with each of the figures, whether it’s a Hamas militant or whether it’s an Israeli settler. In this case the Hamas militant is fighting against other Palestinian security people who have killed members of his family, and the Israeli settler has lost his son to Palestinians, but is also in a very difficult dynamic with other Israelis. The main point is that Rees is not telling stories so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as about the internal divisions on either side of the conflict. So on the Palestinian side it’s about this fight between Hamas and Fatah, between the militants and the security services. And on the Israeli side it’s about, for instance, the divisions between the religious and the secular, or about the rapid development of the Israeli cultural identity. There’s a great piece in it about the treatment of Holocaust survivors in a psychiatric institution in Tel Aviv, and about how Israel, which was founded as the country that was meant to be the refuge of people from the Holocaust, actually treated a lot of its own survivors incredibly badly. He does. The background that he gives to it – and this is a fairly common understanding now in Israel – is that the early Zionists who set up the state came with this ethos of being fighters, of being tough. And there was a perception which took a long time to shake historically, that the Jews in Europe had not put up a fight, and that they had gone like lambs to the slaughter. So for a long time there was something almost shameful for Israel about its Holocaust survivors – about the fact that they were the remnants of a people who had allowed themselves to be slaughtered. Also in Israel, as in the rest of the world, it took quite a long time for the stories of the Holocaust actually to be told, and it wasn’t until the Eichmann trial in 1962 that people began to understand what it was actually like in the camps. What life was like for the survivors. Until then they’d been swept under the rug. I don’t know exactly when that began to happen. I couldn’t tell you for sure, you’d have to talk to an Israeli historian about that. Right. He’s showing how the divisions or dividing lines within society, the things that make it difficult for progress between these two societies – the Israelis and the Palestinians – are often internal clashes. I read this book, as I told you, at the beginning of my stint, and the more I stayed there the more I thought that that was true. If I look at the situation now there, the reason why I think that there is no progress on the peace process is very much because of internal divisions on each side that make it very difficult for a leader to actually progress. There is and there isn’t. Each society is very different, very sui generis . There are ways in which they are the same, because there is a religious versus secular conflict in each society, for example. And there is a certain amount – though much less so – of a social stratification that divides them. So on the Palestinian side there is the gap between the refugees and the non-refugees, and each of those two groups has rather different expectations and desires in terms of what they want from a solution. And on the Israeli side there are the divisions between the settlers and non-settlers… Yes. There are a lot of books you can read that are an attempt to paint a complete picture, and I haven’t picked any of those except for one. Which we’ll come to next. Those sorts of books are very good for getting an overview of what’s going on, but none of them stuck with me because I didn’t feel they revealed anything of a deeper truth. A book like Rees’s does. It lets you touch something you don’t ordinarily get to put your finger on."