The Hilltop

"This is the first novel I read in Hebrew that talks about the settlements in the Occupied Territories from within. I’ve never read anything like it. The settlement debate in Israel today is such that either you take it as morally wrong and a catastrophe, or you think it is completely just. Then, suddenly, somebody comes and writes a novel that is so funny and so cynical and so ironic, and it doesn’t fall into either one of those categories. “Jews feel that the best way to bear the burden of life is to deal with it with a sense of humour” It’s about an imaginary small settlement in the Occupied Territories, situated right in front of a small Arab village. Gavron writes about the people who live there, who for many left-wing readers are the ultimate ‘other’. A left-wing writer would typically say these people are morally wrong, and I can totally understand the political perspective, but when you write literature, you can’t judge your characters all the time, it just doesn’t work. Instead, Gavron writes about them as human beings — for instance, they wake up in the middle of the night when the baby’s crying and don’t want to get up, so they pretend they didn’t hear it. I think left-wing people would feel uncomfortable reading The Hilltop because there is too much humanisation of the other side, and I think right-wing people would hate it because it makes fun of the settlements — it is very ironic. When everybody hates you from all sides like that, you are probably doing something well. I think so. I think that Jews feel that the best way to bear the burden of life is to deal with it with a sense of humour. There is something funny even in the saddest of these novels — there is always this irony. Sometimes it’s so sharp that you don’t exactly laugh, you’re half laughing, half crying."