The Yellow Wind

"Obviously there are a lot of books about the conflict, and I’ve read only a fraction. But I’ve picked out the ones which are not even necessarily the best of that fraction. Just the books that for one reason or another have made an impact on me because they were useful in helping me get at something deeper at the time when I read them, something about opening up my understanding to other people’s point of view. Which, when I think of it, is a very Berlinesque attitude. He believed in pluralism. He believed that is was possible to comprehend someone else’s values and consider them to be objective and valid even if you fundamentally disagreed with them. In the original Hebrew edition it was called The Yellow Time and I don’t remember what that refers to. But in the English version Grossman recounts a conversation with a Palestinian farmer who tells him this legend about a ‘yellow wind’ that comes from the Gates of Hell, and seeks out people who have performed ‘cruel and unjust deeds’ and destroys them. The implication is that Israel has to watch out. That there is something that’s going to come along and destroy it. David Grossman was writing in the context of the First Intifada which broke out in 1987 and took the Israelis completely by surprise, because the Israelis had permitted themselves this myth that the Palestinians were actually much better off under Israeli occupation than they had been under Egyptian or Jordanian occupation. Which wasn’t entirely a myth. There was a lot of truth in it – the economic conditions improved, the human rights abuses were far fewer under the Israeli army than under the Egyptian or Jordanian armies. And so the Israeli narrative was: ‘Oh, so the Palestinians are probably grateful to us.’ It didn’t really occur to them that at some point there would be a Palestinian rebellion against them; and in fact even the Palestinian leadership, the Fatah leaders – Yasser Arafat’s people – did not anticipate it. They didn’t realise that there was this unrest brewing amongst the Palestinian people. And so suddenly when this uprising broke out in 1987 it took everybody by surprise. Well, he himself was at that time in exile. He and the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) were all outside, in Lebanon, then Tunisia. So they were all sitting in Tunis at this point. There was a local leadership of people that were loyal to them on the ground, but I don’t think they were very much in touch with it either. They didn’t really notice what was going on. The people who did manage to grasp it – who did manage to turn it to their political advantage – were a group of Islamists who formed Hamas, essentially on the back of the uprising, and managed to claim credit for the operation even though they were not really the people who started it. And so that was what started off this whole, very deep division within Palestinian society that exists today between Hamas and Fatah. Grossman had been an Israeli left-wing activist since the occupation. He’d been against the occupation and he’d written about that, and then when the Palestinian uprising happened he realised that he, like the rest of the Israelis, didn’t really understand what was going on there, and so he resolved to go and spend some time amongst the Palestinians talking to them. So what made this book significant for me was that I actually read it many years before I started my stint in Jerusalem for the Economist . It’s the only book on this list that I read before I started the job. I read it, I think, around the time that the Second Intifada began in 2000, and I began my job in 2005. The point is that I’d been to Israel a lot, but I’d never really tried to understand the conflict from a more neutral point of view. I don’t know. I didn’t really know enough to have a view. I believed in the two-state solution because that was the kind of thing that one believed in. I believed in the sorts of things my circle believed in. North London, liberalish, intellectualish, Jewish – but I had no informed point of view, so reading Grossman gave me two things. One was that it was the first time I’d really read anything about the Palestinians. The second was that I hadn’t been working for very long as a journalist, and what he demonstrated to me was a capacity to write with empathy about an ‘other’ – somebody who you don’t identify with. In other words, what struck me at the time was that you could let a Palestinian farmer speak and Grossman would record his words and reproduce them and you didn’t feel any sense of intervention by the author, or of any refraction through his lens. He was very good at putting across what those people were saying and letting that speak for itself, and it struck me very powerfully that that was what a journalist should do. Which was actually very hard to achieve in practice because the Economist is not about individual people; not about long quotes or interviews. It’s much more about analysis, about refracting things through your own point of view. So I didn’t get to practise that sort of thing a lot, but nonetheless it was always there in the background, that this was what the aim should be. One should at least put across the views of the people you’re interviewing so that the reader can assess them."