Tom Unterrainer reviews The People on the Street, a writer’s view of Israel by Linda grant (Virago)
“There is currently a war between truth and fact, between the artist and the reporter. This war rages inside me too, as someone who has acted in both professions. ‘Are you going to tell the truth?’ I have been asked countless times by people I’ve interviewed”. So says Linda Grant.
At a time when the futures of Israel and Palestine have reached a new juncture, when the legitimacy of the Israeli state is under positive debate in Palestine, and the Israeli state continues its murderously callous activities — the question of the “truth” and “facts” about Israeli society must be urgently addressed.
Too much of the left continues to provide a caricature or falsification of Israel and Israelis in place of the facts and in order to fit their own particular prescription for a “resolution” to the conflict. The People on the Street, Linda Grant’s portrait of working class Israelis and Jewish identity, is an important cultural source for those of us engaged in combating the demonising tendency of those who’d happily see Israel swept into the sea.
Laced with references to family life, the personal meaning of a Jewish identity, individual life stories and attempts to excavate the meaning of the word “davka” (davka read the book!) this is a clear and heart-felt call on the world to recognise the potential and realities of a complex, divided nation. Though Grant makes no grand political claims for this book and returns to a rejection of “ists” and “isms” on a number of occasions, she exposes in captivating style the tensions at the heart of Israeli society.
“When I first saw the photograph of the ten-year-old Mohammed al Durra cowering against a bullet-pocked wall in Gaza, sheltering in the arms of his father who could not protect him, when I looked at those frozen frames of the very few seconds left to him of his life, before the bullet or bullets entered his body and he was killed, I did not have an immediate emotional reaction… Shock, but reason was still trying to make sense of it, to order these events, to ask, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
This is a question many Israelis ask themselves every day. Far from fitting the image of flag-waving, sycophantic adherents to every twist and turn of the army and government many Israelis have harsh criticisms of the regime. People like the pioneering socialists who founded the first kibbutz before the creation of Israel and who hold on to a vision of a just and democratic society. Like the activists — indistinguishable from Greenham Common types — who watch every day at the border recording the unjust treatment of the Palestinians trying to cross. Like the children of families who fled persecution in Eastern Europe to the sanctuary of Israel only to find themselves used as bargaining chips. These groups want peace with Palestine, want a fair settlement, want the atrocities on both sides to stop and are growing in number.
Grant writes of a youthful flirtation with “radical” politics “My anti-Zionism was a form of cruelty and abuse which had nothing to do with any Palestinians I had ever met, because of course… I had never met any. It was sound and fury: cheap, fake Sixties ideology”. This brand of politics is still very much with us. Anyone not aware of the atrocious conditions and mistreatment of Palestinians must be in self-imposed denial. Anyone who doesn’t find themselves hurling abuse at their television sets when they witness the death and destruction wrought upon that people is heartless. Those who choose to do something about it — to actively address the problems — can find a plethora of groups willing to use their anger...
But you’ll see them, as Grant did, on demonstrations holding aloft placards with the Star of David and swastika in sympathetic embrace. People with a genuine determination to help and campaign for a better life in Palestine are fed a diet of distortion, half-truths and outright lies. Israelis are painted as complicit in every food queue, act of harassment, murder and bombing. Of course Israel is not a utopia — many ultra-nationalists and religious types see every act of aggression against Palestinians as justified — but they are not the majority.
The facts Grant addresses throughout her book lead to one conclusion — one big fact. Any peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict must take into account the nationhood, interests and determination of the Israeli people. This means recognising the legitimate rights of Israel to exist.
Those who do otherwise, who espouse a single-state fail, to appreciate the consequences of such a solution for it would surely mean a pogrom against Israeli Jews and a protracted war of defence. Far from being part the problem Israel’s working class majority are part of the solution.
These are not Grant’s explicit conclusions but her portrait of every-day life is a powerful refutation of the anti-Semitic portrayal of Israelis as a pariah people.
