[In the following essay, Perry notes the tension between Arabs and Israelis reflected in the fiction of Amos Oz, Avraham B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman.]

Just prior to the Six Day War, a popular song writer, Naomi Shemer, wrote a song that quickly turned into a hit and included the following lines:

How dry are the water cisterns,
How empty is the marketplace
No one visits the Holy Mount
In the Old City [ . . . ]
No one goes down to the Dead Sea
On the Jericho Road.

Right after the war, she changed these lines:

We have returned to the water cisterns
To the marketplace and square
A shofar calls on the Holy Mount
In the Old City [ . . . ]
Once more we go down to the Dead Sea
On the Jericho Road.

("Yerushalayim shel Zahav"—Jerusalem the Golden)

It was only the new contrasting version that drew attention to the precise content of the old one and Naomi Shemer was attacked repeatedly in intellectual circles for her chauvinistic view of the marketplace and the road to the Dead Sea as empty territories prior to the Israeli Occupation.

But Naomi Shemer's text is not typical of Hebrew literature. The question of whether the Founders of Zionism related to Palestine as empty territory may be open to argument, but there can be no doubt that, in Hebrew literature of the last eighty years, awareness of an Arab presence in the area has played an important role.

Nevertheless, there is an interesting contradiction: Hebrew fiction has persistently exposed the immoral actions of Jews against Arabs, has protested against repression and eviction, has questioned—in recent years—the legitimacy of war and has raised doubts about Zionist ideology and its future. Whenever the Arab problem is the issue, Hebrew literature has acted as an opposition to the conservative national consensus. When, on the other hand, we examine the concepts involved in the characterization of the Arab himself, sometimes by the very same authors, we can only be amazed by the preconceptions derived from nineteenth century European romantic colonialism. Most Arab characters in Hebrew literature are synthetic stereotypes, not individual, "full" people, based on real observation.

The main conceptions of the Arab in Hebrew literature in this century can be structured in a binary system with two columns of predicates. Within each column, there is some equivalence and the columns themselves are opposed to each other. One column reflects a positive evaluation, the other negative. Indeed, the overall attitude toward the Arab—as abstracted from many texts—is ambivalent and not separable from the tension between contradictory elements in Zionist ideology. The Arab is always perceived as the opposite of Europe but, for Zionism, Europe itself involves a contradiction. Negation of the East-European Jewish small town, the shtetl, and the desire to build a healthy life in the Middle East are linked with two opposing attitudes toward Europe. On the one hand, there is the desire to detach oneself from sick, tired and decadent Europe. On the other hand, detachment from the shtetl does not necessarily mean a break with Europe. On the contrary, the Zionist enterprise can be founded on bringing European progress to the backward Orient.

In the positive column, based on a romantic idealization of the East, the Arab was perceived not only as exotic but also as close to nature and to healthy "roots," as someone living harmoniously with his environment and as the possessor of primeval simplicity and vitality. One should learn from him, copy his customs and dress, adopt elements of his music and food. He was a link with the biblical past and maintained the ways of our forefathers. Abraham was also a sort of Bedouin with camels. The Arab was actually our true "self from which we had been exiled and to which we were now returning.

At the turn of the century, a popular idea was that the Palestinian Fellahim not only resembled the ancient Hebrews but were in fact ancient Hebrews who had been forced to convert to Islam.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Arabs were associated in Hebrew literature with a different notion of "roots" and with more recent nostalgia: They became the representatives of the writer's childhood environment in the agricultural settlements of Mandatory Palestine—an innocent world, lost with the hasty erection of ugly housing projects and the developments of the early years of the State.

The characteristics of the Arab in the positive column are, thus, variants of "beginnings" or "origins." The link between the Arab and "nature," "past," "forefathers," "childhood," etc., can evoke a sense of closeness but it can also be an alienating factor arising from our own position of inferiority: the Arab is a natural element well-integrated into this land, whereas we are a foreign element disturbing the landscape. Even in "the land of our forefathers," we are in exile. This theme was repeatedly developed in Brenner's prose during the second decade of the century.

This alienation can also be viewed from a position of superiority. Several of the characteristics in the negative column are inverted variants of those in the first. Here, "simple" and "natural" become "primitive" and "backward." The Arab is strange and frightening, destructive and dangerous, cunning and cruel, dirty and decadent and associated with disease and madness. He must either be advanced or removed. His attachment to the land is to a sick land that must be dried of swamps and freed of malaria. Because of passivity, laziness and inefficient farming methods, the land decayed and was devastated. Arab goats defoliated the forests. Like the Jews in the Diaspora, so the land itself was "in exile" and in need of redemption. There was not much difference between the Fellah and the Bedouin: one had depleted farm land, the other had desert. In contrast to the variants of "beginnings" (in the other column), this column presents variants of "decay," "end" and "death."

These columns are constructed from a synoptic view of a great number of texts. Up to the 1960s, no effort was made within any single literary text to deal with the entire system and with the tension between the mutually exclusive conceptions.

In the early sixties, major Israeli writers began writing stories exploiting that tension between the opposing conceptions and incorporating much of the entire system. In these works, the attitude toward the Arab is not the central theme. They are focused upon a completely different subject with no causal connection with the Arab issue. The central figure in the story is concerned with personal-psychological matters. In some of the stories, the Arab can be removed without disturbing the general run of the plot. The main function of the Arab is as a metaphor or analogue for an aspect of the central character, an aspect that is shadowy and alien to his everyday conscious life. In other words, the Arab, who is contiguous to the main character, is, at one and the same time, in strong opposition to him as well as a metaphor of his unconscious. The encounter with him is an encounter with another area of the self. These stories are either told by their central characters or are focalized upon a central character. This provides a motivation for the stereotypic presentation of the Arab. He is merely a projection of the main character and hence closer to the "natives" in Conrad's Heart of Darkness than to any Arab in reality.

In such texts, the Arab can be linked with a most basic, intrinsic and intimate essence and yet be strange and unknown; vital but also passive; associated with lifesources—dissociation from him is a dangerous death-inlife—yet cooperation with him also leads to destruction and death. The entire system can be activated. The Arab is equivalent to several absences: silence, darkness, lack of words, passivity, enigma, desert—and on the other hand, he is equivalent to several intense presences, such as wild-singing, flowing and over-flowing, heat and fire. He is lustful and dangerous, hard to control yet dangerous to ignore; he is linked to disorder, dream and hallucination; he is surprising and unpredictable and relations with him are relations with "real life." It is unnecessary to complete the list. A whole tradition of romantic terms transformed into Freudian ones and placed in the historical situations of modern Israel is at work here: the Arab is the repressed in the Jew.

A prominent and complex novel which belongs to this trend is My Michael by Amos Oz. However, within the limited framework of this paper, this trend will be illustrated by "The Nomads and the Viper," an earlier and simpler story, written by Oz in 1963.

During a drought year, the Bedouins leave the desert and wander northward, reaching the vicinity of the narrator's Kibbutz. Their arrival is rendered in metaphors of water and flowing: "They seep through the dusty tracks," they are "a stubborn current, twisting and turning in channels hidden from the sight of house-dwellers" and so on. The Bedouins are "secretive," trying hard not to be seen, and they are "dark like pieces of basalt." "The darkness is an accomplice to their crimes" and they are linked with madness: The voice of their dogs drove the best dog in the Kibbutz mad and it had to be shot—"Every normal person would justify the action." The Bedouins are accused of petty thievery, of damaging the irrigation pipes and of bringing Foot-and-Mouth Disease ("from the desert came the disease"). Their speech is incomprehensible ("a barbarous single syllable"). They are characterized more by singing than by speech: "A sort of wild, unintelligible howl" rises from their tents and blends with the sounds of the night, a song of "a single note" together with the attractive, muffled sound of drums: "The sounds permeate the paths of the Kibbutz and enrich our nights with something like an enigmatic heaviness"—but this distant, incomprehensible sound is also internal and intimate: the distant drum is like a heartbeat. There is also fire: nimbly they whip out gilded lighters igniting little flames.

Indeed there are sufficient indications in the story that the accusations of the Kibbutz-members, at least in part, are not reliable. In fact, the description of the Bedouins and the attitudes toward them are rendered through internal-focalization, representing the stereotypic manner in which the Kibbutzniks view them rather than any objective viewpoint supported by the story. This is the first step on the path to subjectivization of the Arab's image. The conception of "the wild man of the desert" as a stereotype ironically illuminated by the story is typical of Hebrew literature of the 1960s. In these works, the reliability of those Arab characteristics, taken seriously by earlier generations of writers, is challenged. But on the other hand, these stories do not suggest an alternative characterization. It is not a particular "truth" about the Arabs that interests them but rather some psychological "truth."

The Kibbutz secretariat is to meet to reject the proposal of the young kibbutzniks "to one night go and teach those savages an object lesson." Only at this stage, more than a third of the way into the story, does the central character appear—one of the secretariat members, Geula: a poetess, single, 29 years old, who spends most of her time dealing with the social and cultural life of the Kibbutz. (Her name is not incidental—Geula means redemption.) Before the meeting, Geula slips through a hole in the fence into the dusky garden adjoining the Kibbutz where she meets a Bedouin shepherd with whom she exchanges several words and who offers her a cigarette. To her, the Bedouin seems "endowed with a repulsive beauty." Externally, nothing takes place between them. But from her reactions to marginal "irrelevant" details (a passing airplane, the Arab's lighter, the way the Arab looks after one of the goats, etc.), it is clear that this meeting is an encounter with her repressed desires. The Arab is frightened by her and she herself is filled with terror and nausea.

While taking a shower, upon her return to the Kibbutz, trembling with disgust, she imagines her report to the secretariat meeting of how she was raped by the fierce young man. But she doesn't get to the meeting. Vomiting and weeping, she lies among the shrubs of the Kibbutz garden and is bitten by a snake. As the young kibbutzniks, armed with clubs, set out for the nomads, she is actually dying, experiencing intense erotic excitement. She listens to the sweet wave penetrating her body and intoxicating her.

If we wish to weave together the various episodes of the story (including marginal ones like making coffee or smashing a bottle) into a unified causal chain, we have to interpret Geula's responses to her surroundings as responses to external correlates of her psyche. Without being conscious of it, she responds to her environment as to a series of metaphors, including the attractive-frightening Arab. In stories of this period, not only is the conflict with the Arab an internal one but the contact with the "Arab" within is an outburst of life resulting in death or disaster.

Active initiation of a catastrophe or destruction for the purpose of making contact with the vital elements of life is a permanent theme in A. B. Yehoshua's writing. His story, "Over Against the Forest," was written in the same year as Amoz Oz's story and the Arab in it fulfills a similar function.

The main character in the story is a "rootless" student in a state of weary listlessness, bored into a sort of deathin-life. The solution he is offered is to become a fireranger in a national forest. At the beginning of the summer, he leaves for the forest, taking some foreign books, with Latin quotations, to write a research paper on the Crusades hoping "to re-acquaint himself with the words" which presently exhaust him.

In the distant and isolated forest there is another worker—an Arab, whose tongue was cut off during the war, it is not clear by whom, and so he is wordless like the silence of the forest. The Arab lives on the ground floor with his daughter who has a dress as red as fire.

The research is not progressing. "The text is difficult, the words distant." "Strange words from other worlds"; "If only he could skip the words and reach the main point." Instead of the research which is abandoned, the student is increasingly gripped by a joyous obsession to burn down the forest. He gradually discovers that the forest covers a ruined Arab village. The Arab, who was born in that village now buried under the trees, collects and hides small tin cans full of gasoline. At the end of the summer, the Arab burns down the entire forest with the complete cooperation of the student.

For the student, the burning of the forest is a wonderful outburst of vitality and mad freedom. "The earth is freed from its bonds" and what is buried is revealed. Out of the smoke, "the little village emerges before him," "it is reborn . . . like all the sunken past." The arson and destruction are acts of communication and contact, of a "full" voice (opposed to the empty words). The wordless Arab seems to speak too:

The flames rise madly over the treetops, crying out to the lighted skies. Pines crack with a joyous sound and collapse. A profound excitement sweeps him. He is happy. Where is the Arab now? The Arab is talking to him in fire, he is trying to say everything and at once. Will he understand?

The next day, the Arab is taken for police questioning. The investigation is seen as analogous to the abandoned research ("A real labour of research was taking place before him") and the burnt forest "gives off a putrid odour as if there was a gigantic, stinking carcass around them." The student returns to his decaying life in the city.

The network of details in the story is far more sophisticated than is possible or necessary to present here. Most significant is the order of events: The notion of setting fire to the forest begins to take shape in the student's mind before he knows about the Arab village and before he discovers that the Arab has a similar idea. As far as the fire-ranger is concerned, the notion is not the result of any moral decision or intention to take revenge for what was inflicted on the Arab village but rather his own destructive self-realization and a creation of a link with what is buried in him. The covered village, the buried past and the fire are not the opposite of the Zionist enterprise, but of books, masking words, culture and the conscious. The Arab's considerations are secondary, his cunning destructiveness is mainly metaphorical. In the story, he functions as a double of the main character and his problem as an Arab is not the subject of any moral struggle. One could say that the student would have set fire to the forest even without the Arab in the story. It is the Arab's hatred that finds an echo in his heart and attracts him, not a desire for justice. The Arab is linked to his Id and not to his Super-ego.

The "internalization" of the Arab and of the conflict with him goes both ways. Ostensibly, the link with the other is tightened. His alienation is only apparent, in fact he is in close proximity with the most intimate regions. The Arab and his problem move to the existential center; cooperation between Jew and Arab or their common fate is brought to light. The Arab is linked to a problem whose repression leads to an incomplete life.

In fact, however, in such stories, approaching what the Arab signifies also involves destruction. Moreover, the other is not a real other but a projection; there is no real Arab problem but a psychological problem; it is irrelevant to ask who the Arab "really" is or to ask moral questions about the real political conflict. Turning the conflict into a psychological one leads to its "universalization." It becomes an ordinary, "normal" phenomenon, typical of cultured people everywhere and at all times, rather than an anomaly peculiar to the Middle East.

In his essay, "Individual and Society in a Prolonged Conflict," A. B. Yehoshua refers to the repression of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which characterized Israeli society after the Six Day War, as one cause of the profound crisis that overtook Israel after the Yom Kippur War. Prior to the Yom Kippur War, Israel lived a divided life. "During the War of Attrition, when its end was nowhere in sight, an attempt was made to maintain simultaneously a system of normal life and all that goes with it. The soldiers themselves, fighting on the front lines, would repeatedly say, we are fighting here so that life in Tel Aviv can continue as if nothing is happening here."

Indeed, only in the last decade is there a growing awareness of the link between the continuing conflict and other aspects of life in Israel, including phenomena with no direct connection with the conflict. I do not only mean awareness of the relevance of the conflict to economics, agriculture, land settlement, religious thought or culture, but also its relevance to interpersonal relations among Jews or relations between the authorities and the Jewish citizen. Right after the Six Day War, when Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz said that the Occupation would corrupt Israeli society, he was considered an eccentric. But today, the sentence, "He who today acts in this way toward an Arab will tomorrow act in the same way toward a Jew," is almost a cliché in journalism, in speeches and among intellectuals. There is no doubt that the consciousness of the conflict as a central factor in our mode of existence has increased.

This fact, it seems, is not irrelevant in describing the shift in the position of the conflict in Hebrew literature in recent years. In major stories and novels of the last decade, Palestinians and the conflict with them still appear as analogous to subjects far removed from the conflict but some changes have occurred in comparison with the literature of the 1960s.

1) The Palestinian in recent literature is not an analogue to a limited part of the mind of the central figure in the work, hence the conflict with him is also not an analogue to an internal conflict. The Palestinian now becomes an analogue to the whole character, functioning as a prism that reflects and defines the essence of his total mode of existence. Accordingly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an analogue to the interpersonal relations in the novel—either man-woman relations or relations between one human being and another.

2) In the stories of the 1960s, it is the reader, in the process of textual understanding, who reconstructs the Arab as a metaphor. The central figure does certainly respond to the Arab as analogous to an aspect of his mind but he is not conscious of doing so and does not understand the meaning of his responses. On the other hand, in recent fiction, not only is the analogy more total, it is also brought to light. The analogy is made consciously by the central figure himself and hence he can also deal actively with self-characterization by looking at the Palestinian and even by asking his Palestinian analogue questions about his own life. In some stories, the Arab, on his part, is also conscious of the analogy and of the role he plays in the life of the central character.

3) In the stories of the 1960s, the stereotypic perception of the Arab is ironically illuminated as reflecting the projection of the central figure and with no pretensions to reliability. Hence, the analogue characterizes the central figure, the Israeli, but the analogy will neither lead to new insights into the Palestinian nor into the conflict with him. More recent stories do tend to supply new insights into the behavior of the Palestinian in the conflict. The metaphor is becoming bidirectional.

Several characteristics of this new approach can be seen by juxtaposing A. B. Yehoshua's 'Over Against the Forest" with his recent novel, A Late Divorce. At first glance, it seems strange to choose this novel: There are no Palestinians in it, except for an episodic appearance of an Arab waiter in a restaurant. However, I would claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a total metaphor hovering in the background of the novel, which the reader is directed to reconstruct. The novel assumes, therefore, a reading public for whom the conflict is a central awareness, able to fill the gaps on suitable presentation of cues in the text.

Most of the novel consists of Faulknerian interiormonologues, through which the reader has to reconstruct the events.

Yehuda Kaminka is an aging Israeli emigrant in the United States. He is presently awaiting the birth of a baby and has returned to his family in Israel (a married daughter and son; two grandchildren and an unmarried son) to divorce his wife, who is institutionalized in an insane asylum, that has a view of the superb landscape of the Haifa Bay. Their long marriage was a period of fighting and hostility and the wife, Naomi, was institutionalized after an insane attempt to thrust a knife into her husband's heart. He shows the scar over and over again to the family as he retells the story. Israel Kedmi, his son-in-law, a rather unsuccessful lawyer, is supposed to arrange the divorce and the property settlement. During the couple's first meeting in the asylum, it appears at first "as if he had come to ask not for a divorce but for a reconciliation." The meeting ends without results. The wife has changed her mind and refuses to sign the agreement—she now opposes the property division, demanding the whole house. Furiously, Kaminka rips up the agreement and one of the sons, Asa, has a fit of madness. In the following days, Kaminka relinquishes one thing after another and, in the end, the divorce takes place. But a few hours before his departure from Israel, he sneaks into the asylum through a hole in the fence, ostensibly because he regrets giving up his property. Now, with the divorce documents in his hand, he intends to steal the agreement and get back half the property. However, the "visit" is in fact more complex. Kaminka is suddenly drawn to put on his wife's dress and lie in her bed. Instead of a severance of the tie, there is full identification. Dressed in his wife's clothes, he tries to escape through the hole in the fence but does not succeed. The tie which cannot be severed ends in death: an insane giant who has appeared repeatedly throughout the novel is working near the fence; he grows furious when he discovers that the person in the dress is not Naomi but the husband Kaminka and murders him with a pitchfork. The texture of the text indicates that the murder comes not only from "outside" but also from "within" and is, in a sense, a suicide.

During the week-long visit, the members of the family incite the couple against one another. In a certain respect, not only is the husband not interested in the divorce but neither are the other members of the family. Asa, the son, in his fit of insanity claims that, for his parents, "there is a joy in this endless struggle. In the knife, the sickness, the pretense, there is a hidden pleasure . . ." but he also smites himself, to the delight of the mad people around him, and "joy is trembling in me, such lust, I am caught up in the rhythm."

The central topic of the novel is an anatomy of a conflict. A synopsis of the plot cannot bring out the richness of meaning and links constructed in the story through the texture of reality and language. I can give only a simple exposition of them here.

The cast of characters can be divided into the "sane" vs. the "insane"; the "parental couple" vs. their "children"; "blood kinship" (with perhaps genetic insanity) vs. "non-kin."

However, the novel points not to the opposition but to the essential analogy between these sub-groups. The analogy is "woven" by the novel through dozens of minute marginal details, which recur in almost the same way in various characters and which signal the analogy. The characters unwittingly use the same verbal metaphors and terms in their interior-monologues and this is another way of directing the reader to the parallels between them.

I will present just one cluster of details: The old mother in the asylum is working in the garden and watering the shrubs with a hose and "pours unlimited quantities of water on whatever she sees. It is lucky that the hose isn't long enough, otherwise she would try and water the sea." At the end of the novel, the threatening giant with the pitchfork in his hand is standing by the fence and tending the shrubs, the rubber hose lying near him on the ground. The son, Zvi, whose relationship problems and homosexuality are perceived as a type of distancing from "life sources," tells his psychologist a dream about a hostel by a lake surrounded by distant mountains. There is a thicket of shrubs and an earthen-colored hose is sticking out of the thicket. Suddenly the flow of water ceases as if somebody twisted the hose to stop it. (In the novel—water, including the Haifa Bay, becomes a metaphor of vitality.) The grandfather, arriving in Israel and seeing his seven year old grandson, Gadi, says: "You have raised a real giant. A giant he said and not a fat kid." In one of Gadi's drawings, there is a house and a fence and a man is standing near the fence holding a child. By adding a beard to the child, he turns him into a man and he then makes the first man into a woman. There is a scene where he waits in ambush for a friend near a fence with an iron bar in his hand to hit him. In another instance, he brings a bent iron pipe for the same purpose. In one of the scenes, the grandfather and grandson are giving the granddaughter a bath. The grandfather cannot untie the knot in the string of her undershirt and he cuts it with a knife. The water fills with blood. After a moment of fear it is evident that he has wounded himself and not the child. Blood and injury next to water-and-a-hose also appear when Asa pommels himself in the asylum: "I notice spots of blood on my hand . . . there is a faucet near the path, but a long hose is attached to it.. . I clean off the blood, licking it."

During the week-long visit, the opposition between the members of the family and the inmates of the asylum increasingly becomes an essential similarity. The epigraph for the last monologue (from Montale), "Whether separate or apart we are one thing," refers both to the relations between Kaminka and his wife and to all the characters in the novel.

The starting point of the various characters is a state of distance from a genuine tie to raw life and feelings. The father moved to America, and in Israel (because of jetlag) he is living "outside time." Dina, Asa's Orthodox wife, remains a virgin and is afraid to have sexual contact with him and Asa has a similar problem. Zvi's homosexuality is perceived as the ceasing of the flow in the water pipe. He cannot create real links but only those that can easily be untied. Most of the characters deal in meta-life. Kedmi, the lawyer son-in-law, is constantly writing in his mind the books he will one day publish about his "successes" as a lawyer. Asa is a lecturer in history who turns his back on the present. His wife, Dina, walks around with a notebook and is constantly writing a story which transforms the details of what is happening around her. Instead of living, she writes in bed, among other places, as a sort of substitute for sex, and her writing is filled with distancing figurative language "as if you are afraid to touch distress." The epigraph for her monologue is from a poem by Yona Wallach: "The gaze is protected by the imagination, and viewing art as an act protects all life." A comical resumé of this theme is the scene in which Gadi changes his baby sister's filthy, stinking diaper and protects himself: He wears a raincoat, puts a wool hat on his head, wears leather gloves, covers his mouth with a handkerchief and pulls off the with sugar-tongs

The anarchy caused by the grandfather's visit becomes a contact with dangerous life sources. The family is reborn. The insane link between Kaminka and his wife is a vital love-hate relationship; it is as impossible to live without as to live with. Key terms in the story and a Central opposition in it are "freedom" vs. "bondage." But "free" also means "detached" and "bound" is also "attached." The only place where there are both "bond" and "freedom," both "law" and "anarchy" is in madness and in the insane link—an attachment maintained through loss of control, maximum closeness to life and detachment from reality. The climax of the contact with life leads to death. The choice is between death-in-life and life-that-leads-to-catastrophe. It should not surprise us that the wild monologue of the insane woman takes place on the eve of Passover, "The Night of the Seder" ("Night of Order").

How is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict activated in the background of the book? First, through details of language. The old father is called Yehuda, his son-in-law is called Israel. The allusion is to a Jew (Yehudi = Jew) vs. an Israeli. The link between the name of Israel and the State of Israel is strengthened when he explains why everyone calls him by his last name and not his first name: "One Israel is enough." But "One Israel"—outside the novel—is also the slogan of those who oppose repartition of the country. Israel's last name is "Kedmi" which means "of the east." The name of the insane giant is "Mussa." The name of the baby börn in America is "Moses."

The events of the novel are repeatedly described by the characters in terminology characteristic of the national conflict. The words boundary or borders (which are the same in Hebrew) are very common. The state of insanity of various characters or the collapse of the family is a state of open borders ("the boundaries are overrun"; "the boundaries are dissolved") and the freedom of divorce is perceived as the obliteration of borders. A "border" is an imaginary line and Kaminka thinks about the half-apartment that he will get back—about "the imaginary line cutting across the apartment." Relinquishing the apartment is perceived in terms of returning territory. No wonder Kaminka earlier looks at a map of Israel without marked borders. "My Homeland, why didn't you know how to be a homeland?" asks Kaminka referring to his wife. The separation from Israel and the separation from his wife are equated.

During the negotiations for the divorce, the son-in-law, the lawyer Kedmi, repeatedly imagines himself—certainly as a joke—as Kissinger conducting negotiations between Israel and the Arab states: "Kissinger dines before a delicate mission"; "Kissinger sits on the banks of the Nile and explains the Separation of Forces agreement"; "Kissinger reports to the Israeli Government" etc.

Here and there the characters digress on political issues but the context always points to the analogy with the personal story. For example: "Israel has lost control," says the father. "Don't forget, this is only a partial peace and people don't really believe," says the son's homosexual lover to the father concerning peace with Egypt. "This country is a little beyond our powers," he adds, but this is also how he feels about his relations with Zvi. "A nervous country. He gave up his share in the house with such ease" is a sentence in the father's monologue. When the father is due to depart from the country and leave the family with the insane mother, his son-in-law says to him: "In a little while you will fly off into the distance . . . and you are leaving us here alone with Begin. . . ." And when the family celebrates the divorce in a restaurant, after the entire house has been given to the mother, an Arab waiter comes to them, convinced they are celebrating a birthday. Kedmi explains that this is a divorce party and adds: "Grandpa is leaving the country. Are you happy? One less. . . ." The waiter smiles: "Why should he leave Israel, what's wrong with it?" And Kedmi replies: "For you, maybe. You are the masters of the land." For a moment the desire is stirred in Kaminka to open his shirt and show the waiter the scar from the attempted murder.

Asa, the historian, does not deal with the Middle East conflict but the subjects of his lectures are relevant. He treats the moral justification of terrorism in the nineteenth century with respect and admiration for the young terrorists (Karl Heinsen's article "Murder"); he wishes to break the code of Historical Necessity; and, during the visit to the asylum, he reflects on the attempt made by the Anglo-Saxons in Rhodesia to struggle against historical laws. They begin with something rational—the desire to protect their prosperous farms—but they gradually lock themselves into a stubborn, mad belief that they can twist history's arm. There are only two hundred thousand of them but they are convinced that they can control six million blacks in the heart of Africa. They believe they have a mission, they turn their piece of land into a holy land, they lose faith in the world that condemns them and when the world has begun getting used to their insanity—they weary and are driven from compromise to compromise, until they lead to their own domination by the worst of their enemies. The analogy with the father is clear, as is the analogy with the State of Israel.

The father says of his son's historical "investigations": "You will not convince me that everything is ideology, I always look for the personal story." After he succeeds in stealing the agreement from his wife he says, ironically, to himself: "Does history enclose? Indeed it does not enclose, my boy. One can evade it." In the next page of the novel, it becomes clear that it is impossible to evade it.

A Late Divorce is not an allegory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is only a hyperbolic metaphor hovering in the background of the personal story. It is certainly a surprising metaphor which requires mutual adjustment of the two frames to be understood. As such, it can be bidirectional. Is the national conflict also a type of insane link, full of vitality and destruction, a link it is impossible to get away from—by the partition the country—but also a link that is impossible to live with? The analogy with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in fragments, consciously made by the characters but does the novel support it? If so, then instead of two justifiable but irreconcilable viewpoints, the two possible alternatives are of distortion and death: the conflict on the one hand, divorce on the other. The lack of a positive alternative characterizes recent Hebrew literature that touches upon the conflict.

As a good Leftist, A. B. Yehoshua would not venture to write these things in an essay. At the same time as A Late Divorce appeared, he published a book of political essays titled For Normalcy. But throughout this book, ideas that deal with the positive experiential vitality of the abnormal state also creep in. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict produces a deep relationship with the landscape; it is a powerful catalyst which unites society; it stirs energy from hidden sources; it rouses the imagination and the creative force. Without it, Israel would sink into a passive slumber and powerful energy would be wasted.

Despite all this, A. B. Yehoshua's essay explicitly favors a sane solution. Even the novel demonstrates the heavy price of insanity. But it suggests something else—if indeed it does—that the normal solution is not possible.

In A. B. Yehoshua's novel, there is an Israeli-Palestinian problem but it lacks concrete Palestinians. David Grossman, the young author of the novel The Smile of the Lamb (1983), spent a great deal of time in the West Bank before writing his book. His novel is rich in the concrete details of everyday life in the West Bank and has a variety of Palestinian characters, folkloristic anecdotes and even a detailed "semiotics" of plants that are unknown to the Israeli reader and called by their Arab names. The text is interspersed with Arabic phrases. Hilmi—the central figure on the Arab side—has no fewer interior-monologues in the novel than the Israeli characters.

The analogies in the novel are constructed, first and foremost, by the characters themselves. Most of their time is devoted to a detailed attempt to define themselves through juxtaposition with the other and, through the other and his way of life, to find an answer to a disturbing question about themselves. Hilmi is an important junction in the novel. The similarity he himself constructs between Uri—the central character—and Yazdi—his adopted son killed in the service of the P.L.O.—is a central factor in moving the action forward. Uri runs to him because, among other things, he sees in Hilmi's way of life an analogue to his own state. He willingly surrenders to him because he is captivated by his personality.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in itself is not a topic of this novel which is concerned, rather, with alternative modes of conduct within the conflict. These are perceived as analogues or negative-analogues to the individual life styles of the various characters or to their interpersonal relations. Concepts like "truth" vs. "lie" and "justice vs. "injustice" once again become central (as in the literature of the 1950s) because they are the issue in the personal lives of the characters. The Palestinian issue, despite functioning as a metaphor for a different issue, becomes an equivalent sub-issue in the novel. Personal life and West Bank problems are inseparable. There is an integral Israeli-Palestinian totality reflecting a single set of tendencies. The mutual metaphoric relations between the Palestinian and the Israeli domains in the novel cover them both entirely. What appears in one domain as metaphors and similes in the language of a character's monologue is basic reality in the other domain and vice versa. Each is, therefore, the realization of the other.

Most of the novel consists of interior-monologues of various characters during one night and the following day. In contrast to A. B. Yehoshua's monologues, which mainly follow external events, the interior-monologues of Grossman's characters are mostly analyses of the self and the other. What they express appears to the character as true at the time of the monologue but it changes in the next one. The information the reader receives is, therefore, subjective and temporary. External events can be reconstructed only with great effort and, right up to the end, it is not exactly clear what really happened. The fact that several characters are involved in weaving a network of lies—including lying to themselves—or a network of fantasies, adds to the difficulty. This also explains why the Faulknerian narrative technique of the novel is so essential to it.

Uri is an assistant to a military governor in the West Bank. He is an innocent young man—"God's idiot," as he is called—caught between his wife Shosh and his close friend Katzman, the military governor. Shosh is a psychologist. Mordi is a boy she treated and whose treatment was considered a success but was really a failure. She failed to lead the boy to discover his unconscious truth. She "fantasized" another boy and lied to herself and to her superiors. At the peak of the "success," the boy committed suicide. Behind her husband's back Shosh has an affair with Katzman and three days before the novel begins, Shosh reveals the "truth" to her husband. It is not clear what she told Uri; apparently she lied this time too and combined the two stories: she told him that she had slept with Mordi and that was why the boy committed suicide.

Shosh's monologues are ostensibly her attempt to tape an analysis of her life. In the end, it grows clear that she was not speaking but only thinking and the tape never recorded anything. She attempts to peel off one layer of lies after another in a desperate effort to find the kernel of truth of her life—to find "who it is in her that says 'I' without uttering a big lie."Her life is revealed to her as a masking web of deceitful words. Her lies are the only thing in the world that is really hers.

Katzman is a child of the Holocaust. During the Second World War, he hid in a pit with his parents who went insane. Since then, he is an alienated man afraid of feeling, who hates the world and wants to destroy everything around him. His life is an experiment aimed at verifying the assumption that no one speaks the truth and no one is just. He chose Uri as his assistant in the West Bank to destroy his innocence. Only toward the end of the novel does he understand that his "experiments" were to examine how far one could go, in the hope that life would stop him and, in fact, what impels him is the fear of real feelings. His fear is his only real possession.

Uri, who comes to the West Bank an enthusiastic idealist, having in mind development projects, is astounded to discover what is going on there. After learning of Shosh's lie, he loses his temper because of the behavior of some soldiers during a house search. As a result of his behavior, he is imprisoned. He feels that those around him, as he saw them, were only fantasies. "I invented them all." He does not understand the lies or the betrayals nor does he understand what is happening in the West Bank. He escapes from prison in Katzman's car, running to Hilmi. This is where the novel begins.

Hilmi is an old, half-blind, half-crazy Arab, who lives in a cave. He is exciting and exceptional among Arab characters in Hebrew literature. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to avoid stereotypes in describing the other. In Grossman too, Hilmi the Arab is close to nature, speechless, occupied with fantasies and day-dreams, passive and insane.

In opposition to the deceitful words of the Israelis, which have a "deathly cold" about them and on which "a weary foot cannot be set"—Hilmi is an absence of words. He did not speak until the age of fifteen and, even now, he uses words rarely. He too lives in a world of lies and fiction and invents characters endlessly. He spends his days fabricating events for characters he may have invented himself. He lives near the village of Andai but, in his imagination, he creates another, detailed Andai where everything happens according to his wishes. Fathers bring him their pregnant daughters and pay him to marry them. He pretends to believe that the children are his. Over the years he has had 22 bastard children. The women and children have abandoned him and he raised only the last one—Yazdi—as an "idiot of God." He tried to shape his character without words but "the world stole him." The retarded Yazdi joined the P.L.O., where he was fed on ideological words and slogans. In Hilmi's opinion, hatred turns people into stuffed animals and he terms the P.L.O. "declamatory organizations." Just as Shosh created her own Mordi, he created his own Yazdi. After Yazdi left, he continued to correspond with Hilmi—not in words but through plants he would leave for him in hidden spots. Once Yazdi began to write letters in words, Hilmi knew that he had lost him, that Yazdi changed from an "Uri" to a "Katzman." To Yazdi, Hilmi is a day-dreamer in a period when fighting is needed. But Hilmi fights differently, his war is "to be weaker than a feather" and his weapons are "stubbornness and patience and endless weakness. They won't be able to cope with it." "My land which I dreamed up will never be conquered by anyone else," he says.

Uri's escape to Hilmi is meant to tell him that Yazdi has been killed (to Hilmi, Yazdi has already been "lost" for some time); and to tell him about Shosh whom he is trying to "erase"; and also to learn from him "how to deceive lie itself." Hilmi sees Uri as his last bastard, a version of Yazdi. He wants to prevent Uri-Yazdi from being taken from him. He wishes to bring him into his fictitious world, to teach him how to tread lightly, how to touch without touching, to embroider him invisibly into his own pattern. To keep him as "matter for reflection," he must kill him.

Uri, who cooperates with him, transmits Hilmi's message on his two-way radio: if the Israeli Army doesn't withdraw from the occupied land by morning, Uri will be killed with the gun Hilmi stole from Yazdi. Although Uri can escape he does not. He lies over the radio, saying that he has been kidnapped by several Palestinians. Katzman goes up to the cave to liberate him and gets killed by Hilmi although he could have avoided it. Hilmi is caught.

To cooperate with Hilmi's world, Uri is forced to lie and Hilmi must take an active line just like the P.L.O. he hates. Hilmi's fiction up to this point was different from the lies of other characters. In a lie, one person knows the truth and the other does not: it is a manipulation of someone else. The fabricated stories are something positive, a journey several people take together, of their own free will, to a "better world." But Hilmi's last deed resembles the lies of others. In a desperate attempt to preserve his own world he must act according to the rule opposed to his world.

The conclusion is that all lines of response—both personal and political—have collapsed. The only tangible things left are the lies. In spite of the fact that in political articles Israeli authors usually suggest a solution in terms of an independent Palestinian state, their literary works seem to suggest that there is no tangible solution.