Where death is a way of life

The Middle East peace process lies in ruins, with Israelis and Palestinians locked in a self-destructive embrace. One of Israel's most celebrated writers offers an insider's view of a society driven by hatred

Special report: Israel and the Middle East
The horrible thing that is happening to Israelis is that they are getting used to it. They are used to getting up in the morning and hearing about the terrorist attack that happened at dawn. They are used to the sight of their injured and dead. Used to the stock phrases about the situation, to the formulaic photographs and news. They have become so used to it that their emotions sometimes seem like cliches. Like something that could be put into a compact, blaring newspaper headline in one of the tabloids: Anguish and Anger! or Fear and Loathing!

There seems to be no way out, to the point that a person doesn't dare, sometimes, to feel anything more than what the headlines proclaim, out of dread that he will encounter within him emotions that are even more menacing and problematic. Dread that they will kindle disquieting questions about the justice of his actions so far, or his chances of living, even for a single day, a life of serenity; a life in which he will cause injustice to no one and will fear no other.

Most Israelis now believe that the peace process has dissolved and become part of history. Even worse, most of them now believe that it was a mirage from the start. They even have trouble understanding how they let themselves be led on by the left and by the Barak government, who deluded them into believing that Israel really had a negotiating partner and that the Palestinians had really given up their dream of destroying Israel.

Israel has been plunged into a kind of apathy. Ostensibly, life goes on as usual. Everyday affairs are conducted with the characteristic Israeli mixture of vitality and edginess. But as anyone who has lived here all his life knows, everything is taking place with a strange and disheartening kind of impassiveness. In slow motion. Israel is now slipping back into the psychological stance that is most dangerous for it - the stance of the victim, of the persecuted Jew. Almost every threat to it - even from the Palestinians, who can never defeat Israel on the battlefield - is perceived as an absolute peril justifying the harshest response.

Unlike other periods in the past of similar difficulty, it looks as if Israelis no longer have any hope. Only hope can impel them to try to extricate themselves from this fatal ossification. The prophecy is liable to fulfil itself. "You can't make peace with the Arabs" is a sentence I hear several times a day, every time I foolishly get into a debate on the street, in a taxi, or on a radio programme. With a small difference, it is the same statement I hear in debates with Palestinians: "You can't make peace with the Israelis."

The war is taking place almost everywhere in Israel (at this moment, as I write, I can hear the rumble of an Israeli incursion into Palestinian Beit Jala, 10km south of my home). Despite this, the av erage Israeli seems to be able to repress what is happening around him and, in a strange way, almost to ignore it. That is hardly surprising - decades of wars and anxiety have trained him to do this very efficiently. When an Israeli citizen opens his eyes in the morning, he can assume, with a good degree of certainty, that during the course of the day at least one Israeli will be hurt in an attack of some sort. He knows that his life could change in the bitterest possible way. He won't think about it. Nor will he think about what Palestinians are feeling (it's all their fault anyway, the average Israeli believes - we offered them everything and they responded with lynchings and terrorism). He won't go to crowded places. He will refrain from hiking his favourite trails. He delimits himself a little, but no more. He notes that downtowns look empty and bleak. That there are almost no tourists in the streets, and sometimes more policemen and soldiers than civilians. He gets used to that, too. In the evening, in front of the television news, after the segment on the day's funerals in Tel Aviv and Gaza, a little voice in his brain whispers: "Lucky it wasn't me today."

Little by little, Israelis and Palestinians are moving further and further from peace. Just three months ago, at the talks in Taba, an agreement was imminent. Today that looks like a remission, brief and delusional, in the course of an incurable disease. Now almost no one uses the word "peace". The Palestinians say they won't end their violence "until the occupation is completely over". Israel declares that it will not even enter negotiations "until violence ends completely". Each side knows that its ultimatum - even if morally correct - is unrealistic. Furthermore, both know that if they adhere to these demands, they will be caught in a vicious circle of violence and that, in the end, they will bring destruction on themselves. The occupation will go on, and the violence will not end. In any case, with a kind of blunting of the senses, they do nothing to get themselves out of this nightmare.

Since there is no hope, Israelis and Palestinians go back to doing what they know how to do - to shed the blood of the other side. Each day more and more people join the ranks of the dead and wounded, of the haters and the despondent. Each day the appetite for revenge grows. The Palestinians say, before camera and microphone, that they no longer care if there is never an agreement, the main thing is for the Israelis to suffer as we have suffered. Israelis demand that prime minister Sharon rub out a few Palestinian villages and believe, so it seems, that this will make the Palestinians surrender and agree to an Israeli compromise.

Senior Palestinian officials, who in private conversations with Israelis attack Arafat and the blind murderousness of the suicide bombers, close ranks with the most extreme elements in their society when they speak in public. The voice of Israel's leftwing is almost completely mute - many have given up and have decamped to the right, while others find no public resonance with what they say. Indeed, what influence can ideas and words have in the face of the brutal, all-pervasive reality that eats away at hope like acid?

Instead of pursuing a "peace of the courageous", both sides are busy keeping a bloody, you-killed-me-I'll-kill-you balance sheet. The principal objective is to avenge yesterday's murder while minimising the enemy's retaliation tomorrow. Without noticing it, Palestinians and Israelis are reverting to the pattern of an ancient tribal war, eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.

It makes one suspect that the two peoples prefer to preoccupy themselves with this cruel ritual rather than attempt to solve the problem at its roots. On second thoughts, it is easy to understand (especially for anyone who lives here). "They give birth astride of a grave," Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot, and in the Middle East that description is terribly concrete: all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, were born into this conflict, and our identity is formulated, to no small extent, in terms of hostility and fear, survival and death. Sometimes it seems as if Israelis and Palestinians have no clear identities without the conflict, without the "enemy", whose existence is necessary, perhaps vital, to their sense of self and community.

You get queasy these days witnessing that special form of masochism that fills Israeli and Palestinian leaders when their angry prophecies come true, in particular as a result of their own failings. They especially like to see hope collapsing before their eyes. No less shocking is the enthusiasm with which so many Israelis and Palestinians adopt these despairing visions. Peoples get used to the injustices history has done to them, to the point that they forget what they are allowed to yearn for.

If Israel refuses to conduct peace talks before terrorism is "completely eliminated", as Sharon has declared, it will never have peace. On the contrary, it will guarantee that terror will continue. If the Palestinians refuse to halt their violence "until the occupation ends", they will never have peace, nor will the occupation end.

Sharon and Arafat are both cynical leaders. Their consciousnesses were shaped in war and violence, and their actions mirror each other like a carefully choreographed ceremonial dance. In order to achieve a compromise, both will have to renounce most of the fundamental concepts that have moulded their world views and which have given them their standing among their peoples. Their actions in recent months make one suspect that they are deliberately making negotiations conditional on demands that have no chance of being met today. They steer all the components of their regimes, including the media (which in the Palestinian Authority is mobilised to achieve the regime's goals, and is no less mobilised in Israel), in order to divert the citizenry's attention and to fuel the hostility of the other side.

Only a miracle or a catastrophe will change the situation. If you don't believe in the first and fear the latter, you realise that the only practical hope for saving Israel and the Palestinians from mutual slaughter is heavy international pressure on both of them. I still believe that Israel has the obligation to make the larger concessions in negotiations, because it is stronger, and because it is the occupier. But both sides must immediately end their uncompromising rhetoric and reduce their violent actions to the minimum, in order to get negotiations going again. Another, smaller hope is the willingness of individuals, Israelis and Palestinians, to renew dialogue among themselves. This is not easy to do, and outside help is also necessary here. But if such contacts take place, they will be of huge and not just symbolic importance. They will remind both nations of what they do not dare to long for. They will create the only alternative to hatred and despair.

• Translated by Haim Watzman. David Grossman's books include: See Under: Love; The Book of Intimate Grammar; The Yellow Wind; and Sleeping On A Wire: Conversations With Palestinians In Israel.

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