Life on the front line

Linda Grant's The People on the Street should be obligatory reading on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide, says Ian Black
The People on the Street by Linda Grant
Buy The People on the Street at the Guardian bookshop

The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel
by Linda Grant
Virago £9.99, pp214

Received wisdom about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict correctly paints the Palestinians as its main victims - by a ratio of four to one dead since the second intifada erupted in 2000. Linda Grant does not argue with that unassailable fact, though her book contributes to the necessary understanding that Israelis are victims, too, and not only in the sense of being blown up by suicide bombers. Yet for all the relentless focus on the war in which they play a starring role, the lives of these perplexing and often prickly people are not governed solely by violence and politics. Not every Israeli has a tank parked outside his house and drives off to Nablus in the morning. Stating the obvious? Perhaps, but Grant does it well and makes the point convincingly.

This hybrid work contains no official briefings or analysis of peace plans, but there is a lot of musing about Jewish history and post-Holocaust identity. The author is at home in the cafes of Tel Aviv, Bauhaus architecture, intellectuals and tanned midriffs in the city where early Zionists fantasised about Jewish policemen arresting Jewish prostitutes so that their long-suffering people would be 'like all the nations', warts, normality and all.

Warts there are aplenty but there is schmaltzy, honest tribal affection and diamond-hard insight from a British-Jewish writer who worked on a kibbutz in her teens after the 1967 war, embraced anti-Zionism largely to annoy her Polish-born father and has since come to an understanding that there is now a 'Jewish country' that is here to stay.

Grant is fascinated by the notion that Israelis manage by living in a bubble: this includes the soldiers who serve in the occupied territories, often humiliating and sometimes killing Palestinians, while their (Jewish) mothers worry about them without realising how much they are being brutalised. Tel Aviv is itself a giant bubble: no surprise that, like many secular Israelis, Grant is uneasy in Jerusalem, where history hangs heavy, the 'separation wall' looms large and the muezzin's call is inescapable.

Grant's portrayal of the Gaza settlers uprooted by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral 'disengagement' last summer irritated some readers of her newspaper, the Guardian. But she was bang on with her description of 'ordinary people no one ever paid much attention to', who went for cheap mortgages and Mediterranean beaches, while ignoring the Palestinians on the other side of the razor wire and security roads separating their privileged Middle Eastern California from the third-world misery next door.

This book does not negotiate a way out of the Israeli-Arab labyrinth, though it does help explain how it got so complicated. Friends of the Palestinians should read it, just as friends of Israel would benefit from the wisdom of Raja Shehadeh or Suad al-Amiry on the unspun reality of occupation.

Grant has battled against dehumanisation but despaired of the future long before the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections. Her message? If there is ever to be anything approaching normality in this benighted land, both sides will have to accept the presence and history of the other. The rest is detail.