“We have faith in the future.” It is the year 2004 and La Vanguardia has brought together the great Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939-2018) and the Palestinian historian Sari Nusseibeh, recent International Catalunya Prize winners ex aequo, to talk about culture and peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are two debating, but there is only one headline. And they agree on a brief phrase that now, in the midst of total war, sounds more distant than ever: “We have faith in the future.” Both are then involved in separate peace projects, one of which is explained and signed house by house. And they are betting on a two-state solution, a return to the 1967 borders, an agreement on the holy places and that the majority of settlements must be abandoned. The vast majority of refugees will have to return to the new Palestinian State.
At that time, another great Israeli writer, Abraham B. Yehoshua (1936-2022), author of books such as Journey to the End of the Millennium and founder of the Peace Now initiative in 1977, pointed out that “agreements with the Palestinians are necessary. We will never be neighbors like Switzerland and France and there will be a certain tension, but we have already gone from total war to dialogue, a great step. Despite the problems that remain, the important thing will be to always maintain that dialogue.” He even imagined the possibility, now pure science fiction, of achieving peace with Syria with an agreement on the Golan Heights. “Definitive peace,” he summarized.
Two decades later, in March 2022, the acclaimed Israeli graphic novel author Rutu Modan published Túneles (Salamandra/Finestres) in Spain and recalled, however, that if in the nineties after the Oslo agreements there was hope, “today “Nobody talks about solutions anymore.” In his good-humored book, he crosses the tunnels that were already dug in his country centuries ago to hide in the cities conquered by the great invading armies with which they are drilled today in Gaza and the West Bank, including the wall erected by Israel against the Palestinians and the Ark of the Covenant. “There was even a far-right group that proposed digging a country underground as a solution to the current conflict. Imagine who would live below,” she explained.
“Everyone is digging the country but at the same time talking about life in heaven. Everything seems connected: the ancient past, a very complicated present and the distant future when the messiah comes. Israelis think: we can't solve this now but time is on our side. You can find the same thought in the Palestinians.” However, he admitted, there is an obstacle to achieving the meeting: “The ancient kingdom of Israel is in the West Bank. It was tragic to understand: it will never be abandoned, because if there was any justification for coming to the Middle East it was because of that area.” And yet, he ventured: "One theory says that the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea, with their own history and mythology, were forced to live together in the same territory and ended up giving birth to the Jewish people and a highly successful book thanks to their contradictions, the Hebrew Bible. Maybe something like this will happen again. “It is a fantasy to think that Israelis or Palestinians are going to leave here.”
Perhaps it is also true that a conflict is about to end, the rawness of which could not fail to be reflected in the world of culture, in his novels, his comics, his cinema or his music. It couldn't be any other way, because it marks lives. It can be summed up by the experience of the Israeli Edgar Keret, author of titles such as the stories of Kamikaze Pizzeria. Keret recalled how mandatory three-year military service in his country is a profound and transformative experience that changed the lives of him and his brothers. . “The oldest was right-wing, and one day he shot down a Syrian fighter: he killed the pilot and the co-pilot. And he became a human rights activist on the anti-Zionist left. My sister was an artillery guide, she fell in love with a colleague and he was killed in Lebanon. She took refuge in religion. I was going to be an engineer, I was studying at university with my best friend, and he died in the army. "I couldn't continue studying and I started writing."
Ari Folman instead launched himself into screenwriting and film direction, to films such as the animated film Waltz with Bashir, which won the Bafta and the César for best foreign film and in which he remembers his experience at the age of 19 as soldier in the war in Lebanon, of which he has erased all memory and will discover, when searching for them, a difficult reality around the massacre of Sabra and Chatila. Israeli cinema precisely won its first Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival with Lebanon, by Samuel Maoz, an anti-war film told from the point of view of four soldiers locked in a tank and based on their memories of the war in 1982 as a young gunner, barely 20 years old, of one of the first tanks that entered that country. He dedicated the victory to “the thousands of people in the world who, like me, return from war safe and sound. Apparently they are well, they work, they get married, they have children. But inside the memory remains stabbed to the soul.”
The conflict has transcended culture in numerous creations. From the graphic novel by Joe Sacco with Palestine (Planeta Cómic), a key piece of cartoon journalism in which he toured Gaza and the West Bank in the early nineties, and Notes at the foot of Gaza (Reservoir Books), in which he immersed himself years later in the daily life of Rafah and its neighboring city, Khan Younis, uncovering a terrible episode that happened more than half a century ago, to current Israeli series of enormous global success such as Fauda (chaos, in Arabic), whose seasons can be seen on the platform Netflix and which occupies the top positions in Arab countries despite criticism. In it, an Israeli agent chases a Palestinian fighter whom he left for dead. Its creators are Lior Raz, also the protagonist, a former bodyguard of Schwarzenegger and who fought in operations against Palestinian terrorists of the Israeli army, and the journalist Avi Issacharoff, who also belonged to a covert military unit and a harsh critic of Netanyahu, whose judicial reforms are has opposed. Issacharoff emphasizes that Fauda “is a series about the price of occupation, both for Israelis and Palestinians” and a few months ago he stated that “the question is not if the Palestinians are going to explode, the question is when” because “we have in Israel a radical right-wing government that opposes any type of concession to the Palestinians and that carries out an aggressive campaign to build more Jewish settlements. “These policies could lead to an explosion.” In response to the Hamas attack on Saturday, he has declared that it is "Israel's 9/11" and that "if it does not lead to a ground operation it will be the end of the government." “I think they wanted to kidnap a few people and negotiate with them. Not even Hamas imagined that they would manage to go this far. But they are going to pay a very high price,” he warned.
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was built on the possibility of peace, created in 1999 by two friends: the conductor Daniel Barenboim – born in Argentina and whose family, of Jewish origin, moved to Israel when he was ten years old – and by the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, author of the classic Orientalism (Debate/Eumo). An orchestra whose core is made up of young Jewish and Palestinian musicians and that has been demonstrating for decades that coexistence is possible. Said, who died in 2003, said that “humanism is the only resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.” Barenboim issued a statement yesterday in which he indicated that he has followed “the events of the weekend with horror.” “Hamas' attack on the Israeli civilian population is a heinous crime that I fiercely condemn,” he continues, adding that “an Israeli siege of Gaza constitutes collective punishment that violates human rights.” And he concludes that “Said and I always believed that the only path to peace between Israel and Palestine is a path based on humanism, justice, equality and the end of the occupation rather than military action, and today I believe it more stronger than ever.”
