Interviews

Conversation With The Author

Was there an impetus, or more than one, that started you on the long road of research and writing that resulted in this book? How does this book follow from your earlier work?

The Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians was my immediate impetus for writing this book. It occurred to me that for the first time since the days of the British, Jews and Arabs would now once again have to find a way to live with each other as equals, as two distinct nations, two national communities sharing the same country. This means that for the first time we also have to recognize each other's aspirations and fears, national traumas and myths. Unfortunately sharing the same country does not work very well, occasionally we shoot at each other, just like we used to when the British ruled. Indeed, it sometimes appears as if we are back in those days. As you know I am a journalist, I deal mostly with the present, but once in a while I take time off to try and explain, mostly to myself, what led us to the current situation. I first wrote about Israel's first year of independence in 1949, I then went back in time and wrote about the Israelis and the Holocaust in The Seventh Million, and I've gone further back, to find out how it all began, under the British. I try to understand history through the lives of individual people, using diaries, personal letters, etc. I feel as if I have just come back from a long trip into my own past, where I met a lot of people, many of them very colorful¾people of vision, courage, hope and success, uprooted and desperate people, romantics, dreamers, heroes and crooks. And they tell the story which, tragically, we are still living today.

You are Israeli, born and bred, you are Jewish, and the son of survivors and immigrants, so you are obviously personally invested in your chosen subject. How do you maintain objectivity and balance living in the middle of a conflict that you report on and chronicle?

I am not objective. We are all products of our own biographies and so am I. My parents had to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. I say "had to" because they would have much rather stayed there. Like many of the Jewish immigrants who settled in Palestine, my parents came unwillingly, as refugees, not as Zionist pioneers. I think that they never intended to stay in Israel, but then my father was killed in 1948, during the first Arab Israeli war. My mother had no other place to go, and that's why I was born Israeli. You are absolutely right when you assume that it is difficult, sometimes it seems impossible, to write about a conflict when you live in the middle of it. I try not to think of what my potential readers might say or how they might use what I write for their own purposes. I try to stick to the story itself. Do I get myself in trouble? Yes, all the time.

When THE SEVENTH MILLION was published it raised a storm of controversy, but in the intervening years your revolutionary history of the role of the Holocaust in Israeli and Jewish life has become, for many, the definitive of that time. Do you think that the book's hard-won acceptance by Israeli's and Jewish people around the world indicates an openness, a willingness to reevaluate rigid positions in general?

History is an extremely sensitive issue in Israel, and very political, for the very existence of the state rests on the particular Zionist interpretation of Jewish history, and much of the conflict with the Arabs is about different understandings of history. The question is who was there first, the assumption being that he who was first there owns the land. Naturally history in Israel is very political. About fifteen years ago official Israeli archives were opened, and for the first time it was possible to study the real story of the country. Until then we had ideology, mythology, a great deal of national indoctrination. The opening of the archives gave us facts, which led to a psychological earthquake. For you come to an archive, you order a file, you take out a document and wow!¾this is not what we were taught at school. Our history is far less noble and heroic then we were taught. This all feeds a Israeli identity crisis, or as some people call it, a cultural war.

In the wake of escalating violence in Israel, what can the British Mandate era in Palestine tell/teach us about the likelihood of success or failure of the current Peace talks?

I'm afraid that as result of my work on ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE I am much more pessimistic than I was before I started the book. One of the things the book clearly shows is that war between the Jews and the Palestinians was always inevitable, and no compromise will be satisfactory to both nations. The conflict can be managed¾perhaps on the basis of pragmatic arrangements and interim agreements¾but it cannot be resolved.

You argue in ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE that the British¾far from being pro-Arab, as history has led us to believe¾were driven to support the Jews and specifically the Zionist cause because of the mistaken notion that "Jews turned the wheels of history." Can you explain the origins of this mistaken notion?

Israel owes its existence to the British. The Zionist movement would have been unable to achieve as much as it did in Palestine if not for the active support of the British. Their willingness to help the Zionists is quite surprising because they had nothing to gain from supporting them. The Zionist movement was quite weak and had no real influence; it's only source of power derived from the world's fearful image of the Jews. British policy during World War I and the 1920s was based on the eroneous belief the Jews rule the world, and the thought that Jewish support was essential for the success of the British war effort. In other words, the British role in Palestine rested largely on a fiction. It is an amazing story, but there is no other explanation for their policy in Palestine. This fictitious view constitutes a strange mixture of pro-Jewish and anti-Semitic feelings. The British both adored the Jews and despised them, admired and feared them. In many countries you still find a similar attitude today. People think that Israel is much more powerful than it actually is, again because of the demonic powers attributed to the Jews.

You have a deeply historical and personal perspective on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. What do you really hope for Israel, and for the Palestinian people?

ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE is about people who lived in a uniquely charming and tragic period, but it is mostly about people whose personal lives were doomed by national and religious circumstances beyond their control. What I hope for both myself and for the Palestinians is that our individual needs, desires, and dreams take priority over our collective myths, so despite our national confrontations we may all just be ourselves.