Israeli writers don’t need a Sally Rooney lecture - The Jewish Chronicle

Sally Rooney’s critics have rightly pointed out that like so many on the left, she is guilty of double standards when it comes to Israel. She is happy to have her novels published in China but not in Israel. Indeed, it seems that Israel is the only country where she can’t bear to have her work published. Homophobic Iran, Muslim countries which have expelled Jews, Putin’s Russia which will not tolerate any kind of dissent? No, only Israel deserves to be boycotted.

But there is another issue which has not been raised so far. What has she got to say about Israeli writers? Has she read any?

There are two striking features of Israeli writing today. First, it is so good. We have all heard of an older generation, great writers like Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and Aharon Appelfeld. But there is also an exciting new generation of young Israeli writers including Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Eshkol Nevo, Etgar Keret and many more who have addressed the dilemmas facing Israel today, questions about ethnic diversity, Israelis and Palestinians, the relationship between Israel today and its past. These writers don’t need to be lectured by Sally Rooney. They know perfectly well what issues face Israel and how to turn this into important literature.

Sally Rooney compares Israel and South Africa under apartheid. Of course, she does. But this comparison does raise one interesting point. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s critics of apartheid like the American critic Susan Sontag or the actor Sir Antony Sher, distinguished between the South African state and eminent South African writers like Nadine Gordimer or Athol Fugard. Sontag and Sher criticised the state but engaged with liberal South African writers who took the realities of apartheid and turned them into great literature and drama.

Anyone seriously concerned about Israel and Israel literature today should do the same and distinguish between aspects of the state they may disapprove of and the writers, TV writers and filmmakers who do so much to illuminate our understanding of Israel today, whether AB Yehoshua’s novel, The Tunnel, David Grossman’s To The End of the Land, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions, the Israeli TV series, Fauda and Prisoners of War (the model for the acclaimed US TV series, Homeland).

What is perhaps most striking about this Israeli golden age is not just the quality, but the range of issues they address and even what they leave out. In D A Mishani’s thriller, Three, for example, there are no Palestinians, no politics, no references to Israeli history. Mishani’s characters are part of the new normal Israel. There is a melancholy feel to the book. The characters seem desperately lonely, cut adrift. They meet for dates in cafes, have casual sex in small hotels, text banal messages — and wonder if a date might lead to their murder.

AB Yehoshua’s The Extra is all about the contrast between the religious world of Jerusalem and the secular world of Tel Aviv, which increasingly stand for the two sides of modern-day Israel. Which should the heroine’s mother choose to live in? Which path should Israel choose?

In many of these books, politics does not have a capital P. Political issues about Israel are raised very quietly, through a particular moment or character. In Yehoshua’s novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, a young woman has been killed by a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. But hidden away between the lines of Yehoshua’s quiet novel, something else is going on. This is just part of the malaise of modern-day Israel. It is a sad book about lonely, decent people living through hard times and yet the two main characters are those who try to do good. The real values that come to the surface in this deeply moral book are love and caring for each other in anxious and fragmented times. How we can do that is really the book’s central concern.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen comes from a completely different generation from Yehoshua. He was born in 1936, twelve years old when Israel was founded. She was born in 1982, almost a decade after the Yom Kippur War. But they both write about Israel through the stories of ordinary people living ordinary lives. Her first novel, One Night, Markovich, is not a state of Israel novel. There are no significant Arab characters. Its central theme is how distant we can be even from our husbands and wives. Her characters all have secrets which they can’t or won’t share, with consequences that will define their lives.

What these Israeli novels tell us is that politics is not always about grand statements or dramatic events. It is about how people live in a society that is not perfect, that confronts them with all kinds of choices and dilemmas. That Sally Rooney cannot see that shows that she prefers her leftist dogma to engaging with other writers. That is perhaps her greatest crime, the true nature of her offence.

Featured Photo by Chris Boland

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