The literary world can encourage understanding between bitter enemies.
If you buy a ticket and travel to another country, you are likely to see
the monuments, the palaces and the squares, the museums and the
landscapes and the historical sites. If you are lucky, you may have a
chance to conduct some conversations with the local people. Then you
will travel back home, carrying a bunch of photographs or postcards.
But if you read a novel, you obtain a ticket into the most intimate
recesses of another country and of another people. Reading a foreign
novel is an invitation to visit other people's homes and other country's
private quarters.
If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an
old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her
window. Then you will walk on.
But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her
window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.
As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other
people's living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their
bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family
joys, into their dreams.
Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I
believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other
can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not
only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.
Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of
us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other:
the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much
hostility between us, too little curiosity.
Jews and Arabs have something essential in common: They have both been
handled, coarsely and brutally, by Europe's violent hand in the past.
The Arabs through imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and
humiliations. The Jews through discrimination, persecution, expulsion
and ultimately mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
One would have thought that two victims, and especially two victims of
the same oppressor, would develop between them a sense of solidarity.
Alas, this is not the way it works, neither in novels nor in life.
Some of the worst conflicts are indeed between two victims of the same
oppressor -- two children of the same violent parent don't necessarily
like each other. Often they see in each other the image of the abusive
parent.
Which is exactly the case between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.
While the Arabs regard Israelis as latter-day Crusaders, an extension of
the white, colonizing Europe, many Israelis, for their part, regard the
Arabs as the new incarnation of our past oppressors, pogrom makers and
Nazis.
This situation charges Europe with a particular responsibility for the
solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict: Instead of wagging their fingers
at either side, Europeans should extend empathy, understanding and help
to both sides. You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel and
being pro-Palestine. You have to be pro-peace.
The woman in the window might be a Palestinian woman in Nablus. She
might be a Jewish Israeli woman in Tel Aviv. If you want to help make
peace between these two women in the two windows, you had better read
more about them.
Read novels, dear friends. They will tell you much.
It is even time for each of these women to read about each other. To
learn, at last, what makes the other woman in the window frightened,
angry or hopeful.
I am not suggesting that reading novels can change the world. I do
suggest, and I do believe, that reading novels is one of the best
possible ways to understand that all the women, in all the windows, are,
at the end of the day, in urgent need of peace.
January
6, 2008
Image under
license with Gettyimages.com
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