The Yellow Wind
By David Grossman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 216 pages, $17.95
According to Arab legend, every couple of generations a yellow wind escapes from the gates of hell. It is a fiery blast from the East that scorches and cleanses the earth. The wind seeks out those people who have committed acts of cruelty or injustice and it exterminates them, no matter where they seek to hide.
Author David Grossman warns that Israel appears overdue for a visit by the ”Yellow Wind,” which is the ominous but fitting title for his brilliant, searing examination of Israel`s occupation of the West Bank. Journalist-novelist Grossman, like the prophet Jeremiah, delivers a harsh sermon to Israel: Give up the occupied territories captured in 1967 or face certain moral destruction. Only when the Jewish State relinquishes the territories can Israel free itself of its dehumanizing and self-destructive role as colonial ruler over nearly two million Arabs.
Grossman is not the first Israeli to issue this warning, but rarely has the alarm been sounded so powerfully or so convincingly. The rebellion and bloodshed now engulfing the territories have given Grossman`s book particular urgency and timeliness. Grossman says the present situation cannot go on:
Israel has created a system of masters and slaves that is corrupting the whole fabric of Israeli society. Even though this is the clear message of the book, Grossman has not written a polemic. Each of the 18 finely crafted essays that make up the book is a gem of story-telling-beautiful, passionate and profoundly disturbing.
Chapter 11 (”Swiss Mountain View-A Story”) is a work of genius, a masterpiece of compression. In barely 20 pages of narrative, Grossman movingly profiles a young Israeli army officer who oversees an Arab village under occupation. The officer, Gidi, is a decent man, compassionate and caring, but his job calls upon him to play the Arabs off against one another and to wheedle or coerce them continually for information. The demands of the job push Gidi more and more into cynicism and emotional isolation (even from other Jews) and he begins to experience the self-loathing of a prison warder: ”Things which once seemed to him to be the most basic principles of a moral life-honesty and courage and self-respect-now seemed pathetic hypocrisy. . . . All noble virtues were now in his eyes only signals which pointed the observer to their opposites, their ruin.”
In other words, Gidi becomes the classic, doomed colonial official. On a larger scale, Grossman suggests that the moral disintegration of Gidi is a parable for the moral disintegration of all of Israel`s young people. If one needs evidence of Grossman`s point, just review the news footage of the 18-year-old Israeli soldiers who appear each night on television as they beat up Palestinians.
Grossman is no apologist for the Arab cause. The book critically examines the way the Arabs consciously and purposefully cultivate hatred of the Jews, even among kindergarten children. Grossman himself is enraged when Arab terrorists firebomb a car and kill a Jewish woman. But in Grossman`s view, the Israelis bear the larger share of responsibility for the cycle of violence. The book is a litany of examples of Jews provoking Arabs, in big ways and petty ones.
For example, Israeli authorities forbid Arabs from bringing children`s toys into the West Bank when they return from Jordan. The toys might contain weapons or explosives. One Israeli soldier decided to do a good deed and carefully inspected a plastic doll belonging to a three-year-old girl. He wanted to let her have it. But the bridge commander intervened and told the soldier to confiscate the doll. The soldier described the incident: ”I explained that the doll was no danger. He insisted. The girl cried horribly, and her mother pleaded tearfully. The commander said: `We cannot make exceptions.` The doll was confiscated.”
Such incidents keep the Arabs and Jews locked together in a fatal dance of hatred, which Grossman says is leading both sides to disaster. ”The situation is a mint,” Grossman writes, ”casting human coins with opposite legends imprinted on their two sides. But the contradicting legends do not change the fact that between them-freedom fighter or terrorist; ours or theirs-can be found the dark, hidden raw material: a murderer.”
The book grew out of an assignment Grossman wrote for an Israeli weekly newsmagazine. He spent seven weeks visiting the occupied territories and talking to Arabs and Jews of various political complexions. Grossman is a sabra (born in Israel) who speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew; the book, a best- seller in Israel, was published originally in Hebrew. The translation to English by Haim Watzman preserves the poetic imagery. Because it originally addressed an Israeli audience, ”The Yellow Wind” has subtleties and insights that rarely reach the U. S. public via the daily news accounts from the area. For example, one chapter examines frictions between Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of the occupied territories.
If ”The Yellow Wind” has a weakness, it`s that some of the nuance will likely be lost on readers who have not lived in Israel. Stylistically, Grossman relies often on long unbroken quotes, and some of the references by his interview subjects are a bit obscure for the general reader. But sticking with it is well worth the effort.
Clearly, Grossman brought more to bear in writing ”The Yellow Wind”
than just the fruits of a seven-week tour. The book expresses the yearnings and disappointments of that generation of Israelis like Grossman who have grown to adulthood with Israel presiding over the territories.
Instead of bringing peace, the territories ushered in an era of Israeli intransigence, symbolized by the ”hooliganism,” as Grossman describes it, of the militant Gush Emunim settlers movement.
The West Bank and the other territories are poisonous to Israel, says Grossman, and must be removed from Israel like a cancerous organ. As Gidi, the Israeli officer of the ”Swiss Mountain View,” says, ”When two apples touch one another at a single point of decay, the mold spreads over both of them.”
