The Permanence of an Ephemeral Pain: Dialectics of Remembrance in Two Novels of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

The enemy is also the one who sees our darker, crueller, even bestial aspects, the ones we show him in a time of war. We like to tell ourselves, of course, that these sides of us are merely “temporary,” merely measures taken against the enemy until the anger ebbs, till the war passes and we resume being ethical human beings as we were.

David Grossman, “To See Ourselves”

In the alleys and passages of the Shatila camp, I discovered the truth of the catastrophe. Villagers expelled from the Galilee had suddenly found themselves living in huts set up hastily to provide temporary shelter. But the temporary became permanent, and the people were forced to construct a nation for themselves out of words and memories. They gave the various sections of their camps the names of the villages they had fled, and they lived, as they said, “waiting” in a suspended time.

Elias Khoury, “For Israelis”

The common denominator of these two excerpts is the term “temporary.” The Israeli novelist David Grossman criticizes his compatriots’ belief that a need for major revisions in their attitudes against Palestinians is merely a temporary issue, and the Lebanese author Elias Khoury recounts the paradoxical life of Palestinian refugees as a temporary condition that is infinitely elongated. Apart from an understanding of the historical necessity of mutual recognition, what brings these poignant observations together is an insight into the perplexity of a seemingly transitory situation that has turned into a constant condition, shaping both Palestinians’ and Israelis’ collective identity. In fact, this stressed temporariness has played a major role in the creation of identity narratives for the two antagonistic sides that not only reflect their uneven power relations, but also obstructs any reformative action for the existing situation.

This article studies the complex web of memorialization and forgetting of historical traumas for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict through a comparative reading of two novels, David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (2007, trans. 2010) and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (1998, trans. 2006). A contrapuntal analysis of these two narratives delineates the ways the process of narrativization of collective historical pains has intensified the social identity of each side. More significantly, such a reading uncovers the hidden sides of each narrative through the other, leading to a deeper understanding of the forgotten episodes of their history, which are either left unnoticed or intentionally erased. After a short contextual note on both novels, I start my analysis by clarifying the idea of contrapuntal reading, then proceed with a close reading of sections of both works, focusing on two specific issues: the particular representation of natural landscapes in both novels and its significance as collective sites of memory and forgetting, and the peculiar obsession with defining oneself in terms of the other side, where the other becomes a paradoxical element of attraction and rejection. By elaborating on these two issues, I will chart the collective forces and tendencies that have shaped the historical consciousness of Israel-Palestine, especially regarding its continuing temporariness.

David Grossman, one of the most vociferous proponents of the “Peace Now” movement, is among the very few literary figures in contemporary Israel who has advocated recognition of Palestinians—although this recognition is not in full sympathy with their cause. In this regard, Grossman is among the Israeli writers who can draw a multidimensional picture of his country’s social condition.¹ In his epic novel To the End of the Land (originally published as Isha Borachat Mi’Bsora, meaning “Woman Escapes the News”), Grossman generates a sweeping narrative of loss, pain, and memory that covers, through a personal journey in the countryside, a voyage into the afflictions of a nation. The protagonist, Ora, is a middle-aged woman, who starts a hiking trip with an old friend as her only way to escape the horrific possibility of her son’s death in the war. She flees from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house, where she shudders to think about the impending knock on the door by...