Images from a floating world

[Englander]

Do Israelis live in a bubble? Karma Nabulsi assesses Linda Grant's The People on the Street

Saturday March 18, 2006
The Guardian

The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel
by Linda Grant
224pp, Virago, £9.99

It is a gruelling undertaking to read this book. Its self-regarding bubble (or, as Grant will have it, bu'ah in Hebrew) severs the reader from its claim to one's heart. Like the colonial narrative tradition from which one can trace its genealogy, sentence after sentence, page after page, it relentlessly stitches a sentimental noose of absolute dominance: the violence has been done elsewhere, the reader becomes a ghost. The dissociation is wordless, for the words are all Linda Grant's, and she has used them well.

Here are Rafi the handsome plumber and his Romanian sidekick; Gabi the children's television presenter writing his doctorate on the philosopher Richard Rorty on his laptop at the Café Tam; the taxi driver from Salonika whose parents fought with the communist partisans; Fabiana, the Argentine-born fiction editor who daydreams about a Groucho Club in London full of intellectuals discussing Dostoevsky every night; Moishe, the owner of the Café Mapu, who looks like Elvis Presley in his prime.

Millions remain invisible and dispossessed in order to make this charming story possible - this endearing and fey world of a few streets in Tel Aviv. Here, all the Israelis are quirky, amusing, intelligent, terribly winsome, politically aware (or if not, then possessed, like the landlady, the café owner, the shop-keeper, by a sort of madcap ingenuity). There is a mythic quality to this fairytale book, set in an ersatz metaphysical Mitteleuropa on the shores of the Arab Mediterranean. Of course the people on these streets need to be pretty marvellous, as the price for their cosy, closed world is being extracted daily in the refugee camps not too far away.

Grant ventures out of the city's bubble, finally, to visit the "young boys", "these children": the Israeli soldiers who are implementing and maintaining the brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. "I tried my best to understand the soldiers," she writes. Her aim here is even more ambitious, and now the book enters an even bigger, more disturbing bubble: not content to bring us inside a few streets of Tel Aviv, she wants to bring the entire IDF into our warm, understanding, forgiving embrace. She visits a soldiers' outpost in the heart of Nablus, a commandeered Arab home filled with pizza boxes, movies rented from Blockbusters, graffiti, rotting garbage. She worries about them, and what they "have" to do: "Udi tried to explain to me about minds that are divided, how you live with the part of you that shoots terrorists in cold blood and kills civilians, and blows up houses with people inside them, by making a space inside your head that is against the occupation and is waiting for the man to come who will sit down with the paper and write the things that will end it."

But then something unexpected and curious begins to happen: for the briefest moment, the little bubble suddenly collapses. It occurs towards the end of the book (in a chapter entitled "Bu'ah"). The voice becomes uncertain, anxious, even shocked, and is suddenly permeated with a searing clarity as to precisely what it is Grant is witnessing, and has become part of. In two extraordinary passages - almost an emotional epiphany - she describes the real horror of the enterprise without the qualifications and justifications that have seen her safely through up until now: one on the Palestinian reality, and then, two pages later, a paragraph about the nature of Israeli society - and it is not winsome at all.

More at;
Guardian Unlimited


· Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and author of Traditions of War: Occupation, Resistance, and the Law (OUP)