David Grossman’s Camouflage of Violence

When the city of Düsseldorf decided to give Amos Oz the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2008, historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benit ridiculed the investment of the German establishment in the prophet of the Israeli left. Oz received the Goethe Prize just three years earlier. Ben-Dor Benit rebuked Oz’s many celebratory speeches to European audiences where he condemned “extremists of both sides,” Palestinian and Israeli. For Oz, in a racialized fashion, it was the mizrahim who represented the extremists on the Jewish side. Sixteen years later. Düsseldorf found a new champion of Israel’s “universalistic” and “humanist” idealism in David Grossman. But Grossman’s politics, not to mention his relation to mizrahim, are much more sophisticated than Oz’s, and for this reason have not received the same attention by critics.

As with much writing on Mizrahi politics, Grossman’s public claims about Israeli politics are cleverly camouflaged when presented to English readers. Just a few days after October 7, Grossman published a lengthy essay in Haaretz, where he presented a version of Netanyahu’s infamous argument in the Knesset from 2015: Grossman argued that Hamas’ onslaught revealed the depth of hatred among Palestinians, which has no context and was beyond reason, and forces us, “the Jews,” to always be alert and prepared for battle. It was almost a replica of Netanyahu’s notorious “ḥayim ‘al ha-ḥerev” (living by the sword) statement. The article was never translated into English and readers of Haaretz English edition will have to go back to August 2023 to read contributions from Grossman in this venue. Conversely, in February 2024, Grossman was described in the most important newspapers of the German language (Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zuericher Zeitung) as a harbinger not just of Israeli humanism but as a pioneer in accepting the necessity to negotiate with Hamas. Until today I have not been able to find any trace of that in the Hebrew media. This dual tonality, saying one thing in Hebrew and another in English or another outward language, constitutes a form of strategic marketing.

This marketing is subtle but quite prevalent among Israelis. In the two songs that Israel offered the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024, what they included, despite pushback, is notable. After the first song, “October Rain,” was disqualified for being too political, Israel sent “Hurricane” and kept only the line “Who’s the fool who told you Boys don’t cry?” unchanged. A manifestation of a progressive ethos by which also “boys”—that is, probably soldiers—are sensitive, it encapsulates the ethos of Israeli wars since the Nakba, which has been critically named “shooting and crying.” The film Waltz with Bashir (2008) was a paradigmatic example of this ethos. In literature, we associate it with S. Yizhar and Yehuda Amichai, but not with Grossman, whose book The Yellow Wind (1988) is regularly praised for its reckoning with the First Intifada.

In “shooting and crying,” Israeli soldiers are not only sensitive (which many of them in fact are) but the violence which they inflict on their opponents is also always forced on them because no other alternative is purportedly available. This allows fighters to escape confronting their own position as perpetrators. In the 1980s, in the wake of the First Lebanon War and the First Intifada, a fault line was drawn in the Israeli public between violence bound by reality and sheer violence which was obscene and unjustified. The latter was then identified with Menahem Begin’s government and his brutal Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon. Latently, this violence—without a cry thereafter—was also ascribed to mizrahim (Oz’s “extremists”). The generation of Bashir’s director and protagonist, the blue-eyed Ari Folman who recounts his feelings over the Sabra and Shatila massacre to his psychologist, is now the generation waiting to usurp Benjamin Netanyahu via the figures of “moderate” and “sensitive” generals such as Benny Gantz and Yair Golan.

Interestingly, throughout the years, critics of the “shooting and crying” trope have focused solely on Palestinians as the distinct other. Critics’ own discomfort with colonialism led them to secure an imagined identity as Europeans, New Jews who were secular and “sensitive.” For them, responsibility requires one only to stop shooting. They shy away from any reckoning with shooting itself as something necessary to war and to the Jewish and human condition more broadly. The many critics of “shooting and crying” thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the “Old Jew” of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose “oldness” is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of “progress.” This mizrahi “Old Jew” is—(as in Oz) allegedly “oriental,” “religious,” and “bloodthirsty.” The tormented and enlightened Jew-combatant and the postcolonial critic of this combatant’s eventual complacency are both able to consolidate their conscience based on the ability to see only one object: The Palestinian as an ultimate Other.

In recent years I have tried to better understand how violence and its camouflage (“shooting and crying”) function against objects of domestic, internal violence, such as against women, mizrahim, and of course against Judaism itself as a melancholic horizon because of its association with what is old, oriental, and primitive. I dwelled, for example, on the racist representations of mizrahim in the Israeli television series Prisoners of War, in which three male protagonists return from captivity and are engulfed by emasculation and tears. Like Waltz with Bashir, Prisoners of War came out in 2008. This was the same year that David Grossman published his most important work, the novel To the End of the Land, which amounted to a groundbreaking critique of the Israeli military. Over 650 pages it delved into the tormented conscience of a mother and a soldier. This no doubt reflected in Grossman’s own life circumstances. At the time, he was in grief over his own son who died as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

The many critics of ‘shooting and crying’ thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the ‘Old Jew’ of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose ‘oldness’ is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of ‘progress.’

Prior to October 7, 2023, captivity was particularly associated in the Israeli public with the Yom Kippur War (1973). This war forms the dark core of this epic family novel, To the End of the Land. The book tells the story of Ora, the mother of two sons from two different men. The eldest son was born to her by her partner Ilan, and the younger, who had just embarked on a dangerous military operation, was born while she was married to Ilan, who acted as his father. But the second child came from a relationship she had with Avram, an intimate friend of the couple. Ilan, Avram, and Ora first met in their youth during the 1967 War. They matured into military service during the Yom Kippur War and became a family during the First and Second Intifadas. The latter events are depicted in the book via the military service of the younger son and the dissolution of Ora and Ilan’s marriage. Indeed, this is an exceptional national epic that not only describes Israel’s wars but also brings to light the emotional and psychological ordeals of Israeli civilians living amidst violence.

During the twenty years that passed from the birth of Ofer, the younger son, to the time during which the story takes place, amid the Second Intifada, the liberal hope of the Oslo Accords passed, which the novel describes with great longing. The time of hope and “sanity” is accompanied in the novel with unwelcomed guests, those that Oz might have dubbed “extremists”: the mizrahim, who also represent Jewishness. With their explicitly religious attributes, they are a reminder of the breakdown of secular and liberal utopia. Zionism promised the Jews to be like all nations, that is, to love like the people of the west, but that was unachievable because of the ostensibly war-oriented (and not love-oriented) ”orient.” Perhaps, Israelis also feel abandoned by the west which has promised them love, but instead, forsaken them, its Children (as in the Christian-biblical trope of “Children of Israel;” the Hebrew original talks about Israel’s, that is Jacob’s, sons, not children) and exposed them to “the beast” (of “the orient”).

In accordance with the free love counterculture of the Hippies, To the End of the Land is also full of descriptions of sex, “the most beautiful […] in Hebrew literature”; but among these scenes is also a description of rape inside the marriage of Ilan and Ora, which occurred while she was pregnant with Ofer (Avram’s biological son). This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor is the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

In keeping with the racialization of the political geography of Israel, all the many scholars who wrote on Grossman’s epic were Ashkenazim, something that perhaps explains why they all preferred to stick to the state’s involvement with the occupation and violence against Palestinians. But the interesting thing is that the rape scene (on pages 564–66 in the Hebrew version) has a double function: on one level it is an instance of sexual coercion, and on another level, it is a reminder of captivity in war. During this repressed scene, Ilan not only penetrates his wife against her will, but also tells her about their friend Avram’s captivity on the Egyptian front during the war, when Ilan tried to reach him. This story defines the posttraumatic state of Ora, the loving mother who had to feed the fetus in her womb with the story of war.

This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor does the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

Ora’s rape by her intimate domestic partner is the other side of Israel’s Ashkenazi ethos of lack of choice: in committing acts of war, but more than that, in living in the “violent Orient.” But whereas so many articles were written on the latter—the Jew who is being coerced into the position of a perpetrator—Ora’s trauma is not even acknowledged as such. From this point of view, To the End of the Land is a moving example of the divided Israeli psyche, which is first of all in a position of blindness to its own pain, not only in relation to mizrahim, and Jews in general, but first of all to its innermost intimate family, in relation to women and children. Even if we accept the paradigm of “wars of no choice”—Israelis are forced to subject their loved ones to it during every family dinner and in their bedrooms. Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death. It therefore outlines rape as essentially deniable, by characters themselves as well as by critics. Again, critics and writers share the trope of “shooting and crying” because it is a dyad that functions on both ends: it not only simply denies violence, but needs denial (cry, camouflage) to enable violence in the first place.

Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death.

Like the story of Ora, October 7 was a confrontation with that denial. In many videos Israelis were disgraced, sometimes sexually, and deprived of their honor as humans at their most intimate domestic surroundings. Grossman’s novel, where the Israeli secular everyday living room takes on such importance, is a reminder of what has been suppressed in the public sphere. Living the national bourgeois family narrative calls for constant camouflage, which in Ora’s case leads her also to panic attack within her family unit as she, Ilan, and the two boys are having dinner (494–95). Even today, after reading and writing so extensively on the novel, I find it hard to explain its title and main gesture: in being A Woman Fleeing the News, Ora is not trying to avoid death but rather the very possibility—and thus de facto imaginary—news of death. In many ways being in this limbo—not being able to confront death (and thus reality; not being able to confront her partner as perpetrator and her children as soldiers)—became a prefiguration of Israelis during this unprecedented onslaught on Gaza: finding themselves in a position of very real vulnerability while at the very same time placing themselves in an imaginary constitutive victimhood that makes them incapable of bearing responsibility for their actions.

It is interesting to compare Ora’s trauma with the rape of the Bedouin girl who is the historical focus of Adania Shibli’s acclaimed novel Minor Detail (2017). In Shibli, rape is entirely admitted by its many readers, although the novel avoids a description of how it unfolds; we readers understand it is a rape precisely because the mimesis avoids description. In Grossman’s novel, the rape scene is carefully outlined (so many times Ora asks Ilan to stop), but its reception entirely denied. Perhaps it relates to the fact that Shibli’s novel is about the loneliness of a single woman, who lives on her own, while Grossman’s heroine almost drowns under the relentless discourse of family unity. The relations that exist within a family—like those within a nation—often make it difficult to reckon with facts. Exactly at the age of maturity, when her younger son has stopped being a minor, Ora’s 20-year marriage is ending, and thus the promise it offered—the promise of a sane Jewish place “among the nations,” that is, western nations; the promise of Oslo and of the Eurovision—turns to denial. She, like the many scholars who wrote on her, does not confront Ilan, the perpetrator, and thus instead of reaching maturity—of being sovereign as an adult—she collapses in nostalgia and denial. Much the same could be said of current Israel. Thus, David Grossman’s camouflage of violence, is first and foremost our own, Israelis and their families.