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that he wants to avoid the familiar: "When I left on this journey," he tells us
near the end of our guided tour, "I decided not to talk with Jewish or Arab
politicians or officials. Their positions are well known to the point of
weariness."
Like many Israeli Jews, Grossman is tired of both the dovish left's
"democratic Jewish state" and the right's "the people of Israel in the land of
Israel" sloganeering. "... After twenty years it seems to me that all the
arguments, both rational and emotional, have already been made," he says.
The seduction of seeking solutions is that it keeps Israeli society from
identifying the problem. If the problem is defined as "national security," the
Palestinians are reduced to a footnote, the moral dimensions of the occupation
to a sidebar. Conversely, if the problem is dermed only in moral terms, as
in so much ofthe literature on the subject in this country, Israel's very real
security concerns are swept under the carpet. The focus on solutions has
given the political culture a mechanism to avoid the slow and painful tick of
the real-time clock.
As the years have gone by, a generation of Jews and Palestinians
grew into an adulthood, the parameters of which were conditioned by the
realities of the Israeli administration of the territories. And Israel's presence
in the territories became increasingly characterized by a politics of perma–
nence; for Jewish settlers and politicians of the right, the status of the
territories was in abeyance pending their integration into or annexation by
Israel. According to researchers like Meron Benvenisti, the connection be–
tween Israel and the territories has become inexorable, having progressed
beyond the point of separation, a Catholic marriage no priest would or could
annul.
Grossman is one of those Israelis whose coming of age coincided with
this "new" Israel. He was thirteen - bar mitzvah - in 1967:
. .. the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with
the intoxication gripping the entire country; the conquest, the confi–
dent penetration of the enemy's land, his complete surrender, break–
ing the taboo of the border, imperiously striding through the narrow
streets of cities until now forbidden, and the smells, the primal view,
and that same erotic tingle latent in every first meeting between con–
queror and conquered - ah, what a sensuous explosion of all the pent–
up desire that was in us! And on a grand scale! With the entire
country!
Speaking of himself, as well as of his culture, Grossman writes: "We
have lived for twenty years in a false and artificial situation, based on illu–
sions, on a teetering center of gravity between hate and fear. ..." Had the
