The Thinking Heart
Also by David Grossman
fiction
More Than I Love My Life
A Horse Walks into a Bar
Falling Out of Time
To the End of the Land
Her Body Knows Someone to Run With
Be My Knife
The Zigzag Kid
The Book of Intimate Grammar
See Under: Love
The Smile of the Lamb non- fiction
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics
Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo
Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel
The Yellow Wind
The Thinking Heart
david grossman
Essays selected by Eva Cossee and Christoph Buchwald
Translated
by
Jessica Cohen
J ONA THAN CA PE
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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2024
Copyright © David Grossman 2024
Translation copyright © Jessica Cohen 2024
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Preface
Every time a US president proclaims his country’s support for ‘Israel’s right to exist’, I feel a certain outrage: the statement is well-meaning, but could we imagine a president making a similar declaration about France’s right to exist? Or Italy’s, Holland’s, Egypt’s, India’s? Of all the countries in the world, Israel alone finds itself in this absurd predicament. Seventy-six years of sovereignty, and Israel’s existence has yet to be ‘legitimised’ by the rest of the world. This seems all the more inconceivable when we consider that the very nation that was almost annihilated in the Holocaust is once again living – in its own perception and that of many other nations – on the precipice.
Slogans such as ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’, now commonly heard all over the world at mass protests, on university campuses and in editorials, indicate that what lies over this precipice is not only a sometimes-just criticism of Israel by its detractors, but a refusal to ‘grant’ it
what every other state is given: a complete, definitive, stable existence.
In the collective consciousness of many peoples, religions and states, the strange and tenuous Jewish–Israeli existence is conditional. The essays in this collection explore whether, and to what extent, such existential doubt has also permeated the minds of Jewish Israelis themselves, and how they might be affected by the 7 October massacre. One thing is clear: ‘Life on the end line’, as the Israeli poet Nathan Alterman phrased it, has become all the more concrete, more fragile and precarious.
The expressions I see on my fellow Israelis’ faces, the heavy sighs they emit when asked simply, ‘How are you?’ – sighs that seem to have been held in with great effort until this seemingly trivial question punctured them – are symptoms of the current situation: nothing is trivial anymore. Everything reverberates deep down, the proximity to death that we all experienced has left us more exposed. Our sadness is no longer an ‘ordinary’ sadness: it is the sound of our dire understanding that there is not, and perhaps never will be, any relief, any solution to the anxiety and despair that accompany our lives here. Should we in fact despair? Should we stop striving for a solution? Do we have that privilege? May we stop turning over every stone in our search for the slimmest of chances?
Another vital truth that we Israelis have come to understand after so many months of war is that we need committed, strong allies here in the Middle East, because what we have discovered – contrary to everything we believed in, to all the arrogant illusions we were fed for decades – is that we will probably not be able to win the next war on our own.
Resigned to the inevitable, I write these words: ‘the next war’.
Because even if Israel is able – with support from a few powerful states – to deal a severe blow to its enemies, it will itself suffer severe and perhaps fatal blows inflicted by a deadly coalition of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and perhaps ISIS. Even the IDF will not be able to withstand a simultaneous attack by several states – including Iran – on several fronts.
These assumptions lead to a number of conclusions: Israel must achieve stability and acceptance with its neighbours as quickly as possible. In other words, Israel must strive immediately for peaceful relations with those of its neighbours who are willing. Yes, this includes Iran, even if the prospects for that are slim. Peace is the foremost national priority for Israel, as it is for many Arab states. Peace must be the primary element in Israel’s security policy, for it is a condition no less critical to the state’s survival than its military might. Any agreement that strengthens
Israel’s ties in the region – the ‘Abraham Accords’, for example – must address the Palestinian nation, its tragedy, and its wounds: the wound of being refugees, the wound of occupation.
The words I write here are reiterated in the pages of this book more than once, and I shall keep repeating them. They are at the heart of the conflict. Without them, we would have only a ‘peace of the wealthy’ that is bound to blow up in the faces of those who would ignore reality. In other words, when Israel takes any step toward peace, it does so not ‘for the Palestinians’, but rather, to improve its own condition and increase its chances of living a full, secure life in this fickle, violent Middle East.
Yet there are other troubling questions raised by the history of these dramatis personae – primarily, Israel and Palestine – and their relations. Is there a chance for true peace between nations that are becoming more and more religious, fanatical and nationalistic? Are they willing to genuinely relinquish the totalitarian nature of their faiths, or will they merely suspend it for a few years, until they can accumulate enough military power to launch a surprise attack on their neighbour?
These are trenchant questions that must be considered honestly and comprehensively. Today, after 7 October, I can answer them only by way of negation: if the situation between Israel and its neighbours