Yesterday I did a piece that expressed some surprise at Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua’s sanitized view of the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba.
Well a friend passed along this shocker written by David Bloom in 2002. Bloom picked up on an Amira Hass piece in Ha’aretz challenging bigtime writers, including Yehoshua, to come out against “transfer,” or the racist expulsion of Palestinians from Israel. Bloom:
[Hass wrote] “Will the authors who picked olives with the Palestinians make do with that, and not demand that the law enforcement authorities in Israel make clear their position? Is transfer an inseparable part of the founding ideology of the State of Israel, or a twisted mutation, which should not be allowed to rise up against its creator?”
The authors Hass refers to are Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Meir Shalev and David Grossman, who toured Palestinian villages in the West Bank on Oct. 30 and harvested olives for the beleagured olive farmers.
The Palestinian olive harvest has been hampered by Israeli settlers, who have attacked harvesters, and stolen their crops. (Deutsche-Presse Agentur, Oct. 31) [Weiss: Gee, I guess this has been going on a long time without a peep from the Americans]. A.B. Yehoshua, best known for the novel “Five Seasons,” was asked by writer Avi Raz in an April 16 1993 interview in the magazine Tel Aviv Time (Zman Tel Aviv): “What do we do if the Palestinians continue the terror?” Yehoshua replied,
“And then, if this day comes, that the Palestinians break the agreements we’ve made with them, then I, as a dove and as a man of the left, say: Then we have to act against them in a drastic manner, the hardest way possible, that is we turn to them and say to them: If after giving you the opportunity to establish your own state, and to be free and manage your own lives [affairs], and with this you are not content – then leave here. We’ll take them and transfer them across the Jordan. In an orderly manner. Transfer… I say in summary: If they haven’t the ability, after they’ve been given independence, to live as good neighbors – then they should leave here. If it becomes clear after all that has been done that they are not inclined to govern themselves, on the powers that they have been vested with, we’ll transfer them across the Jordan and let them be there.”
