The Yellow Wind

By David Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. 216 pp. $17.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by Catherine M. Willford

In early 1987 Israeli novelist David Grossman began seven weeks of encounters with West Bank Palestinians to write an article for the Israeli weekly Koteret Rashit commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Confessing that until then he had allowed himself to regard Palestinians as an impersonal mass in order to shield himself from the moral dilemmas posed by the Occupation, Grossman vowed to "direct my gaze at the invisible Arabs, [and] face this forgotten reality." The book struck a deep chord in Israeli society, and The Yellow Wind became a bestseller.

Eschewing political leaders and their rhetoric, Grossman spent his time with Deheishe camp dwellers, university students, and illegal factory workers in Tel Aviv.

In what he has termed "a completely subjective book," Grossman concludes that both Palestinians and Israelis are being destroyed by the occupation. While this is scarcely a revelation, the book is nevertheless an engrossing study by a man forced to question the guiding principles of his own life, and of the state he clearly loves.

The book brilliantly conveys Grossman's repeated shocks of recognition when, at the most unexpected moments, he discovers a strong sense of connection with Palestinians. An old woman in Deheishe refugee camp, longing for the sweet water of her village well, reminds him of his grandmother, an exile from Poland. He realizes that Palestinians have their own "strategy of exile," as did the diaspora Jews. He hears the children of Deheishe singing nationalist songs and wonders if they feel just as exhilarated and heroic as did Jewish children singing songs of defiance against British soldiers before 1948.

Grossman tentatively asks whether Israelis are truly capable of understanding the Palestinian condition. In a much-discussed chapter of the book, he describes the Sabbath with the Gush Emunim settlers of Ofra. He asks these Jewish fundamentalists to imagine, just for a moment, what they would find most hateful about the occupation if they were Arabs. Grossman is apalled to discover that the settlers will "not allow themselves even a split second of empathy." He accuses the settlers of blocking off a part of their souls, and of undermining the moral education of their children by sending them mixed messages about the law, intimidation, murder, and the Jewish underground.

Grossman does not restrict his scorn to the Israeli right. He takes to task the courts of the territories and their mockery of civil liberties. He dispassionately describes the killing of three Nafha prison hunger strikers by improperly administered forced feeding, an incident that a commission of inquiry terms "an unfortunate mishap."

Depicting the "demeaning, degenerate existence" of illegal Palestinian workers in Israel, he blasts the Israeli national labor union, the Histadrut, for refusing to force factory owners to comply with the law that requires registration of workers. In the absence of union protection enjoyed by Israeli workers, these Palestinians suffer gross exploitation and injustice. Grossman describes these men and boys, separated from their families for long periods of time, living in filthy, rat-infested warehouses, doing the jobs no Israeli will perform, without health-and accident insurance, and at sub-standard wages.

Grossman is troubled by the moral implications of the use of a network of secret police, collaborators, and informers to "puncture the fabric of traditional life" in the West Bank and "corrupt and anesthetize" Israelis. In a short story set in 1972 called "A Swiss Mountain View," Grossman creates a Shin Bet agent named Gidi who has been in control of "his village" since immediately after the Six-Day War. When Gidi's first son is born, he realizes there is no one with whom he can share his joy. His supposed easy, warm relations with "his Arabs" are in fact just a veneer covering the tissue of blackmail, venality, corruption, shame, and contempt upon which the occupation is based. Though he believes in his work, Gidi realizes that "when two apples touch one another at a single point of decay, the mold spreads over both of them."

Grossman has said that writing The Yellow Wind changed his life. In a recent interview he expressed his support for direct negotiations with the PLO and his hope that within 10 years there would be a Palestinian state with open borders, sharing close economic and cultural ties with Israel. He concludes this powerful, heart-felt work with a call for both Israelis and Palestinians to face the realities of the occupation, speak out against them, and move on to the moral action by which both parties can be redeemed.

Catherine M Willford is a free-lance journalist and circulation director for the Washington Report.