Many undoubtedly hope that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will end in 2024. I don’t have a recipe for Ukraine, except the war novel Life and fate (1959) by the Russian writer Vasili Grossman. But in that epic, Stalin’s army is winning. And no one in the West needs that, now that his successor Vladimir Putin seems to be benefiting from the lack of Western military aid to Ukraine, and that country may be heading for defeat. But for Israel and Gaza, there is a remedy that all Israelis and Palestinians should read to be freed from their mutual hatred: the novel The tunnel by the Israeli writer and peace activist AB Yehoshua (1936-2022).
The tunnel (2018) is the story of Zvi Luria, a retired engineer from the Israeli Ministry of Road Construction, who suffers from dementia. By chance he comes into contact with a Palestinian village teacher, who is hiding with his son and daughter in an old ruin on a hill in the Negev. The three fled the West Bank after the father sold a piece of land that he did not own to Jewish settlers because he urgently needed money for his wife’s heart transplant. For fear of the revenge of his fellow villagers, he can no longer return home. As a result, he has lost his identity and is also in Israel illegally.
Zvi is involved in the construction of a secret military road through the Negev through a younger ex-colleague, Asaël Maimoni. He also has to walk over that hill, but that is where the three Palestinians are hiding. Zvi now wants to spare that hill and let the road run underneath it. To achieve this, a tunnel must be built. And tunnels are the specialty of Zvi, who becomes friends with the three Palestinians and especially with the daughter.
In Yehoshua’s novel, this leads to a literary treatise on the meaning of identity. And especially about how you can get rid of it. Only then can the traumatic past of your ancestors no longer be used to blackmail your opponent, as Israel does with the Holocaust, according to Yehoshua.
In the writer’s eyes, identity has become a curse that stands in the way of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. While that reconciliation was quite possible before October 7, 2023. You can read the proof in all his novels, in which Jews and Arabs get along well. It was not without reason that Yehoshua was in favor of a one-state solution at the end of his life. According to him, this was the only way to end the violence in the West Bank.
A year and a half before his death, Yehoshua said in response The tunnel in an interview with NRC: “Nowadays everything is only about identity. We have to get rid of that too.” According to him, Corona had proven the danger of thinking in terms of conflicting identities. That alone made building tunnels between those identities so important. These are wise words that you hope will one day, preferably in 2024, come true.