On the Visit of Algerian Writer Boualem Sansal.

Grossman, David (Israeli writer)

Boualem Sansal is a brave man. Brave in his deeds, brave in his thinking. I met him at the writers' festival that took place in Jerusalem in May 2012, and I could feel it at once: here was a man whose spirit is free.

He arrived in Israel despite threats, denunciations, and defamations, leveled at him in his own country and throughout the Arab world. I don't know how many of us could have withstood such pressures and remained faithful to themselves.

The greatest courage of all, in my view, is Sansal's readiness to stand up and face reality--not to hide behind prejudice and fanatical belief. It is easy enough to find refuge in stereotypical thinking from the complexities of a situation like the one in our region. It is comfortable and tempting to give oneself over to the hateful demonization toward Israel so prevalent in the Arab and Muslim world, rather than face up to the intricacy of the Middle East tragedy.

Boualem Sansal made up his mind to come to Israel and see it for himself. And when he saw it, he said honestly, to himself and to his readers, that what he saw did not resemble what he had heard about Israel over many years of preaching and brainwashing. In his public appearances and in private conversations here, he did not ignore Israel's problems, and certainly not the wrongs it has caused to the Palestinians. But he also saw Israel's uniqueness and its great accomplishments. He came to understand its complicated relationship with its traumatic history, and the existential insecurity that looms persistently, even as Israel is the strongest military power in the region.

Most of all, he saw human beings, he spoke with them, listened to them, argued with them. He opened himself to the painful complexity of the return of the Jews to their land, and the tragedy that this return brought upon the Palestinians. He met the primary obligation of anyone who really wants to understand: he came. He was here. He experienced--without filters--both sides, and their contradictory stories.

And when he came here, he also gave the many Israelis he met a chance to shed--if only briefly--their armor of stereotypes about "the Arabs" and their own entrenched beliefs. They heard a new voice calling to them from inside the Arab world. They sensed that this man was offering them a new path to dialogue, interaction, acceptance. Believe me---given the suspicious, hostile relationship between Israelis and Arabs, this is a rare opportunity, almost a fantasy. Is there a creative act bolder and more liberating than what Sansal the writer did in his journey here?

So few are the Arab intellectuals, authors, journalists, academics and clergymen who have dared to do what Boualem Sansal has done. But perhaps, overall, only a few people are capable of reaching as he has into the complexity of the lives of strangers, even of enemies, and feeling their common humanity. But this is precisely the sort of contact we lack here: the contact that can bring strangers and enemies suddenly to recall the possibility still contained within them, a possibility from which they have been exiled for years by their own hatreds and fears. Few are the people like Boualem Sansal, whose vision and sensitivity have the power to heal a pained, torn world.

June 24, 2012

Translation from the Hebrew

By Stuart Schoffman

Copyright [c] 2012 by David Grossman

David Grossman (b. 1954. Jerusalem) is the author of To the End of the Land (2010), translated by Jessica Cohen, and other works of fiction and nonfiction. His work has been translated into thirty languages.

Stuart Schoffman, an American-born journalist, has lived in Jerusalem since 1988. His translations from Hebrew include books by David Grossman. A. B. Yehoshua, and Meir Shalev.