the line

perhaps my favourite short story of all time is a Hebrew one — Clean Shave, by Etgar Keret. i was required to read it in high school without knowing anything about its genre and immediately fell in love with the way Keret manages to deliver such an absurd Kafkaesque premise so perfectly in two pages of simple, flat, conversational prose. he's been described as "not much of a stylist — you get the impression that he throws three or four of these stories off on the bus to work every morning". a small part of my intended writing style can doubtless be credited to him.

i was talking with my fiancée about his work and how i'm interested in reading the rest of the collection this story comes from, and felt it made sense to run the standard checks on him. while some legendary figures of Hebrew media and science, like Yehonatan Geffen, have remained true to their values, many more decided they'd like to sit firmly on the wrong side of history. it wasn't nice to find out that linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann is a zionist, or that beloved reporter and recent documentarian Danny Kushmaro is a war criminal. i winced as i clicked over to Keret's blog.

what i found was, well, fine. better than fine, for all intents and purposes, for a man of his generation, in his country. he is explicitly pro-Palestinian, anti-war, and willing to approach the facts head on, as opposed to pretending to care about some theoretical blight of hypothetical Palestinians. an article he wrote for ynet in 2024 does a good job encapsulating my feeling of how Israel as a people feels dissociated and in stasis despite Israel as a (government/military/country/machine) throwing itself in hotter and hotter water. hundreds of people get massacred, half of Gaza is erased, houses light on fire and yet nothing changes. it's still 2023, or 2013, or 2006, or 2000.

no, my issue isn't with Keret's analysis, but with his thesis. Keret's opinion, as shared by an overwhelming majority of the left in Israel, is that it's a shame things ended up like this, really. tens of thousands of Gazans are dead, and Keret will gladly attend a demonstration acknowledging these deaths and directing them back at Israel, but he will insist that the "other side" doesn't exist. that it's a language problem — these people support genocide not because they've been lied to by hostile state propaganda, or because they view Palestinians as inherent animals, he implies. we're all the same, because everyone knows someone who died in the war, and we all hate the government. he's pointing the mirror at no one.

Israeli "leftists" will not agree to condemn Israel's actions because they view these condemnations as besides the point. Israel is not and has never been legitimate, and we've spent the past 100 years trying to manufacture a future where it is, and so it's much easier to ignore everything going on around you and focus on mending, and the future, and hope. they want to skip ahead to the part where Israel is like Canada — a country with colonial roots, with troubled history, where they can accept and understand that Israel has done bad things but argue that there's nothing they can do about them. they will twist your words and make you into a Jew-hating hair-splitting guilt-by-association bastard, because in their eyes the only possible way forward is to take a deep sigh and say "well, darn".

it's hard to think about Israel as someone who grew up there, because i know for a fact my view of it is warped. i know for a fact that the Galilee is the most beautiful place in the world, and that it is my one true home, and that deporting all Jews from Palestine would not be reasonable or practical, so we have to make something work, we have to work together, we have to believe. but as an empathetic human being, i can't look at reality and feel like this admission helps anyone. we've spent decades staring at the ground hoping for something better, and now Gaza is being cleansed, and the blood is on our hands.

but then again, i'm a prolific darnster, and i guess everyone draws the line of what's acceptable just under themselves.