Shulamith Hareven Quotes

More than anything, we must understand that this was not a battle of strength against strength, but of weakness against weakness; throughout the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, each side has felt itself to be far weaker than its opponent, and acted accordingly. We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built.

The first things that get lost in charismatic leadership are facts.

I much prefer this cold peace to a hot war. But let me tell you about the atmosphere in Egypt in May '82. That was a real honeymoon. Everything was open, even euphoric. We had already given back Sinai, and every Egyptian in the street would stop to tell us that Israel was an honorable nation, one that kept its word. Practically all of our friends were making definite plans to visit Israel for congresses, lectures, or simply for private purposes. There was a joint exhibition of women painters-Egyptian and Israeli-at the biggest hotel in Cairo. Once they knew we were Israelis, waiters and shopkeepers refused to accept our tips. "You are family now," they would say. And you know the level of poverty in Egypt where a teacher earns $40 a month. In May of '82, Egypt was a ball! (HC: And then?) SH: And then Israel invaded Lebanon, and everything, everyone stopped-horrified.

Perhaps our region could have freed itself from this prevailing mode of thinking; perhaps not. One cannot play the game in retrospect. Neither can one talk about statistics and numbers without addressing the entirety of human misery, or, by extrapolation, without asking the medics.

In a small stone hut, not far from the Valley of Zin, lived a young man whose father had sought to kill him. Ever since then his eyes blinked rapidly, as if fending off a strong light. The villagers kept away from him and he from them, their speech brief and halting, no more room in it for good or evil than the space between a cloud and a lone thorn tree in the desert. (first lines)

Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist.

If we insist on absolute justice, the reckoning of lives will never end. All we can talk about is beneficial justice, beneficial for both sides-that is, a territorial compromise and the continuation of the conflict at the negotiating table.

It is probable that the time of governments' wishing to control literature is past. What we are faced with now is the frightening authority of great, terrifying masses of people who hardly ever read, who prefer television and the movies, and who carry the terrible weight of sheer huge numbers. What can we do? Essentially, what we have been doing so far: write of what we know, our places, our environment, our families. Tribal literature, if you wish. All the world understands families. A family contributes to the understanding of people as people.

The Hittite woman would not give up. Each time Salu came, she clutched desperately at the threads of his life as if at a garment she could pull him by. (p 171)

A time comes when it is no longer possible to use this victimhood as an excuse for everything. As every educator knows, it creates a great residue of cynicism, if only because of the obvious gap between what children are taught by rote and what they see with their own eyes. If I am a victim--and not just any victim but an eternal victim-then I am excused from many things: from having pride in what I am, for example; from exploring and studying my real identity; from looking in the mirror; from a sober look at my surroundings to see what is in it and what is not; and from any possibility of empathy for another. Semantic clichés, whose truth no one questions, arise and are parroted, such as "the whole world is against us," when in reality we have both enemies and friends, and the majority of nations and people take no interest in us at all. Or "all the Arabs want to throw us into the sea," with no realistic discernment of our actual, diverse relations with each Arab country separately.

Nationalism reinforced by fundamentalist religion equals conflict. In this region, we are drugged on man-made drama; on a perpetual high of violent politics. It will take more than a few men signing a paper to make people realize the strength of the ordinary; to feel that sanity can be exciting. Only visible, everyday change can, gradually, with great patience, make it happen. (Preface)

One essential thing did change: from now on it is not automatically Jew against Arab and Arab against Jew; it is the Jews and Arabs who support peace, and those, Jews and Arabs both, who oppose it-not one nation against another, but two bi-national coalitions. That in itself constitutes the greatest change in the Middle East, perhaps the only one that might succeed, indeed, perhaps a last chance. (Preface)

Anyone who wants to maintain the current situation, the so-called status quo, lays the groundwork for the next war. In fact, the term "status quo" is only part of the phrase "status quo ante bellum": the situation as it was before the war. There are no static situations in the world, least of all in the roiling Middle East. Anyone who thinks it is possible to arrive at peace through continued force-without accords, without rules, avoiding the determination of new and secure borders-misleads people. Anyone who thinks the policy of "nary an inch" will bring about an accord is a deceiver. No one will come to talk to him seriously.

To this day our language has kept its stony, concentrated, concise character, striving for the essential. This makes Hebrew practically untranslatable; a phrase of three words in Hebrew becomes a phrase of eighteen words in French, so you can imagine what it does to poetry.

Past Latrun, between the low hills and the mountains,Ada, without warning, finds herself driving into fear. (first line)