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but also the soul, preparing itself for the next explosion or news bulletin. “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings,” wrote Bertolt Brecht—another experienced citizen of disaster zones—in his poem “To Posterity.” Indeed, when one lives in a disaster zone, one is constantly on guard, and one’s entire being anticipates imminent pain, imminent humiliation.
    It is difficult to determine the moment at which the cruel reversal occurs. When is the question of whether the pain and humiliation will in fact occur no longer significant because, either way, you are already deep inside them, even if they themselves remain only possibilities? For you have already created them inside you. You are already maintaining a routine that is saturated with humiliation because of the constant fear of humiliation. You no longer realize to what extent your life is largely conducted within the fear of fear, and how much the anxiety
is slowly distorting your nature—as an individual and as a society—and how it is robbing you of your happiness, of your purpose in life.
    In this intolerable climate, I and many other writers try to write.
    In the first two years of the last intifada, for example, I went into my study every morning and wrote a story about a man and a woman who spend an entire night in a car, on an intense and turbulent journey. There were moments when it seemed utterly mad to shut myself up with these people in the car while the world around me turned upside down. On the other hand, writing has always been the best way for me to stay sane, and to find a grasping point in the world, which, as I grow older, seems more and more illusory and absurd, not truly graspable.
    When the book I was writing— Her Body Knows —was eventually published, I was frequently asked, “Why didn’t you write about the intifada?” “How could it be that the man and the woman are not a Palestinian who falls in love with an Israeli?” And also, “Is the man’s broken leg a metaphor for the fracture occurring in the Zionist idea?” And of course, “Is the car really an allegory for the stifling Occupation?”
    My reply was, No, these are a man and a woman who insist on turning inward, to each other—because they must. They even turn their backs on the “situation” outside, perhaps because they instinctively feel that this “situation” may cause them to miss out on the most
important things in their lives. They feel that because of the “situation” and its terrors, they barely have the time or energy left over to inquire into the greater questions of human existence, and their own private little existence, which happens to have been tossed into the disaster zone of the Middle East.
    When we live in a perpetual battle for our very existence, we often begin, out of despair and anxiety, and perhaps mainly out of exhaustion, to believe deep in our hearts that the war—in all its forms and guises—is the main thing in life, and often the only thing. We are so submerged in our warped perception that we barely grasp the true price we are paying for living alongside our own lives, for not daring even to dream about the whole spectrum of possibilities that a full, normal, peaceful life can offer a human being.
    Again, I hope you understand that I am not talking “politics” in the narrow and restricted meaning of the term, in its insulting meaning, I would say. I will not discuss occupied territories or settlements or unilateral or bilateral withdrawals today. But I will talk of the principles of this disastrous condition, and of the roots it is striking in us, and the blows it is delivering us. Moreover, I will address the role of literature in this state, the healing and mending that literary writing and a literary way of thinking, observing, and regarding can bring to these distortions.
    In the almost-eternal disaster zone in which our lives are lived, if we dare for a moment to truly look at what is happening to us