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All battles of Abraham B. Yehoshua – Pierre Haski

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All battles of Abraham B. Yehoshua – Pierre Haski

When a giant leaves us, it prompts us to reconsider his life and his struggles. This is the case of Abraham B. Yehoshua, the great Israeli writer who died on June 14 at the age of 85. Born in 1936 in Jerusalem, Médicis prize in France in 2012, he belonged to a generation that is disappearing, along with other great names in literature such as Amos Oz or Aharon Appelfeld, both of whom died in 2018.

A page in history closes with Yehoshua, because Israel and the Middle East of today no longer have much in common with the world lived by his generation. Yehoshua, who signed his books with the initials of his name, AB, or Alef-Bet in Hebrew, participated in all the battles of his time, from that for peace to that for secularism. And at the end of his life he was convinced that he had lost them all.

Like Amos Oz or David Grossman (in the next generation) Yehoshua opposed the colonization of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967. Among the tributes arrived on June 14 is that of B’Tselem, the Israeli organization for the defense of human rights of which it was a part. B’Tselem greeted an intellectual who had “devoted his time and energy to equality, peace and human rights for all”.

Those responsible for the failure
For years, Yehoshua has strongly supported the two-state solution, that of Israel and that of Palestine. However, in the mid-10s of this century he came to the conclusion that that solution was now impractical given the presence of half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

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At that point, Yehoshua sided in favor of a one-state solution in which both Israelis and Palestinians could live, a prospect that however poses other problems as to whether all inhabitants of this state have the same rights.

In an interview granted to the Obs, in 2018, Yehoshua blamed for this failure the “Middle Eastern chaos”, the “passivity of the Palestinian Authority”, “the downsizing of the peace camp in Israel” and above all the colonization that all governments Israelis have encouraged or tolerated. How can we not share this bitter observation when the center of gravity of Israeli political life has shifted to the far right? Today, Naftali Bennet’s government has no peace program with the Palestinians, just as that of his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu did.

Yehoshua’s generation has clashed with the harsh realities of the Middle East. The peace movement hit the wall of violence, lack of trust, ideologies and the growing weight of religion in the conflict, which exasperated the secular Yehoshua. The writer had very harsh words for Gaza in the hands of the Hamas Islamists and for the Jewish ultra-Orthodox and their influence on Israeli political and social life.

Paradoxically, Israel has found its place in the Middle East with the new close relations with the Gulf countries, without even coming close to a peace with the Palestinians.

The international climate, by the way, does not help. On June 14, Joe Biden announced that next month he will go to Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia. However, neither the United States nor the Europeans have the slightest intention of addressing the Palestinian question, which does not appear on their radar. Abraham Yehoshua understood this very well.

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(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)

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