For Palestinians to forgive Israel would be risky, irrational even, but it could be the only hope
In the first chapter of Amos Oz’s novel My Michael, the protagonist Hannah recalls her childhood friends, Khalil and Aziz, two Palestinians who in 1948 disappeared along with 800,000 of their people. In the last chapter she imagines her two friends coming back to blow everything up. By then Hannah has descended into madness.
Hannah, like Oz and his generation of Israelis, knows that before the war of 1948 there was another, older and larger society than her own, and that that society was destroyed and its traces erased; the population was forced to leave, villages were razed to the ground and cities, neighbourhoods and streets were renamed. She must also know that the destruction of the Palestinian society was necessary for the creation of Israel. Unlike her generation, however, Hannah is willing to admit what she knows; but that’s only because she is mad.
A thoughtful article on the way Israeli society puts a mental block on its past atrocities.
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