Litt israelsk litteratur

På den skriftlige eksamenen i hebraisk skal vi oversette et utdrag fra en veldig bra bok skrevet av Amos Oz, en av Israels aller mest kjente forfattere. Det blir uten tvil en utfordring, men litt lettere blir det jo når man har lest den engelske utgaven av boka før eksamen. Siden dere mine lesere er oppvakte og intelligente som få, har jeg valgt å publisere et lite utdrag fra boka her i bloggen. En israelsk araber bosatt på Vestbredden forteller om sine opplevelser fra da Israel okkuperte Vestbredden i 1967. Han var frustrert og sint og full av hat mot israelerne, amerikanerne, engelskmennene, sionistene. Men så...

"And then something happened. One day in 1968 my mother asked me to take her to see some relatives in Acre. It was my first trip into Israel. We took a cab, and because the cab driver had some business, we stayed for a while in Natanya (en israelsk by). I look around and in Natanya I see old people sitting on park benches in the sun, leaning on their canes, talking, just like the old people in Nablus (by på Vestbredden). It was a little strange. It annoyed me! The Zionists should be soldiers! Let them be a brutal enemy! They're not supposed to look like the old people of Nablus! And then I saw little children playing in the street. And then I saw an elderly Jewish laborer drag an ice box and load it onto his cart, which was drawn by a donkey. All of a sudden it became difficult to hate them. They looked too much like human beings. That trip caused a small crisis in me. Perhaps something similar happens to a Jew who comes to Germany for the first time and suddenly finds that the streets are not filled with uniformed Nazis with jackboots and whips, but that there are old people, poor people; that there are lovely children; that there are human beings without horns and tails. It was hard! And afterward, as we were traveling, we wandered a bit around Haifa - on the Carmel ridge, in the park. Suddenly my mother urgently needed a toilet, and i realized that I had to go up to some Jew and ask him where the toilets are. I realized, but I just couldn't do it. There were a lot of Jews around, and I was incapable of talking to them. Totally incapable, as though under a spell. In the meantime my mother was suffering. Finally my mother herself went up to a young Jewish woman and explained her problem without words, because they had no language in common; I watched how this girl took my mother by the arm, like this, as if she were hugging her, and led her to the toilets there at the edge of the park. Do you know what I did? I began to cry. Like a child, I couldn't stop. When my mother came back and saw me she got frightened. She asked me what had happened to me - why the tears - and I cried and cried and didn't know what to say to her. Shall I tell you something? To this very day I don't understand those tears.
(...)
We (the Palestinians) have learned something from you (the Israelis). We want to be an open, pluralistic, democratic society. And that is not going to happen so soon with Jordan. We remember King Hussein, alright. I, for one, am willing to state openly and out loud today: The Jews have a historical claim to part of Palestine. Your forefathers were here, along with our forefathers. Your suffering grants you rights, as does our suffering. I accept that. Do you know what was the hardest thing for me to swallow? That we are two similar peoples. That our fate is interlocked. Am I happy about it? No, not at all. You are not happy about it, either. But nothing can be done about that anymore: we are linked together. You are our destiny. We are your destiny. Our respective disasters, yours and ours, for decades in this land - these very disasters have welded us together. And that's it. Either we will continue our stubbornness until we destroy each other completely, or we will recognize each other and recognize the tie between us, and then, maybe, there will be an end to the suffering. Perhaps. My tears in Haifa that I told you about - perhaps it was my hatred that wept then, because it was dying. My hatred is dead. Now I have only bitterness and anger, but no more hatred. There's nothing we can do about it: here in this land we are welded together, Jews and Arabs, forever."

- Fra In Israel (פה ושם בארץ ישראל) av Amos Oz.