Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 13 1. Although the conflict is their main topic, the texts dealing with the conflict are mostly concerned with the feeling that it is impossible to grasp and understand it. In a way, these texts are oxymoronous as they tell a story about the inability to tell the story of the conflict (Benziman, 2011). For example, David Grossman’s (1983) The Smile of the Lamb ( Heyuch Hagdi ) is a novel in which the question of what is true and what is false is the light-motif and in which the characters “understand that they cannot understand” (Gertz, 1993, p. 96). This novel is rendered by four different narrators (an Arab, two Israeli officers, and a psychologist who is married to one of the officers and has an affair with the other officer) as if to say that in order to describe the conflict one needs several distinct points of view because one perspective is simply insufficient. In addition, the characters involved in the conflict cannot construct a coherent narrative that will give them a clear perspective on it. The identity of each of the characters seems split and embroiled in itself. They cannot manage to find a full and coherent prism through which to view the world. As a result of the absence of a stable identity, the characters seek group-belongings that will help them understand and define themselves, but their attempt fails. The image conveyed is one in which everyone sees the conflict differently and no communication between the different prisms materializes. However – as opposed to a regular Rashomon in which each narrative is full and coherent in its own way and competes with the others – the chaos and fragmentation in this text results in the collapse of the prism of all the individuals who cannot tell a full and coherent story about the conflict. As mentioned, this is an example, one of many, of texts of this time which present the same tendency. The Lover ( Ham’ahev ) by Yehoshua (1977), Delusion ( Ta’atu’on ) by Yitzhak Ben-Ner (1989), Martyr ( Shahid ) by Avi Valentin (1989) and others are all told in the same divided, multi-narrators technique, which splits reality in order to try to understand it. Arabesques by Anton Shammas (1986), a novel written in Hebrew by an Arab, is also structurally divided into portions titled “The Teller” and “The Tale.” The Road to Ein Harod ( Haderech l’ein Harod ) by Kenan (1984) tells a story that is set partly above ground and partly underground, in which “whatever happens above ground level has no meaning for what happens underground” (Kenan, 1984, p. 71). In other texts of the decade, the inability to present the conflict comprehensively through one stable prism is dealt with by presenting the interaction between Israelis and Palestinian-Arabs as a dialog between deaf people. In the movie Fictitious Marriage ( Nisuim