Zionist with a moral purpose

Controversial Israeli writer AB Yehoshua, who visited Dublin last week, tells Sorcha Hamilton why his work questions what's right and wrong

Art has a moral vocation, says AB Yehoshua, the celebrated Israeli author who visited Dublin last week. Shortlisted in 2005 for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, the author and retired academic, now aged 70 and living in Haifa, has been described as "the Israeli Faulkner".

No stranger to controversy, Yehoshua's views on Jewish identity and his work with the Israeli Peace Now organisation have caused heated debate both inside and outside Israel. His visit to Ireland also sparked a protest by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who opposed the Israeli embassy's sponsorship of the event.

"I want to bring the question of morality to the front stage in my work," says Yehoshua.

In his latest novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, a migrant worker is killed by a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. For days her body lies unclaimed in the morgue until a manager at the bakery where she worked is ordered to find out more about her. As the novel unfolds, the manager embarks on a journey of self-discovery, slowly questioning the unfeeling attitude that he and his company have towards the death of this anonymous woman.

At his reading in the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin, Yehoshua was asked about the way Israeli society deals with suicide bombings, in particular the clean-up operations that happen immediately afterwards.

"Israeli society does not know how to react to mourning, or this attack on civilian society," he said. "We repress it to keep the normality. I felt this was wrong, wrong for the health of society."

Yehoshua was keen to explore this approach to death in A Woman in Jerusalem, which is dedicated to a friend killed by the bomb on Mt Scopus in 2002.

"It is the task of the writer to give meaning to death," says Yehoshua. As the main character continues his journey to bring the deceased woman back to her family, his feelings begin to change.

"A minor guilt starts to develop into a very powerful journey of reparation," says Yehoshua, whose novels have also been compared to Kafka and Chekhov.

In The Lover and A Late Divorce, Yehoshua uses internal monologues which create a layering of the text, echoing the style of William Faulkner. In A Late Divorce, the story switches cleverly between first-person narratives written as a stream of consciousness.

"I don't want to say how much I owe to Faulkner," Yehoshua jokes.

Point of view is a key issue in his works, both as a theme and as a stylistic element. Mr Mani, perhaps his most well-known novel, contains conversations in which the words of only one of the participants are recorded, giving the reader the impression of listening to someone talking on the phone and having to imagine what the person on the other end is saying. Throughout Yehoshua's work, the reader is constantly asked to guess and question which side of the story to believe.

It is this moral questioning and political symbolism which has brought Yehoshua's work to such prominence. Describing himself as a left-wing Zionist, Yehoshua became a leading voice in a wave of new Israeli literature after 1948, alongside his contemporaries, Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld.

It is impossible to escape politics, according to Yehoshua, but his literature is not intended as an instrument to express ideological or political views.

"I can express these views in articles," he says.

His visit to Dublin coincided with the sustained debate over the boycott of Israeli academics in the UK, a boycott Yehoshua says is unfair because it focuses exclusively on Israel.

Yehoshua was one of the early members of the Peace Now organisation, whose main principle is that Israelis and Palestinians have the right to live within secure borders. This means that Israel has the right to a border in order to stop terrorism, Yehoshua says. Other members of the Israeli left, however, argue that behind the Israeli security policy is an ongoing attempt to ring-fence the Palestinians.

Yehoshua claims that a border is essential to end bloodshed. A border - "it can be a wall, a fence, or electronic devices" - must be along the 1967 line, established after the Six-Day War, he says. "The border now is penetrating into Palestinian territories and it creates problems, and this is a bad border, a bad wall."

Yehoshua caused a heated debate when he was invited to speak at the American Jewish Committee last month. He accused American Jews of changing their nationalities like jackets. Yehoshua explains to me his concerns about the scope of Jewishness amongst the diaspora.

"Israel is the place in which the totality around you is Jewish," he says. "We are in the totality of Jewishness."

Asked if the Irish community could express their full Jewishness living in Ireland, Yehoshua says no.

"The Jews in Ireland, they are Irish, they are participating as full Irish citizens, voting in the parliament. But the way in which they exert their Jewishness in life is very partial," he says.

This is not equating either with being a better or worse Jew, he adds.

At a time when multiculturalism and multiple identity are seen as progressive, Yehoshua maintains his ideas about the "totality" of Jewishness and the Jewish identity as a battle for survival.

"To be spread all over the world is not the best thing," he argues.

Protesters outside Yehoshua's reading in Dublin circulated a controversial interview in the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, in which Yehoshua expressed his ideas about the treatment of Palestinians after the evacuation of settlements. He told Ha'aretz: "After we remove the settlements and after we stop being an occupation army, all the rules of war will be different. We will exercise our full force. If they shoot Qassam missiles at Ashkelon, we will cut electricity to Gaza. We shall cut communications in Gaza. We shall prevent fuel from going to Gaza . . . And then, when the Palestinian suffering will be totally different, much more serious, they will, by themselves, eliminate the terror."

Yehoshua explains that although he does not advocate the shooting of civilians, other means, such as cutting off communications and amenities, would demonstrate to the Palestinians that they have a role to play in ending terrorism once occupation ends.

"We want to give back territories in exchange for peace," he says. "Our civilians are killed by them; their civilians have to be responsible for this, they can stop it. I can't say 'the army is shooting, it's not my business, I am not responsible'. Civilians are the authority. They cannot say 'I am a civilian, it is not my business'."

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which innocent civilians continue to bear the suffering, Yehoshua touches upon a central moral dilemma of our time: whether anyone has the right to kill or inflict suffering on civilians. Is there such a thing as an innocent civilian in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Ironically, A Woman in Jerusalem brings this moral issue to the fore when an innocent bystander joins the endless list of civilians killed on both sides. Yehoshua's writing explores these fundamental issues and reflects all the moral turmoil which has surrounded the existence of his country and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.