Lessons From Israel

I don‘t think that a bigger army or defense budget could have stopped these attacks; it’s not a question of money. The most important thing that should be understood is that future warfare may not be on the national level. It will be based on groups of people with the same ideas from many countries. It is very discomforting to know that all those people in the suicide attack came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are countries that are friends of America. This is really the most frustrating thing that I know from Israel, that you suffer loss and you don‘t know against whom to retaliate. This puts countries in a very weak position, because you think if you have a big defense budget you will be stronger. But if you have this kind of invisible enemy, your missiles don’t do you any good.

If America doesn‘t react to these things wisely, this fracture could become even bigger, and we could easily find ourselves in a kind of Western-worlddeveloping-world conflict that could lead to a much larger fight. It just shows how much the Palestinian problem was the tip of the iceberg. In a sense, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could serve as a microcosm of this potential larger-scale Western-vs.-Muslim world conflict. I hope that the American government will be smart enough not to repeat our history and our mistakes. Because if not, very soon the entire world will fall into the violence that now reigns in the Middle East.

The author of three books of fiction, two collections of comics, a musical and an award-winning film, Etgar Keret is one of Israel’s most highly regarded young writers and has long been an eloquent spokesman for peace. He will read from The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God, the first of his works to be translated into English, at Midnight Special in Santa Monica on October 1. For this piece, he spoke to Ben Ehrenreich on the phone from the University of Iowa, where he is a resident at the university‘s International Writers Program.