It can't go on, it goes on

Since Sept. 11, it has often seemed as if the whole world is in the grips of an Israeli-style madness, a kind of mental illness in which not just a person but a whole national entity boldly flings itself into the one series of actions that most goes against its long-range interests. This makes David Grossman's new collection of essays, "Death as a Way of Life," a peculiarly, one might say eerily, useful and enlightening book to read right now, not just for the usual crowd of fanatics who are chronically obsessed with the Arab-Israeli conflict but for a far more general audience. In it, one of Israel's great contemporary writers shows us what lies ahead for the Western world if force is the only weapon we choose to wield.

As its title would indicate, "Death as a Way of Life" is a primer in the logic of the absurd. Has there ever been a conflict more amenable to the laws of Beckett, the unreason of Kafka, than that between the Israelis and the Palestinians? The locked, motionless quality of the desperate battle, the unerring ability of both parties to plunge into realms of self-destruction, the dark, dark, darkness of it all (especially the uniquely inexorable tool of suicide bombing as well as the killings of babies), the seeming endlessness and no vision of the future -- what struggle could be more conventionally modern, even postmodern? What clash more existential on both sides? Who are -- behind all the rhetoric and theatrics -- better contemporary analogues of Vladimir and Estragon than Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat? It's as if Grossman were writing from a Middle Eastern Alcatraz, writing out of sheer exhaustion and despondency: Perhaps someone somewhere will someday see the message in the bottle.

In a series of short essays written as events unfolded, the new book addresses the 10 years of Arab-Israeli conflict that followed the signing of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn. There is progress in the history Grossman sketches out: progress from hope to despair, from possibility to futility, from the rational to the absurd. Reading the book from cover to cover is something akin to watching Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat come away from the Historic Handshake only to find that what they had hidden in their grips was not an olive branch but knives, bombs, tanks and every other tool of betrayal and death.