Israel's leading writer: ‘We're used to war – but this is something new'

Telegraph

6 hours ago

For the first time in days, the Israeli author Etgar Keret has been able to sleep through the night without fear of an Iranian missile attack on his home in Tel Aviv. 'It's a good feeling,' he tells me when we speak early on June 25. 'Although much has been lost. Close friends have lost their homes. Whole streets have vanished in my hometown of Ramat Gan. Buildings that were part of my landscape of memory in Tel Aviv have gone.
'Of course, Israelis are used to being at war. But the damage the missile attacks created felt like something new.'
Keret, 57, is Israel's leading writer. He has won several awards, including a few from the Israeli state itself. His books, written in Hebrew and translated around the world, include six collections of short stories. They have a high-concept comic absurdity, and often wink at sci-fi or dystopia, yet they're shot through with a pathos that catches, in a strange way, the lunacy of our age. Above all, they refract the warped normality of life in one of the most battle-torn regions on earth.
His new collection, Autocorrect, is a case in point. He had begun writing its constituent stories as the Covid-19 pandemic hit; then his mother died. The book is full of atomisation, disconnection, loss. For instance, 'Soulo' imagines the loneliness of a world brimming with AI companions. 'Point of No Return' scrambles the borders between virtual reality and real life.
He finished the book on Oct 6 2023, but judged it, for the moment, too bleak to send to his publisher. 'I'm such a drama queen,' he says.
The next day, Keret woke to the news of Hamas's attack on Israel.
In the aftermath, he forgot about these stories entirely. Only 100 days later did he read the manuscript again. 'It felt as though reality had descended to the level of what I had written,' he tells me. He points to 'Cornerstone', in which the friend of a boy killed by a drunk driver tries to help the boy's estranged parents decide what to put on the gravestone. 'I wrote that four years ago. After October 7, people were drafted in to write eulogies on gravestones for the victims, because their family had been wiped out – there was no one else to do it.'
Alphabet Soup
Yet Keret is no supporter of Israel's conduct in Gaza. In his homeland, he is as well known for his prominent criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's government as he is for his literary success.
He regularly updates followers on his thoughts and opinions via his popular Substack, Alphabet Soup. Keret believes that the Israeli prime minister, under investigation for corruption, has effectively been using the war both to keep himself in power and to destroy the idea of a Palestinian state. Keret warns that many of the old political certainties about the Middle East no longer hold.
'Recent history has had this biblical magnitude – the massacre, the war in Gaza, our attack on Tehran. But at the same time, our perceptions are shifting. We have learned that the Israeli army is not as strong as we thought, that Hezbollah is not as strong as we thought, that Iran is not as strong as we thought. It's like watching a series of paper tigers being knocked out one after the other.'
He points out that 'the situation in Iran is different [to that in Gaza]. People in Israel despair of the war in Gaza. But we understand why we are fighting this war [with Iran]. And hopefully Netanyahu now at least feels able to hold an election.'
Keret is contemptuous of Israel's ultra-nationalistic parties, on whose support Netanyahu has relied since 2022. 'We have the crazy situation in Israel in which the most dominant person in deciding strategies is Bezalel Smotrich.' (Smotrich, Netanyahu's hard-Right minister of finance, has called the blocking of aid to Gaza 'justified and moral', and called for the Strip to be 'completely destroyed'.) 'The entire country hates him. But he is holding up Netanyahu's government.'
Does Keret fear for the future of Israel, then? 'Every country has its fascists,' he says. 'You have neo-Nazis in Germany and fascists in Britain. Usually the moderate parties refuse to sit alongside them. This was always the case in Israel too. But Netanyahu, running out of options, decided to legitimise them. I'm not warning from afar. It's already happening.'
The son of Holocaust survivors
Keret grew up in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv. He's the son of Holocaust survivors. His first collection was published in 1992. 'I wrote to understand what I was feeling, what my story is, so that I wouldn't have to use other peoples' voices,' he says.
He describes himself as an insubordinate child, possibly thanks to his parents, who imbued in him a horror of groupthink and of victimhood. He recounts a story – and Keret loves to tell stories; interviewing him, wonderfully, takes three times as long as it might – in which his mother refused to take a seat on the bus that had been offered to her simply because she was a Holocaust survivor. 'In a country that owes its existence to the Holocaust, she refused to play the role she was given,' he says. 'She and my father used to say 'We've been through the Holocaust, we don't have to work in it.''
He hates anything that resembles a slogan, anything that hints of the mob. 'I protest against the war in Gaza, but I do so when I feel like it, holding a placard that contains my own words and not other people's.'
But doesn't he worry that many of the protests against the war, particularly in London, are also vectors for anti-Semitism? 'All my life I've campaigned for freedom for Palestine,' he says. 'There is nothing anti-Semitic in that. The majority of Israel wants to see the war ended. And when you have a war in which you kill civilians in big numbers while causing major hunger problems, people won't like you.'
He added: Maybe if we lived in a less dumb era, our criticism would be more sophisticated. But thanks to social media, people think and respond in very simple, uncomplicated ways.'
A crisis for literature
Indeed, Keret reserves his greatest contempt for social media. 'We've become those grumpy people from The Muppet Show. Our role is to sit in the stands and react.'
He fears deeply the effect that technology is having on individual subjectivity. It's an overriding concern of his work in general, and Autocorrect in particular. For him, the greatest threat that AI poses is not evil robots taking over the world, but humans giving into a homogenising passivity – and by their own volition, too.
In particular, Keret thinks, it represents a crisis for literature. 'If you told me the last three movies you saw at the cinema, that would tell me something about you,' he says.
'But if you told me the three last videos you saw on Instagram, the one with the cat, the one with the rapper and the one with the recipe for crème brulée, I can't tell you anything about you, because you didn't choose them. The world we see [online] represents the thinking process of the masses. But a story is the sum of the decisions of the protagonist. If a character says 'I'm not going to kill that woman', instead of Crime and Punishment, we'd end up with ham and cheese.'
Nonetheless, at the same time, he's fatalistic about the future of the novelist. 'The age when we as human beings could persuade ourselves we were useful is over.'
This is starting to sound almost impossibly bleak. Keret has an unsettling way of delivering the most desolate sentences in the lightest possible way. The effect isn't dissimilar to that of his stories, which rely on a similar disruptive juxtaposition. It's almost certainly the consequence of having lived 'through five wars', as he puts it, in a region in which the horrors of conflict are seemingly superseded by each passing decade.
'Everyone on the street in Israel looks normal, but everyone is incredibly damaged to levels you don't understand. It's a nation in trauma. Children talk of fathers who were burned alive [by Hamas]. You think: what kind of society can grow from this? And then, can you even start to imagine what's happening in Gaza? This region – it's like a reality show in how to suck humanity out of people. And it risks having this effect in which pain turns to fear turns to horrible indifference.'
Yet there is nothing indifferent about Keret, nor his deceptively off-hand stories. He wrote his first one during his military service, which he spent working on computers in a basement. A friend worked alongside him and during one shift suddenly shot himself in the temple. Keret took him to the hospital, where he died; Keret then had to return to base. 'His blood was still on the floor. There were two more bullets in the gun.
'And I remembered then my father, who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in a hole. He told me he had avoided going crazy by inventing a new world each day and living inside of that. He said to me: 'When you are put inside a cramped space, the human instinct is to try and widen it. And if you can imagine a different place, that means you still have options.''