"Ed medina" ("State Witness") by Igal Sarna, Xargol, 479 pages, 16 euros

In the face of obstacles and difficulties in life, the individual can opt for one of two opposing responses: to deal with the painful issue, to study it and even to become unflaggingly engrossed in it, or to flee as far as possible, if not into concrete reality then into distraction and imagination. Neither of these two courses of action testifies to better mental health than the other. This is also the case with life in the State of Israel. Although for many of us our personal lives are absolutely fine, a sea of troubles, threats, prophecies of wrath and bad news surrounds us on all sides, all the time. The news prompts the question of what can be done to repair the situation. It seems to me that the way preferred by most of this country's population involves ignoring things, distraction and excessive absorption in everyday life and its pleasures. After all, I am just a small cog in a large wheel and I won't be able to solve all of those problems; for that there are leaders and experts.

In one of his reports, journalist Igal Sarna of the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth relates to the question he was asked in nearly every Palestinian home he entered during the period of the intifada: "How are things in Tel Aviv?" And he quotes his late colleague Yoram Bronowski, who once said to him: "Human life isn't just suffering. You also have to breathe, and therefore Tel Aviv is so essential to our existence." Most Israelis do not know the details of the occupation, says Sarna; only those who deal with it. This is difficult knowledge and the witnesses are few.

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Sarna's book, "State Witness," is a book of personal history. It is a book that is immeasurably captivating and devastating, like his regular reports in the press and those of some of his colleagues, about what is happening in the reality that we are trying to deny, knocking on the doors of the bubble in which I and others like me are trying to live normal lives, under a volcano. The book sums up Sarna's journalistic work between the entry into Lebanon in 1982 and the exit from the Gaza Strip in 2005. He tells about his meetings and his observations beyond the borders, about his journalistic work in the company of daring photographers, about his experiences as someone who lives in the field, sometimes infiltrating areas behind roadblocks and fleeing like a Palestinian from the Israeli soldier. Perhaps this is not very original as far as careful readers of the press are concerned, but in the form of a long essay that aims to provide a coherent picture of the chaos in which we are living, the reading experience is nevertheless different.

Were this not my reality and that of my children, I would say: How fascinating. But because it is about our very own selves, this is a book that drives the reader to despair. It is hard to read this bleak narrative, which does not lead to any exit, in which there is not a single drop of hope. The author does not even say: Perhaps in the next generation we will know tranquillity. His only consolation is in the birth of children to him and to a Palestinian friend, but it is clear that these children will know more wars. The children's fate comes up repeatedly at various points in the book. In a meeting, poet Dahlia Ravikovitch says: "There has to be security for the children even in a national struggle." And Palestinian poet Fadwa Touqan contradicts her: "No ... because [President] Bush has to be refused by everyone, even children." The symbols of the intifada are children who are killed, on both sides. Sarna enlarges upon them, but spends more time on the Palestinians. He notes during the course of 1999 that, "the murder of children is the last warning sign of a society that is losing its mind."

Who can take in all the suffering that is described in this book? At I conference on parenting that I attended this week, psychoanalyst Anna Epstein spoke about children who grow up in the shadow of traumatic events and their psychological survival. She spoke about herself, a little girl who was imprisoned in Auschwitz together with her mother, and used one of her early memories to explain how a parent can protect his child even in the most difficult situations. Here is what she said: "We arrived in Auschwitz on a beautiful day in June, but the air was full of thick black smoke that had a cloyingly sweet smell. A short time after we arrived I heard my mother saying to another woman that the smoke had the smell of scorched human flesh. When I asked my mother if that was possible, she shrugged her shoulders and said: 'It's just a rumor.' That is what I needed to hear. Now I could reinforce my disavowal and be protected from the threatening significance of what was happening at Auschwitz."

Epstein defines this disavowal as a split situation which makes it possible to acknowledge reality, but at the same time makes possible the belief in a situation for which one is longing. In the book before us I found nothing to protect me from the threatening significance of things.

Tragic plot

Sarna's book has the plot structure of a tragedy. From within the horror of the war the figure of Yitzhak Rabin and the period of the Oslo agreements emerge as the most beautiful time for Israeli society, the time of blossoming and hope. The book documents the experience of the hope that wafted for a short time above the inhabitants of the region - those who did not oppose the peace process, of course. This is the high point of the narrative. But ever since the assassination of the prime minister, things have been going from bad to worse, from terror attacks to disengagement, and so on, until today when there is war erupting from within Gaza, and no one can imagine what its effects will be on all of our lives.

At the beginning of 1995, Terje Larsen, the United Nations envoy to Gaza, had already said to Sarna, that either the two peoples will succeed together or will crash together. For better or for worse, the envoy said, you are right next to each other and there is no chance of a victory for one side at the expense of the other.

The journalistic narrative presented in the book places at its center Rabin's assassination, which colors all of the stories before the murder, and the period dating from that event until the present. The history that is related here, which jumps between the 1980s and our own days, from the first intifada to the second intifada and what was between them, bears the character of a story that leads to a low point that is known in advance: the assassination. But it is possible, in Sarna's mind, that the low point had already come much earlier.

In one of the segments on his meeting with the late writer S. Yizhar, Sarna quotes him as saying: "In the lifetime of one man I have seen two completely different countries. One that ended in the 1950s and another country, a new one that has undergone a metamorphosis." After their conversation, which took place on the occasion of the publication of a new edition of the writer's works, Sarna sums Yizhar as sounding "more like a disillusioned refugee than like a Hebrew writer proudly surveying what he has done."

As in an important tragedy, the plot is constructed not only of the two segments of "before" and "after" the catastrophe, but also in two voices: the voice of hope that increases in strength until it is smashed, and the voice of madness and destruction that increases alongside it beneath the surface until there is the inevitable clash, which is known in advance to those who are reading this book now. In a single blow we tumble into the storm, in Sarna's description, the angry and disappointed world of after the assassination, the world of the roadblocks and the walls.

The question of the reliability of the witness is obvious in light of what has been said. In choosing the title "State Witness," Sarna is equating his words with weighty legal and historical testimony. However, every bit of evidence, even from historical research that is done when the fire and the smoke have died down, and not during the very heart of events, is limited to the perspective of the observer. History always includes the organization of events into a story that affords them significance. A contemporary psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden, has said that the difference between history and the past is that the past is simply a collection of events, whereas history is a creation that reflects the way in which we remember the past - consciously and unconsciously - and how we present, distort and interpret it.

Sarna does not hide his point of view or that of the camp to which he belongs. In describing the year 1993 and its hopes, in a segment that links up to what preceded it - (future murderer) Yigal Amir's return from a mission to the Soviet Union, his studies and the demonstration at which he stands with an anti-Rabin placard above Route 4 - the writer gives the key to his vision as a whole. Here he diverges for a moment into his own personal life and tells about the morning of the birth of his daughter Anna, giving his readers a key to understanding:

"On Friday, November 6, 1993, at seven in the morning, my daughter was born at the Kirya Hospital located inside the Defense Ministry compound. She is a native of the peace process. We bring her to our apartment near the municipal plaza that is still called Kings of Israel Square. The ceiling of the room above the baby's cradle is painted sky blue and is studded with seven silvery paper stars. For a while I imagine that my daughter, who is quieter than her brother and sleeps well at night, was born into a new time, when her father's worldview has won and the fruits of serenity have ripened."

Elsewhere he even says frankly that perhaps the enormous attraction of life under fire, which he documents, is for him a way to escape from the private depression and personal tumult in his life. He describes friends who attribute a "death wish" to him that causes him to run around in the territories.

Be that as it may, the witness has no escape from his own point of view in space and time. His point of view determines what he will see, and what he will omit from the picture he draws. There is no such thing as an objective photograph. A person who sees things while standing on the bridge does not see the same thing as a person who is passing beneath it. A person who described the events of 1989, at the time could not have known where they would lead in 2006. For the Arabs as well, who at the start of the 1990s celebrated their approaching independence, the Oslo agreements today are not the sweet dream that has been shelved. "The Oslo peace accord was good only for a few officials here. A peace of the wealthy, not of the brave," they say, partners to the absence of hope.

Sarna's forays to the other side, as he himself knows and writes, connect him to those who are looking at us from the other side. "This is a fraught view, because the angle of vision interprets the view ... From every angle the narrative changes. Often it reverses," he writes. Elsewhere, in the chapter called "After the Destruction," he relates how each side counts only the victims on its own side. "Each side has its own baby who has been killed, its little girl who has lost an eye, its orphan, its hero, its unbelievable miracle, its family that has lost two members. Each side ignores the other side's casualties as though they cast doubt on the justice of their own claims."

Until when?

Prof. Amia Lieblich's book "Yaldey kfar etzion" ("The Children of Kfar Etzion") was published by Keter and the University of Haifa (in Hebrew).