“Does your novel speak to Hamas’s attack on Israel?”
I got the question during a podcast interview I was giving to support the launch of my new novel, which is set during the 2006 34-day Hezbollah-Israeli War. My novel came out shortly before Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel and my interview was a few days later. News outlets, broadcast reports, and social media were filled with accounts of the barbaric killing of more than 1200 innocent men, women, and children in southern Israel.
I wasn’t prepared for the question. I had rehearsed for the usual discussion about craft, plot, characters, and how I’d come to write novels after a career in media, but I had not prepared for that question. In fact, I was afraid of it. I wasn’t certain what I could say, or should say, given the raw, savage accounts of killings. My novel seemed tame by comparison, and perhaps apologetic. I told the interviewer that they weren’t related, but even as I said the words, I knew I was being untruthful.
The 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War was the seventh major conflict between Israel and its neighbors since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, but there had been countless acts of violence and many uprisings in the seventy-five years since its founding. I consciously chose the 2006 war as a backdrop for my novel and I had carefully researched the region’s history of violence, betrayal, and revenge. The book’s epigram is from Aeschylus’s Agammemnon, the first play in his revenge trilogy: “The spirit lives within me, our savage ancient spirit of revenge.” Revenge and justice figure prominently in the book.
So why my reticence?
What I hadn’t counted on was that a new war would be launched four days after the novel’s publication. The new war is similar to the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli conflict. Both began with cross border assaults – Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas killing more than a thousand Israelis and kidnapping 150. Both wars were initiated by non-state terrorist groups with deep grievances against Israel. Israel’s reaction to the Hezbollah war was swift and brutal. The Israeli Air Force bombed Lebanon for 34 days, destroying infrastructure, and wiping out Beirut’s southern suburbs which were home to Hezbollah. Israel is now delivering a swift and brutal response to Hamas in Gaza.
When I wrote the novel, I wanted to address, but not focus on, the complex moral and ethical issues that arise from the region’s cycle of violence. To be clear, Beirut Station is a spy novel and a love story, but characters in the book have opinions about war and the cycle of violence, which are the author’s way (my way) of making observations important to him (to me). I was surprised when I was unprepared to address the interviewer’s question.
I’ve read newspaper columnists to see how they’ve expressed their outrage. Nir Avishai Cohen, a Major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces, and an author of “Love Israel, Support Palestine,” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he said, “It is important to me to make it clear that in this already unstoppable new war, we cannot allow the massacre of innocent Israelis to result in the massacre of innocent Palestinians.”
Another writer, Daniel Silva, whose recurring character, Gabriel Allon, is a Mossad agent in his popular spy novels, reposted a tweet from the Israel Defense Forces: “The IDF wants the world to know we are at war with Hamas and not the people of Gaza.”
Nicholas Kristoff, in a Times opinion column published as Israel was poised to invade Gaza, wrote “Israel has tactical superiority, but what’s the strategy? Who will govern the rubble afterward? And how will the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians possibly lead to harmony with Israel afterward?”
And yet. Hamas gunmen arrived at a music festival three miles from the border with Gaza with murder on their mind, and killed innocent youth celebrating peace. Should that go unanswered?
The cycle of war, the cycle of violence, the cycle of innocent suffering. How do you put that into a novel? And how, as an author, do you talk responsibly about it?
The playwright Harold Pinter addressed these points in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which I have read several times in the past. He distinguishes between citizenship and fiction. He wrote: “As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”
But as a writer, he said, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily true or false; it can be both true and false.”
He went on to say that truth in fiction is forever elusive. “More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image…but the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many.” The truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, ignore each other, and are blind to each other.
As a writer, I believe I have a responsibility to address gray-toned, ever-elusive moral and ethical questions, even if they are disguised as commercial entertainment. Beirut Station tries to accomplish that.
