The Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk gave this interview a few days before his death.

profil: „1948“ was published in 2010 in Hebrew. Why did you wait so long to talk about your experience in the independence war?

Kaniuk: I was always against the Israeli settlers. And I have been enganged in working for a peaceful solution for decades. But we never got anywhere. It seems to me sometimes that we ask for too much. You either take the land or it is taken from you. You kill or you get killed. The Palestinians did not want to accept the State of israel, so they started a war against us. We won the war. It’s as simple as this. There is no morality in nature. And no morality in war.

profil: Are you sure? In your book you describe the accidental facts of war. You describe yourself as an 18 year old soldier, who fights for his country, but who still has feelings. And morals.

Kaniuk: I start the book by saying: What was, was. It is not a historic account, I say this clearly, maybe I make mistakes, because my memory is already weak. It is a novel. But take the story of the city of Ramla, I will never forget it. I was 18, I came from the hospital back to my regiment and we arrived in Ramla. A beautiful city. It was empty, only dogs and donkeys, but no people. In some of the houses there was still food on the table. I was wondering where the people were. When I walked outside of the city I saw them. Thousands of Arabs who couldn’t come back. They were crying. They were standing there, near their houses, but not allowed to come in anymore. The city was surrounded by barbed wire. And then suddenly 15, 20 trucks came, full of people. They climbed off the trucks and took over the city. In five minutes the city became jewish. These people had come from Birkenau. I spoke to one who played in the orchestra for Mengele. I stood in the middle. I stood there and cried. I knew then that they will make it, they were strong. It happened so fast. It was so right and it was so wrong at the same time. The next morning I saw a woman hanging a sign on a tent: “Famous seamstress from Warsaw.” And women who just survived from Auschwitz stood in line to change their dresses to look better.

profil: So it must have made sense for you then to fight for this state. Even if it cost the Palestinians their land.

Kaniuk: Yes of course. I felt pain, not guilt. I did not think that moving from Ramla to Ramallah was the same then coming from Auschwitz. The war was terrible for me. When I came home from the war in 1948, I was wounded and could not walk, I was in a cask. My father, the “Jekke potz”, had served in the same army like Hitler in the First World War. Hitler was only a Corporal, but my father was a Lieutnant. My father sat down next to me and said: "Yoram, the jews and the state - it will never work." I was coming back from months of war and this is what he said. He was right. I don’t think we can succeed. In the history of judaism there has never been a connection between the religion and the land. When we were in Palestine we were Hebrews. As jews we lived in the diaspora. Only then 50 years ago Rabbi Kook invented the connection for religious nationalist jews to claim the land. Before that the Utra orthodox did not think of coming back to the land. Only the secular zionists did. The terrible connection between nationalism and religion destroys us.

Profil: Your book "1948" is an angry book. And you are angry too. But have you always felt like this? Were you angry then?

Kaniuk: I am not sure. I was always an author of the absurd. My writing was always somewhere outside of the normal. The Israeli authors that made it and that were understood were Amos Oz or David Grossman. I was - in Israel and in Germany or Austria – not understood I think. I also did not know how to write well. So I wrote it upside down. Only now, lately with “1948” I became successful in Germany.

profil: I think you are wrong. I read your books in the Nineties and you were well respected in Vienna. Maybe Amos Oz occupied more the centre of the stage because he represented more the "good Israeli" the European public symphasized with. Maybe your were too pessimistic for people to digest. Now you are more appreciated because Europe shifted in your direction. People are today more aware of the problematic aspects of Israel. You were ahead of your time.

Kaniuk: Everything I did my whole life was out of time. I lived by changing all the tragedies to fun. “Adam Hundesohn” was the first funny book about Holocaust survivors. When you ask me why I think the jews survived, I think it is partly because they knew how to write and because they managed to joke about the tragedies that happened to them. I always wrote with humour because Life is so ridiculously tragic. What else can you do?

profil: You are maybe the truly jewish writer compared with other Israeli writers like Amos Oz. Oz is maybe more of a zionist author. You used the survival instrument of the jews: humor.

Kaniuk: True. My father used to tell me the joke about the two jews on a safari in Africa. They are attacked by lions. One asks the other: Does it hurt? And the other one says: Only when I laugh. In Auschwitz people told each other jokes. In "Kanada", you know, where people had to take off their clothes before the were sent to the gas chamber – they were telling jokes.

Profil: You parents both came here before the Holocaust. You were born here. In a way, you were lucky.

Kaniuk: I am not sure if you can call this”luck”. My mother came here in 1910. 103 years ago. She was a young girl. Her father was a zionist. He came from Odessa. And Tel Aviv was just half a year old. She fell in love with my jekke potz father, who was wise and funny but did not believe in anything. Maybe this is why he build a museum here in the middle of nowhere. The first Tel Aviv museum. There were still camels walking aorund here. But my father started a chamber music series. All the jekkes came and listened to Beethoven. And outside were the camels. He came here 1928. Why did he come? He loved Germany more than anything. In Heidelberg and Berlin he studied the violin. He came originally from Galizia. In the Twenties he smelt the disaster. He listened to the songs they were singing in Germany and he knew he had to leave. All those who stayed were sucked into the Third Reich, most disappeared. When the war ended in 1945 there were two million jews jeft – and no country wanted them. So the Hagaddah people brought them all to the shores and some came to Palestine. I believe the only time of my life I believed in something was then: I wanted them to be safe. That is why I fought in the war.

Profil: Can you be safe today in Israel?

Kaniuk: What will happen to this country? How can you go to war all the time, how can you hate all the time? And we have such immense problems: We have the Haredim (Ultra Orthodox jews, Anm.), we have the Aravim (Arabs, Anm.) and then we have Tel Aviv, where people go dancing. It’s a villa in the jungle. 120 kilometers from here in Syria they want to throw chemical weapons on us. Today in the hospital there was a man, he has a house on the Golan Heights. He rents it. He likes the view. He has cancer, too. And he wants to take me there to see it. It’s absurd. You know, in Austria you don’t live like that.

profil: True. It’s a different story. But when I come here to Israel it makes me sad to think that the possibility for Israel as a state is being missed while we all sit around and enjoy the view.

Kaniuk: All my life I was a crazy maniac on the radical left, I wanted to believe that it could work, so I fought for a Two-state-solution But I was never a believer. The country is too small. Let's assume that the Two-state-solution had become reality. Twelve kilometers from here in Tulkarem there would be a Palestinian State. And let's say they have a wedding. And one palestinian shoots in the air from happyness. And some stupid Israeli hears it and shoots back. In five minutes we would have a war.

profil: You are such a Pessimist!

Kaniuk: It is not important what I believe. I will die soon. But my daughter is doing such beautiful work. She goes to jails and she goes to check points, she is monitoring what happens in the territories. She has a friend, Tamar Goldschmidt, who is the greatgranddaughter of the philosopher Martin Buber. They do this work together. The go, see and the complain to the israeli authorities. It is very impressive.