How Batya Gur Created Classic Detective Fiction in an Israeli Key

In her short literary career, begun at age thirty-nine and ending with her death at fifty-seven in 2005, Batya Gur wrote six bestselling crime novels that established her as Israel’s leading practitioner of the genre. A former high-school teacher, Gur claimed to have modeled her books’ hero, an academic-turned-detective named Michael Ohayon, on herself. Praising her works, which have been translated into several languages, Sean Cooper examines what makes them especially Israeli:

In each of the six books, Gur dispatches Ohayon into a tightknit, insular community where the murder of one of their own, and with one or more of their own somehow implicated in the death, threatens to collapse the foundation of that community. . . . Gur’s communities are stand-ins for Israeli society writ large, whether a kibbutz, chamber orchestra, university literature department, or a psychoanalytic teaching institute.

Gur emerged with her bestseller debut, in 1988, when detective fiction written in Hebrew had been all but dormant for five decades. As a consumer product for popular entertainment, the crime fiction of the 1930s was published in small books on cheap paper intended to be discarded, like a periodical, after it was read. Dismissed in their day by some critics as a frivolous abasement of the language, these disposable tomes were supported by others as an effective means of promoting basic Hebrew literacy. The enterprise did not sustain itself much past a decade, and save for the occasional children’s book, readers of crime fiction had to turn to translations of English works to get their fix.

Unlike [the celebrated English-language crime novelist] Ross Macdonald’s free-floating, solitary Lew Archer, Gur’s detective, Ohayon, is an institution man, respectful of his own, of others, striving for promotions, deferential to leaders, occasionally sentimental, with a firm but not insoluble belief in the sanctity of a group’s code of conduct and declared intentions. When a subordinate chafes at judicial procedures that slow up their investigation, Ohayon snaps back, “Don’t knock it. . . . You want to live in a place like Argentina? It’s a price we have to pay.”

Read more at Tablet

More about: Israeli culture, Israeli literature

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF