Yossi Verter and Amir Oren, the two best writers at Haaretz, were a dynamic duo. Both shared a similar worldview and journalistic approach that focused on micro-tactics (amusingly and intricately convoluted!) at the expense of strategy. This perspective generates a gossip-like mindset among their readers, where the ridiculous bears obscure the forest, and the constant dance of folly overpowers tectonic movements.
One fine day, Amir Oren, who was the best writer at Haaretz newspaper, a kind of Agnon [Translator's note: S.Y. Agnon, Nobel Prize-winning Israeli author] of Israeli security jargon, disappeared. He had turned his obsessive cleverness into a parable about Israel's security perception. In doing so, he disappointed the Bitch's long-standing hope that one day his column would appear in the culture and literature supplement. There, Dr. Cleverness would be revealed as the inventor of a new genre of supremely witty security poetry (something like Spanish poetry meets the Agranat Commission report [Translator's note: An inquiry into the 1973 Yom Kippur War]), or allusive prose for intelligence connoisseurs (Lurianic Kabbalah meets IDF structure). This military-poetic genre would revolutionize Israeli literature, finally giving it local uniqueness and existential relevance, distilling the language and culture of the security establishment to levels of high culture. Because, as with great artists throughout history, it was precisely the censorship and the constant struggle against it that refined Oren's writing to the level of art.
But canine fantasies are one thing and housewifely reality is another. In his departure or removal, which was never clarified or even communicated to readers (as always), Oren left the second-best writer, also (not coincidentally) the inventor of a new genre (the anecdotal political short story) - Yossi Verter - in first place. These two distilled the Israeli governmental reality in its two aspects (civil and military), creating a unity of content and form that essentially tells the story of the Jewish failure to create a Western state.
After all, what are these two friends really telling us, what is the formal message beneath the countless (really) small plots and tiny witticisms? That Israeli governance is an ancient Jewish genre of wit and wordplay, that our country's story is small-town gossip, that we have (fake and false) intimacy with what goes on behind closed doors, and did you hear what Yossel's son said about Rivkele's daughter? The week's events at the state-strategic level become a kind of juicy and deliberately personal gossip session (and endlessly fascinating), full of hints, inside jokes, winks, and slander in the back pews of the synagogue. And this weekly Sabbath hustle and bustle easily drowns out the voice of the Torah reader trying to get through the weekly portion or the prophetic Haftarah (which are, beyond any doubt, of first-rate strategic - and therefore literary - importance).
When the piquant or clever triumphs over the important, the dominant tone in the writing is irony (Verter) and cynicism (Oren), and reality seems static: a constant dance of small plot twists that obscure the grand narrative. In such writing, ultimately the genre defeats the content, and the hidden message is that what was will be (despite everything having fundamentally changed in reality). It turns out that Israeli logic is a genre unto itself, which ultimately, as in all truly excellent writing, seeps into the writing genre itself. If there is no security policy but only countless tactically sophisticated operations, disguised with imaginative code names and strategically failing - this will seep into the writing about it and its language. If the parliament is nothing but one big eternal kindergarten (Verter's central and surprisingly conservative meta-narrative) - this will seep into the plot structures, and the lowering will be the main - and very effective - comic effect.
The subject of writing inevitably affects the writer as well. Oren's forceful writing, which tries to bend the world beneath language and subjugate reality to its logic (and consistently fails), reflects the failed attempt of the security establishment to tame the Middle Eastern jungle. Like the system he covers, Oren repeatedly provides confident, solid, rational, arrogant predictions - and the Bitch can't remember a single prediction of his that came true, which doesn't stop him from continuing with the same confidence. Because the very confidence in security discourse is security itself. Again and again, Oren will hint at secrets, giving us the feeling that we know something others don't, despite it being published in the newspaper. Again and again, Verter supposedly exposes us to what happens behind the curtain, in conversations where if he's not a fly on the wall, he's fed by one of the two flies in the room (his writing will always hide this at the overt level - this is important for creating the feeling of being in on the secret), and again and again we learn nothing about what really drives our political sphere beneath the surface. The secret hides the depth. The buzz of hints obscures the undercurrents (I think an Amir Oren just slipped out here!).
Israeli intelligence is the craftiest in the world at the tactical level (such as in special operations) - and consistently fails substantially (for example, in strategic warning). This is the Jewish diaspora heritage that specializes in sophisticated Talmudic pilpul [Translator's note: intricate rabbinical method of textual analysis], but fails in common sense. The State of Israel has failed not only in policy (i.e., in the results of the discussion) but in the discourse itself. And this discourse is revealed to us every week - in the gap between the far-sighted biblical discourse of Deuteronomistic and prophetic literature (to which the founding fathers connected) and the diasporic-anecdotal fiction of righteous deeds, musical chairs, and appointment rounds, which is the literary heritage of these two wonders.
And where did Amir Oren really disappear to? At first, the Bitch thought he had gone on vacation, but as the Saturdays accumulated, she discovered to her great surprise that walla! - he moved to Walla! [Translator's note: A popular Israeli news website] Never has there been a greater gap between a writer's level and that of his readers. After a bark of surprise (a kind of "woof" followed by a question mark), the Bitch immediately took the following link and put it in her bookmarks, right above the bookmark to the Haaretz site, and she continues to read him every Saturday, immediately after Verter's column, the second-best writer, because the best writer at Haaretz left Haaretz:
Amir Oren: Latest Articles - Walla!And you don't even need to bypass the paywall. Recommended for you too.