For Middle East watchers, who are accustomed to reports of shootings and explosions, learning about a banned or suppressed book might be the closest thing to receiving good news. Suppression of a book, after all, is a perverse acknowledgment that literature holds the power to subvert the status quo — and without a single shot fired. If books that imagine peace are still able to put fear in the hearts of warmongers, isn’t it a sign that there’s some hope for us?  Or is that overly hopeful? What, for example, should we make of the current controversy in Israel over the Ministry of Education’s brazenly sectarian decision to exclude a novel, “Borderlife” by Dorit Rabinyan, from the state’s high school curriculum? The ministry objected to the story’s ugly portraits of Israel Defense Forces soldiers and its depiction of a romance between a Jewish Israeli woman and Palestinian man, which it deemed “threatening to Jewish identity.” Does the reading public’s defiant response in support of “Borderlife,” which made the novel an overnight best seller, offset the ministry’s ugly decision to exclude it? What’s the real story there: the suppression of the novel or the pushback against this suppression?  With the “Borderlife” controversy, still very much in progress, it’s hard to know what to think. But if we’re willing to pry our eyes from the daily news cycles for a moment, we might find some insight from the just-distant-enough past, in the provocative work of the Egyptian writer Ali Salem. In 1995, Salem’s book “A Drive to Israel,” translated from Arabic into Hebrew, first reached the Israeli public. The publication of the book completed a circuit that Salem began a year earlier when he climbed into his car and, without informing even his family, drove across the Sinai Peninsula to the Egyptian-Israeli border, embarking on a 23-day road trip through Israel. When “A Drive to Israel,” a slim travelogue of this journey, was published in Egypt shortly after his return, Salem was harshly denounced and blacklisted by the literary establishment — but the book itself became a best seller. In the Arabic edition, an avuncular 58-year-old Salem was pictured on the cover, frowning; in the Hebrew version, he appeared with a sleepy grin.  That was during the mid-1990s, not long after the Oslo peace accords had gone into effect. How does “A Drive to Israel” read today, 20 years later and in a politically altered Middle East? And what can the controversy that surrounded the publication of Salem’s book, during a brief period of optimism, tell us in 2016, when the forecast for the Middle East appears as grim as ever?  During his trip to Israel, Salem played baffled tourist and literary guest. He visited the sites and hung out with Arab and Jewish Israelis. At the universities, he addressed students of contemporary Arabic literature who knew of him as the author of a series of tragicomic plays, absurdist satires of Egyptian politics. At his hotel, Salem marveled at the size and variety of the Israeli breakfast, which he placed within the tragic context of Jewish history: “A collective feeling of insecurity is what fashioned this breakfast,” he theorized. “No one knows what the next moment will bring.”  Salem’s most telling encounters happened with strangers on the road. At the border, he haggled with a soldier over the difference between traveling to Israel “for tourism” versus “to visit,” which was what he had written on his visa (the soldier helpfully advised him to state that he was going “for tourism”). Before he managed to step out of his car onto Israeli soil, a boy approached him at a red light and offered him a political bumper sticker. Salem asked the boy, in English, what the Hebrew bumper sticker said.  “The people in the Golan.”  It appeared that his English wasn’t up to this question, so I repeated: “Do you want them here …”  Praise the Lord, so he wants an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.  Later, Salem discovered that the sticker attached to his bumper, in fact, advertised the exact opposite position — it was a slogan calling for Israel to retain control of the Golan Heights. “In order not to produce extraneous political complications in the region,” he wrote, “I removed the sticker.” The exchange, and Salem’s droll recollection of it, are typical of his journey: Every turn is taken in the spirit of curiosity, humor and risk-taking.  In his descriptions of his travels, Salem adopted a matter-of-fact tone — starting from his deadpan title — precisely because there was nothing typical about the trip. Egyptians don’t generally drive to Israel for holiday, and Salem’s colleagues in the intelligentsia, unamused by the book, accused him of “normalizing” relations with the enemy. Despite the 1979 Camp David peace accord between Egypt and Israel and continuing security cooperation between the two states, citizens of Egypt maintain a de facto boycott of all things Israeli. Even today, Egypt is a place where it is considered reasonable for TV broadcasters, for example, to counter realpolitik arguments for cultural and economic engagement with Israel by citing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious forged document that fueled 20th-century European anti-Jewish paranoia.  Because of his visit to Israel, Salem was blacklisted in Egypt, expelled from the Writers’ Union and denounced in print as a stooge or even as a paid agent of Israel. A friend told him, “I’ve attended a meeting at which it was decided to purge you and your family from all literary, cultural, artistic and social groups.” Alongside this social ostracization, there lurked a vague threat of violence. The same year that Salem made his trip to Israel, Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and a friend of Salem’s, was stabbed in Cairo by an Islamist assailant.  Salem was well aware that he would elicit this response. That was why he made the trip to begin with. He felt that the boycott of Israel, particularly among artists and writers, was backward and dangerously counterproductive — especially in 1994, shortly after the Oslo peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians went into effect and regional peace seemed possible. Salem believed that the words of treaties would mean nothing if they weren’t supported by the words of writers, and that the road between the former enemies would not yield peace until someone took that road.  Among Egypt’s readers, as it turned out, curiosity about Israel trumped ideology, and the attempt to discredit Salem didn’t succeed: The book was a best seller. Eventually, and by order of a court, Salem was reinstated, at least nominally, into the Writers’ Union. For the next 20 years, until his death in September 2015, Salem continued to visit Israel and to speak out in favor of normalized relations with his neighbors as the only way to achieve peace. His path has been followed by other Egyptian public figures, including blogger and jailed Tahrir Square activist Maikel Nabil Sanad, who visited in 2012 and told me recently by phone that Salem’s book was “very influential” for him and his thinking about regional politics. Last May, Maged Farag, a historian of modern Egypt, made waves by documenting his trip to Israel and continued to provoke controversy upon his return home by making forceful public statements in favor of closer relations with Israelis.  But only Ali Salem had the audacity to cross the border in his own car. For Salem, a man of the theater, the car trip dramatized his message that he was not a mere foreign tourist but a close neighbor. He wanted regular people all over Israel to see his Egyptian license plate and to see him driving among them on their roads. He wanted to stage the political principle of “recognizing” another people as a literal, physical interaction between individuals. And he wanted the Arab reader to join him.  This performance was greatly enhanced by Salem’s Russian-made, beat-up green Niva, “the most durable legacy of the Soviet Union,” as he calls it. In the Israel of the mid-1990s, a post-socialist society eagerly transitioning to consumerist capitalism, Salem’s conspicuously melancholic Niva was a reliable comic prop. Strangers he met on the road in Israel seemed more worried about him than threatened, more empathetic than suspicious. It turns out that the most effective kind of diplomatic envoy is the humorist.  His road trip through Israel in a Soviet jalopy was, in essence, a satire of an enemy invasion. Instead of a hero driving a tank, he was an antihero in a junkheap, stopping to ask for directions. Salem was a satirist by trade, after all, and the idea for this journey, he later explained in an interview, was the 1966 American film “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” which starred Alan Arkin as a proto-Borat Russian sea captain who lands a Soviet submarine in a provincial American town and meets his hated enemies.  Salem’s sight gag is powerful because it is far from a joke. His own brother died, in a tank, fighting the Israelis in the Sinai Desert. And decades later, in the 1990s, after Salem crossed that same terrain on his way to Israel, he finds himself looking out at an Israeli audience and wondering how many of their family members died in tanks fighting his people. The purpose of his visit, he writes, wasn’t as much to love his neighbor as it was a “serious attempt to get rid of hate.”  Revisiting Salem’s travelogue 20 years later can be a sobering experience. There are stray details of Israeli life from the mid-1990s that are indistinguishable from today’s headlines — at one point, one of his Jewish hosts is reluctant to walk near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, citing a recent stabbing attack. But what’s more striking is just how much has shifted politically since Salem’s visit. Many of the biggest countries in the region, including Egypt, are suffering inconclusive regime changes or catastrophic civil wars. The Oslo accords — the plan Salem had set out to support — has deteriorated after rounds of violent confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians.  The ground was already shifting during Salem’s visit. Only months after his book was published in Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Today, Rabin’s Labor Party, the standard-bearer for the two-state solution, is a weakened force. Part of what made it possible for Salem to risk his road trip was that Israel, at that time, was governed by leaders who were themselves taking extraordinary risks in the cause of peacemaking. Unbeknownst to Salem at the time, or to his first readers, “A Drive to Israel” was a document of the last days of Rabin-era Israel.  Since then, mistrust, delusion and despair — and ever-deepening trauma — have allowed extremist politics to consolidate into a ruling norm in both Israel and Palestine. The infrastructure dreams of the mid-1990s, which included proposals for a regional superhighway with no checkpoints linking Egypt, Israel and Jordan — and continuing on through Saudi Arabia — and a railway that would connect Israel to Lebanon and Syria, sound hopelessly utopian to us today. In Israel and Palestine, the rule has become occupation and incitement; in the rest of the region, it’s upheaval and ISIS. The borders of the Middle East in 2016 are more anxiously guarded than ever.  So how does Salem’s account, written during a moment of regional optimism, still feel so relevant? Possibly it’s because Salem was never much of an optimist himself. He harbored few illusions, and so his Oslo-era perspectives are fairly disillusionment-proof. This was the man who once wrote a Kafka-style satirical dialogue between a guy caught in a burning house and an emergency dispatcher who is so soulless and literal-minded that he spends the entire exchange nit-picking the panicked caller’s words (“Define your terms exactly: Has your house ‘caught fire’ or has it ‘burst into flames’?”). Salem never held much hope that Middle Eastern authorities would save their citizens, who were languishing in the region’s various burning houses. It was, instead, a world-weary, pessimistic view that moved Salem in all of his writings, and certainly in his travelogue to Israel.  But he did have faith in regular people and in humor, which to him was the language of the people, not the regime. To Salem, humor shares the same structure as peacemaking: Each works by allowing for and managing contradiction. Salem understood that peacemaking sometimes means driving around with an Egyptian license plate and a right-wing Israeli bumper sticker. What mattered to him most in his exchange with the Israeli boy who gave him that sticker was that they met each other face to face and interacted in a civil manner, despite the poisonous political slogans that each had swallowed from his culture.  Salem spends much of the end of “A Drive to Israel” reinterpreting the biblical Book of Exodus, which tells the story of the people of Israel escaping slavery in Egypt. He gives his own, novel version of that narrative: that it’s a story about a regime that oppresses both Israelites and Egyptians, and that the peoples themselves were not in conflict. The prompt for this retelling is an Israeli woman he meets on the road, who tells him that modern Israel’s relationship with its neighbors is, at its source, inscribed in that ancient text. Salem, who sees himself as an heir of this shared Semitic literary tradition, takes the Israeli woman’s view to heart. And so he should: These prophetic stories are still powerfully relevant to a majority of people who live in the region. Perhaps even more courageous than crossing the border in his car, as a civilian, was Salem’s commitment, as a writer, to reopening old, divisive stories, to boldly rewriting the narrative — and to conversing about it directly with his enemy. He understood that this story, of how peace might actually look, would, by necessity, bother people, especially those in power — just as today, the reactionaries at Israel’s Ministry of Education fear the vision portrayed in Dorit Rabinyan’s novel. Until new, compelling narratives are written and circulated freely among the people, the old ones will continue to hold sway. Ali Salem not only understood that, he got in his car and did something about it.  Avi Steinberg’s travelogue, “The Lost Book of Mormon,” was nominated for the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor.
The Egyptian author Ali Salem used humor — and all of its contradictions — to inspire peace in his country. Can other writers do the same?