The Yellow Wind (Hebrew: HaZman HaTsahov) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 1987 and translated into English by Haim Watzman in 1988 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Grossman spent seven weeks in the occupied West Bank in early 1987 — visiting refugee camps, villages, settlements, and military installations — and wrote this book-length report on what he found.
The title comes from a Palestinian folk belief: the yellow wind is a catastrophic storm that will someday sweep away everything — a metaphor for the apocalyptic sense of approaching disaster that Grossman sensed among both Palestinians and Israelis. The First Intifada erupted months after the book’s publication, confirming Grossman’s intuition.
The book shocked Israeli readers because it presented Palestinians as fully human — with complex lives, genuine grievances, and understandable rage — rather than as the abstracted “enemy” or “security threat” of Israeli political discourse. Grossman interviewed Palestinian farmers, refugees, intellectuals, militants, and ordinary families, and reported their words and experiences with a novelist’s attention to detail and emotional nuance.
He also visited Israeli settlements and spoke with settlers, presenting their views without endorsement or mockery but with the same attentive specificity. The book’s power derives not from polemic but from witnessing: Grossman simply shows what occupation looks like from close up, trusting the reader to draw moral conclusions.
The Yellow Wind remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — not because it proposes solutions but because it refuses to let either side reduce the other to an abstraction.
Collecting The Yellow Wind
First edition English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20