The Quest for Identity in Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning

Introduction

In 2011, Mohammed Saif-Alden Wattad expressed the identity crisis he experienced as an Arab citizen of a Jewish state:

Like a school of dolphins, most Israeli Arabs have lost their way deep in a stormy sea. One wave throws them up; another pushes them down to the bottom of the sea. They struggle day and night for their identity. They keep swimming in that stormy sea wishing for the sunny day to come, thus enjoying the glory of the sea; but the sea refuses to accept them, and the stormy waves insist to throw them out to the shore, where they get suffocated and find their death.¹

These words represent the feelings of many Palestinian Arabs who, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, found themselves within its boundaries. Having become Israeli citizens, they were always torn between their national identity as Palestinians and their identity as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. Many national groups live as minorities within sovereign states, but the situation here has been particularly hard because of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and because Israel, while granting its citizens political rights, defines itself as a Jewish state, thus excluding non-Jews from the narrative developed as part of the nation-building process. That narrative views the Jews’ settlement of the land of Israel since the late nineteenth century as a return to Zion and a restoration of Jewish independence, while the Palestinian narrative views Zionism as a colonial movement and Israeli independence, achieved after a war in which 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, as a Nakba (catastrophe). The Zionist narrative has been institutionalized in the state in a way that made it impossible for its Arab citizens to identify with the state’s hymn, flag, national holidays, and other symbols, as noted by Yitzhak Reiter:

The national goals of the state are . . . reflected very accurately in its values and symbolic representations. The state’s principle values, as well as its culture, which dominate the public space, strongly express the national interests and cultural aspirations of the Jewish majority. The public atmosphere, national educational norms and reforms, and official ceremonies that have developed over the years are all built around the Jewish historical memory and accentuate a Zionist outlook that includes Diaspora heritage, the Holocaust and the revivalist movement.²

We are thus faced with a complicated situation in which Arabs living in Israel are defining their identity as citizens of the state within circumstances encouraging their exclusion from it. No wonder they have been compared to a school of dolphins lost in a stormy sea, a metaphor relating both to the overall condition of the Arab minority in Israel and to the often futile discourse held about it. In what follows, I discuss that discourse in an attempt to highlight a creative attempt by novelist Sayed Kashua to breach its boundaries.

The Discourse About the Arab Minority in Israel

The difficulties experienced by the Arab minority in Israel have been analyzed by sociologist Sammy Smooha, who emphasized the circumstances at their core. The relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel were forged in tragic circumstances of war, destruction, evacuation, and coercion. In 1948, Smooha writes, the Arab minority unwillingly became part of the enemy and was subjected to 19 years of military rule. The Arabs and Jews saw themselves as the indigenous population and demanded almost exclusive rights over the same strip of land.

Smooha puts special emphasis on class differences; Arabs in Israel are a working class community within a middle-class society. About 90% of them live in Arab villages and towns and the other 10% live in separate neighborhoods in Jewish cities. They do not share power and suffer from discrimination in allocation of state budgets, in appointments, and in obtaining work and housing in the private sector. “To put it bluntly,” he writes, “the Arab minority is a distinct national-religious-linguistic, non-assimilating and dissident minority, whose loyalty is suspect, who is discriminated against, does not accept...