Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture

Chapter 4. Israeli Jewish Fiction of Dissent, Its Writers, and the Canon

4 Israeli Jewish Fiction of Dissent, Its Writers, and the Canon Literature and Ideology: A Symbiotic Relationship The lack of influence of Hebrew literature on the political scene can be ascribed neither to its lack of attention to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict nor to an absence of critical interest. In fact, numerous critical studies of the representation of the Arab in Hebrew literature have been published,1 placing the potentially explosive works into the national literary canon. Here I have chosen to focus on a few such works: Amos Oz’s tales “The Nomad and the Viper” (1964) and My Michael (1972), A. B. Yehoshua’s “Facing the Forests ” (1968) and The Lover (1978), and David Grossman’s novel The Smile of the Lamb (1983). These works have gained critical recognition as landmarks in the history of Israeli fiction.2 These texts—which are deeply concerned with the history of the Palestinian Arabs, especially their defeat, dispossession, and unjust treatment—criticize harshly the discriminatory politics of the state. They denounce the notion of the “empty land” and the “invisibility” of the Arab; they reject the slogans “purity of weapons” of the Israeli army and of “humanitarian occupation”; and they disclose the brutal reality of Israeli victories. Furthermore, these works of fiction attempt to discredit the Zionist ethos, which is intent on demonizing the Arabs as implacable enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people generally . The writers undermine the negative view of the Arab and dispel the myth of the humane Jewish fighter. 88 Israeli Jewish Fiction of Dissent 89 As was mentioned earlier, a close comparative study of the Jewish and Arab texts in order to release them from their canonical interpretations occupies the third part of this study.3 Here I wish to elucidate the strategies behind the canonical reception of Jewish Israeli fiction that demonstrates quite a radical attitude of dissent. Yehoshua’s celebrated story “Facing the Forests” restores the Arab history in the land to the consciousness of the unsuspecting Israeli protagonist. The latter literally resurrects the history of the Arab defeat when he inadvertently discovers the ruins of an Arab village destroyed in the 1948 war, which remained concealed under a young, recently planted Israeli forest. In Yehoshua’s famous novel The Lover, Naim, a young Arab boy, enters Israeli society and exposes its moral disintegration. By contrast, his growing indispensability to the Israeli Jewish family highlights the “absent presence” of the Arab laborers, who work for Jewish employers but otherwise remain invisible. Even though the novel ends in a renewed separation between the Jew and the Arab, it seems that the short experience of togetherness allowed each to gain an understanding of the vulnerability of the other. Oz’s wellknown story “Nomad and Viper” contains a trenchant criticism of Israeli society as represented by a kibbutz community in its encounter with a Bedouin tribe. The story reveals how the Israelis project their unresolved problem of insecurity upon the Arabs. One of the themes dwells on the sexual attraction of a female kibbutz member for an Arab. The fear and desire evoked by the strangers prove to be so threatening to the kibbutz that all appearances of civilization collapse , turning the kibbutz members into a horde of brutal victimizers. In Oz’s famous novel My Michael, Hannah, the protagonist, dreams about her childhood Arab friends, who disappeared in the refugee camps during the 1948 war. Her explicitly sexual, sadomasochistic dreams and fantasies demonstrate the haunting psychological impact of the suppressed memory of the Arab upon the Israeli subconscious. Her husband and son, whose lives evolve “normally”—that is, in conformity with the Zionist ethos of the “new” Jew—remain completely unaware of the madness that looms under the surface of normalcy . The Smile of the Lamb, the novel that catapulted Grossman into the limelight of the Israeli cultural mainstream, deals with the occupied territories, showing how the moral corruption of Israel’s ruthless domination destroyed every possibility of closeness between 90 Dissenting Literatures and the Literary Canon Jews and Arabs. The theme of dispossession and humiliation of the Palestinian Arabs belies the official image of Israel’s humanistic occupation . It is a story of betrayal and defeat of the values of humanism and empathy as represented by the protagonist, Uri. Despite its bitterly critical attitude toward Israel’s victimization and oppression of the Arab, this fiction entered the canon of Israeli literature. Moreover, despite...