Let It Be Morning (review)

The English word "transfer," which has been incorporated into the Hebrew lexicon, has a particular meaning in Israel, one with a long and insidious history. It means, roughly, "expulsion." The term "Palestinian-Israeli" also has a divisive meaning, because the state refuses to recognize its Arabs citizens (those who remained in Israel post-1948) as Palestinians and insists on defining them as Israeli Arabs. Conjuring up these two explosive notions, Sayed Kashua's second novel, Let It Be Morning, chillingly literalizes the significance of "transfer" and forcefully dramatizes the sheer improbability of inhabiting a Palestinian-Israeli identity.

Kashua's novel begins shortly after the eruption of the second Intifada and the events of October 2000, in which thirteen Arab citizens were killed by Israeli police during demonstrations. The first-person narrator, an "Israeli Arab" who works as a journalist, decides to return to his native village because city life has become too expensive and fraught with racial tension. Signs like "Arabs out = Peace + Security" have proliferated over the landscape. Moreover, the narrator's position at a Jewish newspaper has changed. His reports from the West Bank are now edited beyond recognition, with "every word double-checked," and his very presence in the office elicits unease and suspicion.

Feeling increasingly unwelcome among Jews, the narrator imagines that life will be better in the Arab village. He wants to be in a place "where everyone was like [him]" and "Arabs didn't have to hide." But what the narrator finds after a ten-year absence is a fragmented society, increasingly isolated from the Jewish mainstream and alienated from the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Jews no longer come to shop in the village, gangs and crime abound, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories are treated like a sub-human species, and there has been a formidable Islamic revival.

One day, soon after the narrator returns, something unprecedented occurs. Without warning and without explanation, the Israeli military surrounds the village. No one is allowed to leave, and all forms of communication with the outside world are cut off. The novel goes on to describe how the narrator, his family, and the village in general cope with the siege. Not surprisingly, fault lines quickly begin to emerge, until finally it is every family for itself. People stock up on food; there is looting, rioting, and betrayal.

But just as the village teeters on the brink of total disaster, the electricity comes back on and the mystery of the siege is revealed. A comprehensive peace agreement has been reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and most of the Arab villages within Israel have been "transferred"—without the inhabitants' knowledge—to the new Palestinian entity. Villages that were part of Israel have been placed under the jurisdiction of the new Palestinian state in exchange for the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the citizenship of all "Arab Israelis" has been revoked. Transfer has exposed the inextricable relationship between Israeliness and Jewishness, and separated Palestinian from Israeli identity once and for all. Israeliness and Jewishness have become completely and unapologetically interchangeable.

Let It Be Morning is a disturbing account of anti-Arab racism within the Jewish mainstream, and of the deep divisions within Palestinian society. Invoking and literalizing the concept of "transfer" becomes a means, in Kashua's capable hands, of revealing the extremely fragile position of Israel's Arab citizens. The novel highlights how, on the one hand, the minority population is compelled to emulate the norms of the dominant Jewish society in order to access sites of power. For instance, in order to survive in the Jewish world, the narrator denounces the Islamic movement, criticizes the Arab leadership in Israel, and expresses his gratitude every time someone tells him that "Israeli Arabs really ought to say thank you." On the other hand, no matter how well the narrator adopts "the lingo of the military reporters" and emulates "Jewish" norms, an "Arab's an Arab" and...