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

Notes

Notes Prologue 1. I realize that some Israeli Arabs prefer to be called Palestinians, or Palestinian Arabs, while Israeli Jews call themselves Israelis. I chose to call the national groups Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews to signal their common Israeli citizenship as members of the two ethnic groups—as opposed to Diaspora Jews and Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens—that reside in the State of Israel. 2. There are, of course, Israeli authors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who write in languages other than Hebrew, such as Arabic, Polish, Russian, and Rumanian. I wish to thank Margalit Matitiahu, general secretary of the Israeli Federation of Writers’ Union, for bringing these national literatures to my attention. 3. Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 227. 4. Yehoshua, Oz, and Grossman were born in Jerusalem; Yizhar was born in the agricultural colony of Rehovot. 5. Mansour was born in the Galilean village of Jish, Shammas was born in the Galilean village of Fassuta, and Habiby was born in Haifa. 6. There are other cases of ideological suppression. For the feminist aspect , see Naomi B. Sokoloff, “Gender Studies and Modern Hebrew Literature ,” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 257–65; Sokoloff provides a comprehensive annotated bibliographical listing of literature. Yael Feldman treats the subject of women’s Israeli literature and its struggle with the Zionist male chauvinist orientation in her book No Room of Their Own: Gender 291 292 Notes to Pages 6–21 and Nation in Israeli Jewish Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For the suppressed story of the Iraqi Jews who emigrated to Israel, see Nancy E. Berg, Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), and Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For cinematic mispresentations of the Sephardi Jews, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1987). See also the critique of the “Zionist narrative” in the study by Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 7. Some scholars prefer the more “positive,” perhaps less judgmental terms “Exile” or “Dispersion” in place of “Diaspora.” I have borrowed the phrase “the negation of the Diaspora” from Ahad Ha’Am’s 1909 essay “The Negation of the Diaspora,” in which he presciently claims—contrary to the political Zionists—that the Diaspora will never disappear but that its national life “must be strengthened . . . by the creation of a fixed center for our national life in the land of its birth.” In Arthur Herzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 276. I discuss Ahad Ha’Am’s essay and his idea of the land as a cultural center in the first part of the study. 8. The slogan was invented by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury in 1851 and was later popularized by Israel Zangwill. See Adam Garfinkle, Politics and Society in Modern Israel: Myths and Realities (Armonk , N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 44. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111. 10. My discussion does not include the fiction of Israeli Arabs written in Arabic, nor do I discuss the Israeli Druse writer and poet Naim Araydi, who writes in Hebrew. Araydi’s only novel, Tevilah katlanit [A fatal christening ] (Tel Aviv: Bitan, 1992), focuses on the problem of Druse-Christian intermarriage. Araydi does not touch on issues concerning Jews, Arabs, and Zionism, topics that are the main interest of this study. Since the completion of the present study, Sayed Qushu, an Israeli Arab, has published Dancing Arabs (Modan: Moshav Ben Shemen, 2002) in Hebrew. Part 1. Zionism and the Discourses of Negation, Introduction 1. See especially chapter 10 in Chelouche’s memoir Parashat hayayi [The story of my life], 1870–1930 (Tel Aviv: Strud and Sons, 1930), where he describes the founding of Tel Aviv and the enormous difficulties and complications encountered. 2. Adi Ophir, Working for the Present: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 259, 276. Notes to Pages 21–22 293 3...