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

Prologue: Israeli Literatures and Their Presence in Zionist Culture

Prologue Israeli Literatures and Their Presence in Zionist Culture Something happens to objects, beliefs, and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. . . . The ability of artists to assemble and shape the forces of their culture in novel ways so that elements powerfully interact that rarely have commerce with one another in the general economy has the potential to unsettle . . . a mutually affirmative relation between artistic production and the other modes of production and reproduction that make up a society. Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture” Is literature capable of re-visioning the culture in which it was conceived ? Are literary texts powerful enough to unsettle the conformist practices of the dominant social discourse? This study examines these questions in the context of literatures produced by Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews.1 More specifically, this study probes these literatures in terms of their dissension from the widely accepted ideological propagation of the irreparable antagonism between Palestinian and Jewish national groups. In contrast to the deeply entrenched perception of unbridgeable cultural, social, and political divergences between Arabs and Jews, this study shows that the two literatures affirm a complex yet indissoluble affinity between the two communities. Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab communities came into being in 3 4 Prologue the wake of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, which established the domination of the victorious Jewish majority over the defeated Arab minority . This asymmetrical sociopolitical configuration allowed the ruling mainstream to carry on the pre-state Zionist politics of separation between Jews and Arabs. The origins of the doctrine that dismissed Palestinian history and ignored the Arab presence in Palestine can be traced back to the beginnings of the Zionist settlement. The conceptualization of national literature in the new state perpetuated the exclusionary self-definition of the pioneering Zionists at the time of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine). In its endeavors to construct Israel’s cultural identity, the Zionist establishment defined Israeli literature in terms both of its Hebrew mode and of the Jewishness of its Israeli citizen-authors.2 Israeli literature was expected to promote the Zionist ideal of the Jewish people speaking their reborn language in the reborn nation-state. As an artistic refraction of the Zionist separatist discourse, Israeli literature constituted a category of its own; it was meant to represent Israeli culture as distinct from Jewish Diaspora culture as well as from the Palestinian culture. As it evolved, however, Israeli literature diverged from the prescribed path. Some Israeli Jewish writers openly addressed the issue of the suppressed history of the Palestinian Arab population. A number of Israeli Arab writers told the story of Palestinian suppression in Hebrew. However limited, the phenomenon of Arab writers who directed their story to the Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jewish majority undermined the ethnic (Jewish) component of Israeli literature. Even though the controversy over the definition of Israeli literature has by no means ended, the Arab writers who wrote in Hebrew effectively transformed the concept of Israeli national literature, redesigning it as a bi-ethnic literature. This study examines the fiction of the Israeli Arab writers alongside literary texts by Israeli Jewish authors. It discusses those Arab writers who have either written their fiction in Hebrew or published it in Israel in Hebrew translation: Atallah Mansour (In a New Light), Anton Shammas (Arabesques), and Emile Habiby (The Pessoptimist; Ikhtayyeh; Saraya, Daughter of the Ghoul—novels translated into Hebrew by Shammas). The Arab writers’ choice of Hebrew, which signifies the intention to address the Israeli Hebrew-speaking majority readership, has defined them as Israeli writers. At the same time, Prologue 5 the literary preoccupation of the Arab writers with the tragedy of Palestinian defeat, degradation, and dispossession points to a contiguity with Israeli Jewish writers, who were also preoccupied with the theme of the Arab. My discussion of this theme as represented by Jewish authors focuses on S. Yizhar’s “Hirbet Hizah” (a story that depicts the conquest of the Arab village of Hirbet Hizah), A. B. Yehoshua ’s “Facing the Forests,” Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” and My Michael, and David Grossman’s Smile of the Lamb. In his discussion of the inseparability of culture and literature, Stephen Greenblatt maintains that “cultural analysis [of literature] must be opposed . . . to the rigid distinction between that which is within a text and that which lies outside.”3 Indeed, the thematic focus on the Palestinian...