Space and Place in Jewish Studies

3 Jerusalem

38 3 Jerusalem Eli Amir is an Iraqi-born writer who immigrated to Israel as a teen in the 1950s and became a popular novelist and well-known public figure. His 2005 novel Yasmin begins with a remarkable rendering of Jerusalem: on the morning of June 7, 1967, a senator from the Jordanian parliament watches the sunrise from the window of his home and notices a straggling column of dusty, tired-looking soldiers in torn uniforms walking down a nearby alley. Remembering the tremendous commotion of the previous night’s battle, Al-Sayed Antoine Salome reflects upon the heroism of these fighters, no doubt members of the Iraqi brigade that has arrived to help the Hashemite kingdom defend Al-Kuds (Jerusalem). As the soldiers pause to rest with their heavy packs and weaponry, leaning against the fence surrounding his home, he opens the balcony door and greets them, expansively, vividly comparing their efforts to the great Islamic warriors of the past: Al Salam Aleykum and may Allah’s mercy bless you, oh mighty soldiers, fighters of the holy war, oh sons of the illustrious Arab family, oh bravesouled , beloved. I, Antoine Salome, member of the Hashemite Jordanian parliament, am honored to present you with the gratitude and admiration of King Hussein. . . . Your glorious fighting is akin to the war of Caliph Omer Ibn Al-Khtab, conqueror of Al-Kuds Al-Sharif.1 By the sword you have pushed back the contemptible, heretical, brutal, lowly Zionist enemy, pitiful and cowardly, and with the help of Allah you will throw them into the sea.2 His speech is greeted with stunned silence; finally, one of the soldiers approaches, removes his helmet and says: “Ichna yahud, min hon. We are Jews, from here, from Israel.”3 This short scene provides the frame through which much of the novel unfolds: the jarring sense of amazement felt by Al-Sayed, “the blood drained from his face,” resembles in some fundamental fashion, I would argue, the experience of the Hebrew reader of Amir’s novel, who is repeatedly forced to view her own recent history, especially the first few decades of Israeli statehood, from the point of view of those Palestinians who share its territorial setting. Just as the Arab functionary is confronted with the presence of those Israeli/Jewish soldiers, “from here,” so too readers of Jerusalem 39 Yasmin, by entering its fictional world, are faced with competing claims of ownership and homeland. After the city is “reunified,” Palestinians, prevented from visiting the western neighborhoods of the city since 1948, are suddenly able to visit their homes in Talbiyeh, Katamon, and the German Colony with a sense of familiarity and entitlement. The Israeli soldiers’ multilingual reply to the Jordanian official points to the kind of cultural border-crossing that is one of the novel’s central themes. The soldiers speak both Arabic and Hebrew; they are, perhaps, Iraqi-born like the author (and like the novel’s hero, Nuri Amari, who himself speaks Arabic at home with his parents, and Hebrew in his job in a newly formed government office devoted to managing East Jerusalem). Indeed, Antoine Salome was expecting Iraqi soldiers and here they are— just not the ones he thought he would find. The use of both Arabic and Hebrew in this critical moment—indeed throughout the novel—further complicates what it means to be “from here, from Israel.” The presence of Arabic in the mouths of conquerors disrupts the historically privileged bond between Hebrew and territory, and offers instead a more complex sense of how space is constituted and produced by often unpredictable social interactions. The novel treats the potential crossing of borders through the evolving romantic relationship between Nuri Amari, a new Jewish immigrant from Iraq who serves as an advisor for Arab affairs in East Jerusalem, and Yasmin, the daughter of Abu George, a Christian Palestinian cooperating with the city’s new Israeli administration. The demarcation of physical borders, in this case between East and West Jerusalem, between Arab and Jew, Palestinian and Israeli, serves as a physical corollary to the inherently unstable borders defining Israeli national identity.4 The potential union between Nuri and Yasmin, briefly consummated, symbolizes the untenable nature of any long-term partnership in the city, deriving, the novel suggests, from the unequal power relations between occupier and occupied. Many Jewish citizens of the city also greeted its expansion after the war with a kind of geographic vertigo, a disorienting...