In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (review)

Ostensibly, Gil Z. Hochberg’s richly comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic writers bears a certain resemblance to previous works such as Ammiel Alcalay’s oft-cited After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993) and more recently, Rachel Brenner’s important Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003). But Hochberg’s over-arching perspective leads her toward strikingly different conclusions than any previous work. Rather than stress the values of “coexistence” or even “hybridity,” she attempts to demonstrate the need to “free both ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ from their current status as markers of fully separable . . . identities. . . . I am interested in the passage between the Jew and the Arab” (p. 16). Brenner and Hochberg examine some of the same figures (Israelis and other writers of North African descent) as well as Arab-Israeli writers such as Emile Habiby (The Pessoptimist), Atallah Mansour (In a New Light), and Anton Shammas (Arabesques), each of whom has written in Hebrew or published their works for Israeli readers in translation. But In Spite of Partition is distinguished by its insistence that, rather than polarities, “Arab” and “Jewish” must be reevaluated as inseparable identities.

This book’s greatest strength resides in its compelling close readings of literary narratives. Hochberg begins by noting the expressed antipathy toward the East in the discourse of early Zionist statesmen and ideologues, as in the following: “Ben Gurion’s statement: ‘Israelis will not become Arab-like’ . . . not only expresses Israeli antagonism toward anything Arab; it also attests to a terror at the very heart of the Israeli nation’s enterprise, haunting it from within. . . . It is only by establishing a connection between these threats that we can fully uncover the internal phobia operating within the Israeli society still today” (p. 14). In pursuit of this dynamic’s complex reverberations, Hochberg finds ingenious ways to structure her chapters around dialogues, real or imagined, between North African, Israeli ( Jews, Christians, and Muslims), and Palestinian writers. These include works by authors that will likely be unknown to most English readers, such as Jacqueline Kahanoff and Albert Swissa, as well as more familiar figures such as Albert Memmi, Ronit Matalon, and Anton Shammas.

At the heart of In Spite of Partition’s idealistic yet rational approach is the sober reality of two peoples whose lives and destinies are utterly inextricable due to the complex territorial, economic, and demographic circumstances in which they are rooted. In this respect, Hochberg’s favorite trope seems to be that of “traces”—in Derrida’s sense that one’s subjectivity or identity “always already” bears traces of the other. Thus she maps out ways in which “‘Jew’ and ‘Arab,’ rather than representing two independent identities, are in fact inevitably attached” (p. 2). She finds a tremendous range of illustrative examples that demonstrate the profound impact this essential paradigm has on the writer’s imagination. For example, both the Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifah and the Jewish Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom experiment with the ways that bilingual narrative can stimulate the reader’s understanding of the illusion of homogeneous national identity: “calling attention to the ‘familial’ (Semitic) relationship of [Hebrew and Arabic], and further implying . . . that the two Semitic people might in fact be closer to each other than they realize, or wish to realize” (p. 6).

Besides offering a particularly astute reading of Anton Shammas’ widelytranslated and acclaimed novel, Arabesques (1989), Hochberg argues that the subsequent controversial cultural debate between A. B. Yehoshua and Shammas (over the latter’s “presumption” in claiming the Hebrew language as the natural provenance of Israel’s Arab writers) should be seen “as an opportunity for rethinking the limits of national separatism and ethno-cultural segregation” (p. 78). It would seem that many critics expressed unease over the Arab writer’s appropriation of the “Jewish” language, accusing Shammas of harboring an acute and destructive “identity crisis.” For her part, Hochberg clearly regards the novel...