LONGING TO BELONG:
LEVANTINE ARABS AND JEWS IN
THE ISRAELI CULTURAL IMAGINATION

In a world where Jewish is synonymous with Central and Eastern European, where North African/Middle Eastern is synonymous with Arab Muslim, where “of color” is synonymous with “not Jewish,” and where communities are generally represented through their men, our mere existence threatens to destroy the foundation of numerous identity constructs as society knows them today.

Inevitably, whenever one writes of Israel it seems that one must do so either in the context of the latest cycle of Jewish and Arab violence or, as has lately been the case, in the aftermath of some political leader’s cynical expressions of xenophobia. For instance, at the time of this writing (early July 2009) Ariel Atias, Israel’s housing minister, declared that it was a national responsibility to curtail the Arab population in the state. He stipulated that the proximity of Jewish and Arab populations (especially in the Galilee, a region of many Arab Israeli communities) was highly undesirable: “Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don’t think that it is appropriate [for them] to live together.”[2] Though it is hard to imagine a more incendiary statement (nor one more likely to frustrate those who would defend Zionism from the charge of racism) such remarks undermining the prospects for healthy civic attitudes toward Israel’s multicultural complexity have been uttered with greater frequency ever since the ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.[3] Atias’s official hostility hardly bodes well for dreams of coexistence in the region. Yet, even at a time when members of Israel’s minority have good cause to feel dangerously alienated from the state, a careful examination of cultural and intellectual trends suggests that a more hopeful multicultural ethos based on an expansive sense of regional belonging (that transcends national identity) continues to find vibrant expression.

In place of the reductive, inherently hostile paradigms of identity that demarcate discourses about the “East” and “West” or that presuppose a “clash of civilizations,” an impressive and eclectic range of Israeli writers recover the creative potential inherent in ambiguity, hearkening back to the cultural world of Muslim Spain in which the spirit of convivencia, or interactive and adaptive Muslims, Jews, and Christians flourished, recognizing and embracing the creative tensions that have subsequently stood the test of time as literary models of a civilization sophisticated enough to overcome our own age’s paranoid and fanatic predilection for certainty and absolutes. Even in contemporary Israel, built on the foundations of a manifestly monolithic, collective identity, it is not difficult to come across substantial formulations of a creative multiculturalism that might yet transcend the brutality imposed by the all-consuming attachments of territory and identity. Accordingly, Israeli artists, both Arab and Jewish, struggling against the closure and stability of the nation have a special regard for the Levant as an affirmative space for exercising their sense of selfhood as open, unstable, and unbounded. Though it is true that most Israelis do not yet perceive themselves as part of the Levant, many younger Israeli writers express variations on a special geographic identity that is paradoxically also an “uprooting,” or welcome displacement, in Emmanuel Levinas’s sense of recoiling from the violence of nationalism and fetishization of place and origins: “Every word is an uprooting. Every rational institution is uprooting. The constitution of a true society is uprooting.”[4] This would mean an outward movement, whether from the egoistic self or from the tribalistic society.

The Jewish Israeli writer’s attraction to the promising indeterminacy of Levantine space is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the most eloquent formulation of the Levant comes 
from the luminous prose of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979). Born in Cairo to a father of Iraqi descent and a mother from Tunisia, Kahanoff later lived in Beersheva and wrote numerous polemics advocating a “Levantine” orientation which she felt would help Israel overcome its isolation and increase the prospects for regional peace:

Kahanoff often alluded to a childhood in which she and her family enjoyed warm relations with Egyptian Muslims and Christians, as well as Europeans. Her poetic appraisal of the multicultural heritage of Levantine space is remarkably similar to that of historians investigating the Mediterranean’s ancient role as a site of bridges and contact zones between disparate cultures whose proximity made them less alien to one another.[6] Lately, this paradigm of Mediterranean and Levantine culture as a space of interpenetration has also attracted cultural and literary scholars who examine the historical interdependence of Muslim and Jewish regional identities, seeking to overcome the tragic vision that threatens to overtake those who, gazing only at the present, tend to read history through the same pessimistic lens.

New Critical Paradigms of the Levant

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, sought to prevent what he himself identified as the “levantinization” of the Jewish state by segregating the North African and Oriental Jews in remote development towns, thus preventing them from influencing the new “Israeli” identity of the transplanted Eastern and Western European elites. The uncompromising terms of Ben Gurion’s imperative were: “We do not want the Israelis to be Arabs. It is our duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that ruins individuals and societies.” As Alain Finkielkraut memorably argues in The Imaginary Jew, Zionism was a sort of dream of certainty: “What Zionists wanted 
. . . was for Judaism to put an end to its undecidability.”[7] In Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003) Rachel Feldhay Brenner examines Israeli identity as having long defined itself against Judaism’s repressed Mizrahi Jewish Other,[8] and, with more egregious consequences, imposed discriminatory practices vis-à-vis external and internal Arabs. As a counternarrative, Brenner suggests, the cumulative impact of the writings of a significant number of Arab and Jewish authors in Israel, in spite of their disparate sociopolitical perspectives, effectively “restores the visibility of the Arabs in the ‘empty’ land and calls into question the unequivocal Zionist claim to the land . . . by contrast, the story of the suffering that the triumphant Jews inflicted on the defenseless, defeated Arab population invokes the history of Jewish persecution and victimization in the Diaspora. Against the doctrine of exclusion, the literary representations reassert in the Israeli consciousness the denied histories of the Palestinian Arab and the Diaspora Jew.” Notwithstanding the fragility of such hope in our own time, Brenner insists that literature ultimately wields a power in the real world that cannot be discounted: “The readiness to tell one’s story and to listen to the story of the other signifies mutual recognition, which alleviates fear. Attention to the story of the other signals the ability to transform the knot of violence into a dialogic interaction” (italics in original). She regards it as a vital sign of Israel’s capacity for healthy self-interrogation that, in contrast to figures such as Rushdie, Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, and others who achieved their international fame as dissident writers at the cost of total repudiation at home, authors such as A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and David Grossman (as well as many who are lesser known outside Israel), while deviating sharply from accepted political lines and cultural myths, nevertheless “gained canonical legitimacy from the cultural establishment that was founded upon the ideological orientation they defied.” Her most important claim brings us back to Kahanoff’s trope of the Levantine mosaic: Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish writers together produce a dynamically “bi-ethnic” rather than a narrowly “national” body of literature.

Intriguingly, there is an emerging generation of Israeli cultural critics whose formulations of identity transcend the traditional premise of “dialogue” between hostile polarities. As her title, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (2007), suggests, rather than merely stress the values of conventional formulations such as “coexistence,” Gil Z. Hochberg declares her own desire 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.” At the heart of In Spite of Partition’s idealistic, yet rigorously defended, approach is the sober reality of two peoples whose lives and destinies ultimately prove inextricable, which is hardly an exaggeration given 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. . . . Exploring the meaning of this inseparability against the current polarization of the Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli societies, I suggest that the radical separation of the two people is itself attainable only on the basis of repression and active forgetting.” To her credit, she finds a considerable range of exemplars to demonstrate the profound impact this essential paradigm has on the writer’s imagination. For example, both the Muslim Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifah and the Jewish Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom boldly experiment with the ways that bilingual narrative stimulate the reader’s understanding of the limits of homogeneous or tribal identity: “accentuat[ing] the phonetic similarity between Hebrew and Arabic, calling attention to the ‘familial’ (Semitic) relationship of the two languages, and further implying . . . that the two Semitic people might in fact be closer to each other than they realize, or wish to realize.” Her claim for literature (more radical than Brenner’s emphasis on “dialogue”) is that “better than any other discursive practice [it] is capable of supplementing the economy of identity (I versus You, Arab versus Jew) with an economy of relation by demonstrating the “haunting presence of alterity within the self.” Hochberg offers contagiously exciting demonstrations of how literary texts affirm “possibilities of being that escape the limits of the separatist imagination.”

Another recent study, Alexandra Nocke’s meticulously researched The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity (2009), deftly exposes the ways that the spirit of Yam Tikhoniut (or “Mediterraneanism”) is employed by Israelis to open up their claustrophobic situation by relating to their locale as intrinsic to a more expansive geocultural space. Nocke is keenly interested in journalist Zvi Bar’el’s formulation of the transformative broadening of the Israeli sense of spatial belonging that has lately taken hold: “The Mediterranean Sea ceased to be a place into which Jews could be thrown, and turned into a ‘basin’ around which one discuss[es] common regional problems.” While fully acknowledging that such an expansion is subject to the precarious state of the peace process, Nocke and her subjects find vibrant expressions of Mediterranean identity “in the media, in cultural and everyday social practices, and as a part of public debates.” This transnational attraction’s power derives in part from its capacity for complementing “existing models of identity without either threatening their legitimacy or replacing them.” In other words, Yam Tikhoniut encompasses the “East” and the “West” without imposing a monolithic model of identity. Yet, it would be hard to deny that such an orientation has potentially far-reaching social and political implications. For instance, there is President Shimon Peres’s declaration that, rather than devote more resources to settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, “we must invest in the sea, and stretch our western borders in that direction by building artificial islands.” Undeniably, the expansive sense of belonging that Yam Tikhoniut temptingly promises also carries a certain demographic logic; after all, seventy percent of the country’s population dwells on the coastal plain. (In this regard, it is worth noting that “Mediterraneanism” has lately taken hold in other countries in the region; in 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy called for a “Mediterranean Union” that might one day lead to a supranational body.)

For the average citizen, Nocke speculates, “the Mediterranean Idea . . . offers a political vision, adding a new dimension to the prevailing fatigue, bitterness, and disenchantment with politics that can generally be found in contemporary Israel.” But the fraught question of belonging posed by the “East” and “West” demarcation is not so easily put to rest. In this regard, some of Nocke’s Mizrahi respondents express wariness about the prospect of being marginalized once again by what sounds to them like yet another Eurocentric rubric. Thus, Iraqi-born Jewish Israeli novelist Sami Michael proposes an alternative formulation that respects the traditional Levantine configuration of Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria but would be called the “Middle Eastern Union.” Both of these supranational paradigms look toward a much longed-for integration in the region, but they are heavily idealized, ignoring the prickly identity politics, let alone the tenacious ferocity of religious fundamentalism, that besets the ­entire region. (Pace Nocke’s Israeli subjects; a Lebanese academic complains to her, “Why shall we, alongside with Israel, all of a sudden become ‘Mediterranean,’ just for Israel to feel more welcomed in the region? We are Arabs and we will stay Arabs!”) Yet it is worth noting that variations on the views espoused by the Israelis who appear in Nocke’s book have already been articulated by others, including Arab intellectuals, in the region. In “Re-Thinking the Mediterranean” Omar Barghouti and Adrian Grima call for new regional alliances to transcend the ethos of a West and East destined for permanent enmity: “A progressive alliance that focuses on the Mediterranean can be a credible, indeed a crucial, core of a larger alliance that presents a counterweight to American unilateralism and European cultural ethnocentrism and economic protectionism, as well as a new paradigm for cross-regional partnerships based on a harmonizing vision and a geopolitical philosophy that is essentially at odds with the neocon worldview. It is not civilizations or even cultures that are pitted against each other, but the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice.”[9] The values and disparities they identify suggest a strong foundation for future forms of alliances—that is, if we ever overcome the fundamentalisms, narrow nationalisms, and ideologies that currently determine relations in the Levant.

These matters appear in a somewhat different light in the critical perspectives raised by the seventeen Jewish women essayists of Middle Eastern and North African ethnicity in Loolwa Khazzoom’s The Flying Camel (2003). Based in part on the formal proceedings and personal encounters that took place during the first international conference held by and for African and Middle Eastern women, this book is further enlivened by the spirit of the multicultural and feminist movements in America and elsewhere. Many of the essayists offer variations on Lital Levy’s disenchantment with mainstream Jewish education: “In Hebrew school we were taught ‘Judaism’ as if it were a monolithic tradition.” Levy recalls that diversity was represented only by “Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism.” Inspired by Levy and other women’s similar protests over the tendency to conflate Jewishness with Ashkenazi origins (and her own discovery of her Baghdad-born grandmother’s abayah, the full length veil worn by Jewish and Muslim women), Khazzoom seeks to penetrate beyond the “metaphoric veils . . . others throw over us in attempts to shroud our identity and history. . . . [T]he world has heard little or nothing about Jewish women from North Africa and the Middle East.” In “Reflections of an Arab Jew,” Ella Shohat, the influential film and cultural studies scholar, muses over the incongruities of identity wondering why “[t]o be a European or an American Jew hardly has been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion.” She complains that such a “binarism has led many Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arab-ness and Jewish-ness have been imposed as antonyms.”[10] Examining the case of Israel, Shohat finds a most unpromising status quo, especially in the crucial realm of pedagogy: “Our cultural creativity in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist in, and that some of us still live in, Iraq, Morocco, and Yemen.” While insisting on a more complex and complete Jewish story than is usually disseminated, it seems especially admirable that Shohat and other contributors refrain from constructing a falsely idealized past.

This restraint leads them to value the ways that the somewhat delicate historic position of the Jew in the Islamic world led to a nuanced and complex understanding of identity, analogous to the double-consciousness and insider-outsider perspectives that inform popular contemporary understandings of marginality and multiculturalism. Accordingly, in her concluding essay, Khazzoom acknowledges a complexity sometimes glossed over by others who prefer to present a rosier version of history: “Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, Jews were dhimmis—second class, inferior people. Islam and Muslims were made to be, literally and figuratively, always above Judaism and Jews. Even in the mildest forms of discrimination, Jews were treated as subordinate. This dynamic meant that Jews could participate in the society around them, even enjoy a certain degree of wealth and status, and befriend their Arab Muslim neighbors, but they always had to know their ‘place.’ It is with this information, understanding, and personal experience that many Mizrahim approach . . . the issue of Arab-Jewish relations.” Unfortunately, even today Khazzoom’s efforts to create sisterly bonds with Arab and Muslim women have been painfully rebuffed in encounters (she recounts these in heartfelt anecdotes) with those unwilling to hear that Jews had anything less than an ideal life during the long centuries of Islamic hegemony.

A.B. Yehoshua, National Cohesion, and the 
Seductions of Proximity

One of the most widely translated of Israel’s writers, A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1936) is renowned for capturing the quotidian reality of Israeli life, especially the fateful proximity of Jews and Muslims. Since the 1960s, his ambitious Faulknerian novels (The Lover, A Late Divorce, Mr. Mani, Friendly Fire, among many acclaimed works) present Israeli families as microcosms of the national condition, and scattered among them happen to be some of the most empathic and interesting Arab characters in the entire modern Hebrew canon. Yet while portraying members of Israel’s Arab minority with unusual depth and insight, Yehoshua has been obdurately antagonistic to the position of Jewish communities in relation to their surrounding societies abroad. Provocatively, in interviews, editorials, and polemics, he has steadfastly repudiated the Jewish Diaspora, not only as an essentially “neurotic” situation but also as an historic aberration that led directly to Auschwitz. He regards Jewish life outside the land of Israel as the epitome of irresponsibility. On this question, Yehoshua avows what must amount to the most resolutely classic Zionist perspective of any contemporary Israeli author: “The State of Israel came into existence precisely because the Jews wanted to change themselves and their situation without waiting for the anti-Semite to stop killing them. Zionism established the fact that in the destructive interaction between the Jews and the world, change could not occur in the world alone—Jews also had to change and normalize their situation.”[11] In contrast, firm possession of national space requires that the Jewish people take full moral responsibility for themselves, which in turn has direct implications for the lives of Others (a pervasive theme that bears heavily on the lives of Yehoshua’s fictional Arabs). Where many see the triumph of Zionist hegemony, Yehoshua sees the utter breakdown of Israel’s true borders, which has led directly to a collapse of moral will and humane values. The problem of Palestinian and Israeli coexistence and its ultimate dependence on each nation’s territorial responsibility undeniably endures as one of his deepest preoccupations. Hence, in considering the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Yehoshua has reached a conclusion based on a complicated understanding of identity, exile, and territory that does not quite resemble the terms of most intellectuals of the Israeli Left. He sees the settlements as the source of the malady but provocatively contends that the territorial conflict is worsened by vestiges of the diasporic mentality that Yehoshua is convinced circulates as a debilitating plague in the Jewish state: “We have hooked our circulatory system to that of the Palestinians and the two nations are poisoning each other. We have a tendency to blur borders and toward identity unclarity, whereas with them deep suicidal elements are now erupting.”[12] Clearly, Yehoshua the polemicist demands absolute identities and boundaries. But I wish to demonstrate here that there is often an acute and fascinating divide between Yehoshua the public intellectual who demands national “coherence,” and Yehoshua the experimental and empathic novelist whose imaginative narrative contains mysteries of identity not easily accounted for in the absolutist terms of his political remedies. No writer exceeds his capacity for delineating the strange and distorted paths of his nation as they percolate through the porous lives of individuals and families.

For this writer of Sephardic heritage (his family lived for five generations in Jerusalem), it seems highly significant that, in spite of his notable achievement in portraying the complex alliances of Jews of the “East” in novels such as Mr. Mani and Journey to the End of the Millennium, Yehoshua declares that the non-Jewish Arabs of Palestine and Israel remain the greatest catalyst for his literary imagination: “You can belong to one community or another and still maintain a degree of empathy toward a different one, but [it needs to be] through your own background. I have realized that, on a certain level, Arabs are important to me and continue to be more so than the Mizrahi issue . . . I think Arabs accompany me to this day, and even if the novel doesn’t deal with them, there has to be a moment of contact . . . I need that point of contact and warmth.”[13] Arguably his most complex novel to date, The Liberated Bride (first published in Hebrew in 2001 as Ha-Kala Ha-Meshachreret) beckons so alluringly to the unresolved disjuncture between proximity and distance between Israel’s and Palestine’s Jews and Muslims that in the end the novel seems ironically in thrall to the promiscuous diasporism of permeable identities that Yehoshua publicly reviles.[14] Nowhere is this more apparent than in the long Ramallah sequence, the Palestinian locale of an intercultural festival to which the Jewish Israeli protagonist, Professor Rivlin, a scholar of North African history, and his friends have been invited. The festival takes place on a Saturday evening in late November, strategically selected so as to not exclude any of the wide Jewish, Christian, and Muslim audience the organizers hope to attract. As it happens, the date is the anniversary of the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine. But Rashid (an Arab Israeli whose charismatic warmth lures Rivlin deeper into the Arab world than he has ever ventured), assures his Jewish friend that this time he will not be the sole Other in attendance: “There would be Israeli poets and peace activists, progressive people, all guests of the Palestinian Authority. There would even be a poetry contest, with prizes. . . . It would all be in a spirit of fun. Everyone was tired of politics. Ramallah wasn’t Gaza, where people loved to hate each other. The Ramallans knew how to live.” Participants are due to arrive from the West Bank, Israel, and even Jordan. Rivlin and company are met at the Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center. Significantly, the latter is an actual institution founded in 1996 (not long before the publication of The Liberated Bride), devoted to the promotion of arts and culture in Palestine.[15] (I would argue that this crucial quotidian detail lends the novel’s ensuing portrayal of unguarded proximity between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs even greater conviction.) Hence, Yehoshua’s sympathetic and hopeful portrayal of this groundbreaking institution in Palestinian national life strikes me as one of the most important aspects of the novel as a whole.

The festival’s director cheerfully announces that a highlight of the festival is to be a poetry contest between Jews and Palestinians, to be presided over by a British judge.[16] Immediately, the Jewish professor notes the remarkable ease with which fixed identities melt into indeterminacy: “Rivlin let himself be carried along by the festive hubbub of the guests, most of them young people of unclear identity. It was hard to tell the Arabs from the Jews, or either of the two from anyone else.” Rivlin is accompanied by Suissa, the father of Rivlin’s promising young colleague who was blown up in a bus bombing. Though described as harboring “vengeful feelings,” Suissa is deeply impressed by the celebratory atmosphere and chooses to remove his mournful “fedora and put on a big, colorful skullcap that might have been knit back in his North African childhood.” That last revealing gesture is Yehoshua’s subtle way of alluding to a past continuum of vibrant coexistence in which “Arabs” and “Jews” were far from estranged from one another. In spite of himself, Suissa eagerly joins the crowded buffet of “stuffed grape leaves and cigar-shaped meat pastries [where] the conversation flowed in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.” Arabs and Jews mingle freely, relaxed by the captivating sounds of the rebab, zither, lute, and other Middle-Eastern instruments. At one point, an Israeli guest tosses out the comment “that according to the latest studies Jews and Palestinians had the same DNA.” This startling remark is followed by the kind of collective laughter that remains indeterminate, but it provokes this ribald exchange by two poets, an Israeli and a Palestinian, in attendance: “ ‘We all come from the same monkey’s ass,’ the erotic poet guffawed. The Palestinian poet grinned provocatively. ‘I trust that’s one place where the Law of Return applies equally.’”[17]

In spite of the explicit politics of the second speaker’s mischievous rebuttal, the atmosphere remains playfully amiable throughout the evening; Yehoshua portrays the promiscuous intermingling of Jewish and Arab bodies at the Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center humorously and with an indelible optimism. One of the most moving moments of this interfaith and intercultural festival occurs at the reading of an exilic love letter written by Sakakini himself to Sultana, his future wife, especially in this fragment where Yehoshua unquestioningly highlights the Palestinian’s sense of belonging:

After the reading of the anguished letter of the Palestinian educator (“a revolutionary in his thoughts and a romantic in his feelings”), Yehoshua describes the audience as deeply moved, a collective experience that envelops both its Jewish and Arab members. But this melancholy mood is overtaken by genuine levity in response to the readings of verse by two historical poets who dwelt in medieval Baghdad, hybrid beings born in Persia who later embraced the literary milieu of the Arab empire. Abu-Nawwas, a riotous figure notorious for lyrics on wine and homosexual love (he’s immortalized in The Thousand Nights and a Night) and Al-Hallaj, a Sufi mystic castigated for his rejection of the primacy of the pilgrimage to Mecca and for embracing elements from other faiths. Their medieval boundary crossings and transgressions seem crucial antecedents for Yehoshua’s heterogeneous group of Jews and Arabs. One titillating poem after another is read by Palestinian and Israeli readers—in each other’s languages:

At first, the audience is treated to a succession of ribald poems, many of which feature Jews who tempt their Muslim neighbors with sensual taboos until Al-Hallaj’s exquisite language of mystery and ecstasy takes over, transporting all into a more sublime place, culminating in these absorbing lines from a sequence of three startling poems of Sufi origin. On one level, the lyrics describe an interior state of spiritually heightened awareness while in another sense they can be said to hint at an erotic union. But considered in the context of the surrounding novel, they offer yet another astonishing iteration of cultural doubleness and harmonious coexistence between the two disparate groups who must somehow also share a land:

The disparate realms of eros and politics are heightened by the fact that the lyrics are read alternatively, by a Palestinian poet and by Rivlin’s female colleague. The evening continues to divulge more instances of hybrid artistry and daring forms of cultural and ethnic destabilization. Hence, through Rivlin’s eyes readers grasp the hope not merely of a flourishing Palestinian state but of one confident enough to reach out to its neighbor in ways that might transform the meaning of the existence of each people in the eyes of its Other: “what an effort had been made by the festival organizers to reach out to their Jewish guests. They wanted the Israelis, whether peaceniks or poetry lovers, to feel at home in their hilly city—which, freed of the cruel yoke of occupation, extended to them a strictly cultural welcome on this chilly but brightly lit winter night.” To lay further stress on the theme of intermingled identities, Yehoshua produces an even more dazzling instance of the evening’s disordered confluence of Jewish and Arab identities. Nowhere is the profound promise of cultural coexistence more evident—borrowing, adaptation of tradition to produce new meanings—than in the startling choice of “the half-liberated Palestinians” (Yehoshua’s phrasing) to stage a bilingual scene from S. Ansky’s famous drama The Dybbuk (1919), based on Eastern European Jewry’s folkloric tale of ­demonic possession.[18] In one of the novel’s most amusing moments, Rivlin is flummoxed upon glimpsing Samaher, his female Arab-Israeli graduate student, inexplicably cross-dressed in the guise of a pale-faced, black-garbed yeshiva student (complete with earlocks and beard). Soon the professor discovers a number of her Arab-Israeli friends dressed up in the guise of East European shtetl Jews. He is captivated, not only by Samaher’s appearance as Azriel, the kabbalistic Rabbi of Miropol, and Rashid as Leah, the possessed Jewish maiden, but by the eerie subtext of Rashid’s bitter utterance as he resists the attempt to expel him from his beloved host: “I have nowhere to go, nowhere to rest in this world, apart from where I am now. . . . I will not leave this woman! I cannot!”

It seems to me that, in conjuring this moment, Yehoshua richly demonstrates Gil Z. Hochberg’s claim for literature that “better than any other discursive practice [it] is capable of supplementing the economy of identity (I versus You, Arab versus Jew) with an economy of relation (I as You, Arab as Jew)” by demonstrating the “haunting presence of alterity within the self, [the] belated return of the not-me-within-me” (In Spite of Partition). Here Yehoshua imaginatively intensifies his doppelganger theme—the inescapable prospect of two people’s intertwined destinies as Israel/Palestine. And yet this audacious portrayal raises a disturbing question about the nature of the intended allegory. For, after all, Ansky’s original version does culminate in the powerful rabbi’s decisive expulsion of the spirit (portrayed here as a little doll gripped by Rashid/Leah throughout the scene) from his beloved. Fittingly, the determined denouement of the original drama is not revealed in the distinctly exilic consciousness of this radically re-envisioned production, and that delicate matter must rest in uneasy ambivalence, just as it does in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

At this point the performance abruptly concludes, either because “this was as far as the rehearsals had gone” or because one of the actors has “forgotten his lines.” The lights come on and the audience breaks forth in loud applause.

From its imperative order of expulsion through the stark moment of violent force, the lonely spirit remains recalcitrant in its determination to cleave to its beloved dwelling. But in the spirit of the evening, eros and comedy ultimately quell the tragic overtones that permeate the cross-dressed, cross-
cultural version of this Dybbuk, allowing the Jews and Arabs present to face each other as autonomous and hospitable individuals, rather than hapless and acquiescent conduits of the play’s despair.[19] When I asked him about this episode, Yehoshua grinned with pleasure, affirming that he regards it as one of the novel’s salient achievements. He considers Ansky’s original text the classic Jewish play, calling his own appropriation “a sly idea that has in it truth. . . . [T]he Arabs stage the play because the Jews do stick to other peoples, as you stick to the Americans, and another to the French, and today a Jew from here sticks to the Polish . . . just so the Arabs stick to us and from this stickiness [devak] will result many troubles.”

In terms that strikingly echo the logic of Edward Said’s notion that “each is the other,”[20] Yehoshua asserts that he conceived the dybbuk as a vital metaphor for the dangerous relations between Palestinians and Israelis long ago: “It is as I’ve said, ‘you, you are our dybbuk and we are your dybbuk’ and this was before the Intifada . . . this dybbuk [is] what happens when you attach the blood vessels, the blood system of one nation to the blood system of another nation.” In case one misses the fatal consequences of this “unnatural condition” for the Jewish people, he emphasizes that “We saw this very well in Germany, how it ended . . . with a lot of blood” (personal interview).[21] In these remarks, Yehoshua the polemicist seems to distance himself from the optimism of The Liberated Bride, retreating to his defensive ramparts of absolute identities and a sharp division. Nevertheless, what triumphs in the Ramallah scenes is not only an inimitable sense of a dignified future for both peoples, but the possibility of new self-understandings fashioned by a confluence of previously disparate experiences and histories. Indeed, this sequence often seems to contradict Yehoshua’s polemics, even serving as a stirring illustration of the possibilities of what might ensue were artists (and others) to prophetically heed Hochberg’s call 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.” It is as if Yehoshua challenged himself to create characters who, if only briefly, explore for themselves the transformative implications of Hochberg’s insistence that, rather than polarities, “Arab” and “Jew” must be recast as inseparable identities.[22] Unfortunately, the eventful evening of metamorphosing identities of Yehoshua’s novel concludes with a sense of inevitability—a harsh return to the reality of borders, armies, and identity cards. The exuberant illusion of free-flowing, porous identities melts away for, when the “peace and poetry lovers escorted by a Palestinian police jeep” return to the IDF military checkpoint, the soldiers, “unwilling to rely on their instincts to tell an Israeli physiognomy from a Palestinian one in the dead of night” demand to inspect their IDs. Yet even in its bleakest moments, the novel ambitiously rises to the challenge of Said’s assertion that “It is more rewarding—and more difficult—to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally about others than only about ‘us.’”[23]

Paradoxes of Identity: Jewish/Muslim Otherness 
in the Twenty-First-Century Israeli Short Story

In a pair of recent magical-realist stories of transformation, the Israeli writers Almog Behar and Sayed Kashua, a Jew and a Muslim respectively, each reveal the absurdity of perpetuating the notion of “Arab” and “Jewish” Israeli identity as exclusive, impermeable categories. Most significantly, each of their narratives of identity confusion, published just a year apart from one another, is provocatively set in the eternally troubled and contested city of Jerusalem. Both writers respond to the segregations, divisions, and separations that govern the lives of the “reunited” city’s Jewish and Arab citizens.[24]

In Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi’s compelling essay, “‘Jerusalem Assassinated Rabin and Tel Aviv Commemorated Him’: Rabin Memorials and the Discourse of National Identity in Israel,” she builds on the foundation of anthropologist Chaim Chazan’s assertion that “in Jerusalem, the boundaries between mythological time and terrestrial time are blurred . . . while Tel Aviv is a place of one time—local, palpable” (Vinitzky-Seroussi) to investigate Israeli society in the aftermath of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder by a Israeli rightwing fanatic who sought to undermine the peace process.[25] For Vinitzky-Seroussi, and a number of influential journalists and cultural figures she consults, “Jerusalem” has come to signify “fundamentalism, militarism, uncompromising politics, ethnocentrism, and a Jewish ghetto” whereas “Tel Aviv” represents “universalism, secularism, pragmatic politics.” The author, who is currently a professor at the Hebrew University, does not rest on these rhetorical abstractions but instead takes the reader directly into a representative day that demonstrates the binary identities of the two cities:

Aside from providing such exemplars of the indelible ways that “Jerusalem” and “Tel Aviv” embody a Janus-faced Israel divided between tribalism and universalism, Vinitzky-Seroussi examines the Jerusalem municipality’s troubling reluctance to erect an official monument to Rabin in a genuinely public space; a lapse which Tel Aviv embraced with alacrity. Thus, she argues, “Tel Aviv expanded its symbolic reach beyond its geographical boundaries. Tel Aviv can be said to compete with and challenge the existing national identity represented by Israel’s official capital. . . . [B]y appropriating Rabin, Tel Aviv gained a measure of legitimacy in claiming to be the real capital of the state of Israel, while Jerusalem by omission, relinquished its symbolic role as one.”[26] In their surreal stories of metamorphosis, Behar and Kashua defiantly “import” the cosmopolitan, left-wing, and secular spirit of Tel Aviv into tense and separatist Jerusalem’s stony and unyielding “sacred” space.[27]

For Behar (b. 1978), migrations, journeys, and cultural dislocations are not just past experiences that might form the basis for new understandings, but charged catalysts that threaten to disrupt and destabilize the prospect of comfortably static identities defined by others in the present. A remarkable young Israeli writer, educator, and journalist living in Jerusalem, Behar presents a more radical narrative of porous identities than Yehoshua. His lyrically written prose fantasy about the transgression of identity and national boundaries, “Ana min al yahoud,” (I Am One of the Jews), won the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s short story competition in 2005, impressing the jury with its gentle use of “humor and unexpected changes of direction”—qualities they felt ensured that the work, in spite of its strong political implications, triumphs as art rather than polemic. They further noted that though “this is a very ‘local’ story, it has a universal message that can apply to any immigrant society.”[28] To this I would add that “Ana min al yahoud” is simply one of the boldest, most creative examinations of identity and heritage to be published in Hebrew in recent memory. In a fantastical and darkly humorous mode that bears a kinship to Kafka, Behar creates a gripping tale of cultural memory, dispossession, and recovery. At the same time, the story offers an indictment of a society in which Mizrahi writers like Behar himself were too long condescended to as arrivistes, largely ignored by the cultural establishment. Filled with jarring temporal and linguistic slippages, “Ana min al yahoud” is primarily concerned with the almost uncanny capacity of language and culture (even when neglected or repressed) to reclaim the individual with force and vitality, sometimes shattering the walls of nationality.

One day, the story’s Jewish Israeli narrator, who lives in contemporary Jerusalem, discovers that he has somehow lost his ability to speak normative Israeli Hebrew. To his intense discomfiture, his utterances are suddenly possessed by the Arabic accent of his long-deceased grandfather Anwar, an Iraqi-born Jew. In contrast, we learn that in his mother’s immigrant childhood, feeling the disapproval of her teacher and fellow students, she labored until she subdued the harsh glottal ‘ayyin that betrayed her roots. Yet now the narrator is helpless as the unwelcome alien sounds erupt from him: “I tried to soften the pharyngeal fricative het . . . I tried to make the tsaddi sound less like an ‘s’ and I tried to get rid of that glottal Iraqi quf and pronounce it like ‘k’ but the effort failed.” Like a Kafka protagonist, he finds himself standing accused, by “strangers passing by,” and soon he attracts the attention of policemen for his “tremendous guilt”—he is suspected of being an Arab.

In the following days, the narrator suffers a number of inexplicable incidents that strip him of his safe sense of national belonging. When the police stop him (it doesn’t help that his identity card mysteriously vanishes every time he needs to prove his identity), he reassures them that he will immediately contact Ashkenazi friends with “beautiful” accents—
“Hebrew as Hebrew should be spoken, without any accent” to aid his struggle to restore his civic integrity and secure identity. When these friends refuse to take his telephone calls, he turns in desperation to a second tier of linguistic hierarchy, friends whose parents immigrated from “Aleppo or Tripoli or Tunisia,” but whose native-born Hebrew will surely satisfy the officials. Yet their speech too “suddenly . . . had a heavy Arab accent and they’d be listening to some meandering oud in the background . . . and they’d greet me with ‘ahlan bik’ and call me ‘ya habibi’ . . . and take their leave of me with ‘salamatek.’”[29] At this point, appearing less an “Israelite” and more like an “Ishmaelite” the narrator, already suffering as a hapless conduit for the alien language and culture that erupt through him, is subject to increasingly intrusive (and surreal) investigations into his true identity and loyalties. The officials apply their most precise instruments to examine his case, but something about the alien identity lurking within eludes their most conscientious efforts and indeed assumes a deeply rooted and defensive position within its host:

Set loose in the city, the speaker’s unfortunate hybridity seems to infect Jerusalem’s very topography—even its temporality. Hebrew street signs vanish and streets, city landmarks, and inhabitants are all Palestinian Arabs and “not only construction workers, not only street cleaners and renovators.” The city suddenly reappears as it did in the days of the British Mandate: “as if there had never been a 1948 war.” Here it seems that Behar’s Jerusalem is sentient, inhabited by its own Levantine memories—which thwart the notion of possession or containment by any people’s “homeland” discourse.[30] As the narrator plunges recklessly into this dangerous counter-historical space, readers might assume that at last he will have a sense of belonging but here too, his fragmented identity places him at odds with his surroundings:

I do not succeed in mingling . . . because all I have at my disposal is Hebrew with an Arabic accent and my Arabic, which doesn’t come from my home but from the army, is suddenly mute, strangled from my throat, cursing itself without uttering a word, hanging in the suffocating air of the refuges of my soul . . . all the time, when I tried to speak to them in the small, halting vocabulary of the Arabic I knew, what came out was Hebrew with an Arabic accent, until they thought that I was ridiculing them.

Readers familiar with W.E.B. Du Bois’s description of the “double-consciousness” of black Americans will immediately recognize the fraught nature of this Mizrahi Jew’s plight, his lack of legitimacy in any of the disparate linguistic, cultural, and political worlds that surround him at various junctures. At the story’s midpoint, the beleaguered narrator discovers that neither of those societies can accommodate the inconvenient complexities of his identity: “I had lost their language and they didn’t know my language and between us remained the distance of the police forces and the generations.” Such darkly lyrical descriptions of the speaker’s metamorphosis beautifully convey Behar’s underlying insistence, not only that there are real stresses and fractures that invariably undermine any concept of a universal or otherwise absolute form of identity, but that the seemingly deracinated individual contains multitudes within.

Ironically, just as the narrator fails to function as a coherent unit within his defensive society, he becomes more integrated within. He no longer embodies a clear rupture between the generations (no longer “pil[ing] non-memory on memory”) and indeed, the more he accepts the alterity within, the more confident and expressive he grows:

One thing leads to another, however and (to paraphrase Yehoshua), the narrator’s identity chaos spreads like a virus. First, his girlfriend’s speech begins to blend her father’s Yemenite Arabic with her mother’s Ladino accent from Turkey. In the coming days she reports news of “a small plague” as “the old accents that were hoped to have vanished” mysteriously reappear. Even the Ashkenazim are affected, though they, in one of Behar’s gently mocking asides, succumb to the malady more decorously: “for them, the change would develop more slowly . . . because their children were convinced that their parents’ accent and their grandparents’ accent had originally been American, and they have less concrete memories of their old speech.” Where others have often critiqued the “Eurocentrism” that they regard as the partial cause for Zionism’s failure to ensure that Jewish Israelis have a sense of authentic belonging to the surrounding Arab Middle East, this slyly humorous allusion points to what is often Israel’s actual (if unspoken) and ultimately misguided cultural loyalty. Interestingly, at one point Behar identifies the new unclarity as a “dybbuk.” Whether or not an intentional reference to Yehoshua’s ambivalent use of this motif earlier in The Liberated Bride (which seems to waver between a celebratory cultural fusion and a reluctant indictment of a schizophrenic condition), Behar’s approach to this haunting is decidedly affirmative, as the previously homogenized culture bursts forth with a cacophony of Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, German, and Ukrainian accents and memories. Unsure of how best to respond to the national emergency of this new Babel and fearing that nobody will be left to “instruct our children in the secret of the correct accent,” the “security authorities . . . reinforce the radio with announcers whose Hebrew is so pure” that everyone else “will feel alien in our speech.”

As one might already expect from the protagonist’s picaresque journey, redemption proves elusive; the generational rift not so easily healed. Rather than gratification at their son’s “discovery” of his heritage, his parents recoil, feeling their hard labor to assimilate shamelessly repudiated: “my parents stood staunchly against me and against the plague, remembering the years of effort they had invested to acquire their clean accent.” At such moments, the anxieties that seethe throughout this fable bear a remarkable resemblance to the shifting priorities in America’s own epic story of immigration, assimilation, and triumphant reclamation of ethnicity.[31] In Behar’s story, as in culture itself, the younger generation prevails and the narrator’s parents are “alone in their non-transformation” while the transgressive dybbuk stirs its reluctant host “to write my stories in Arabic letters.” At times, the “important departments” are shocked by this challenge to cultural hegemony while on other occasions they dismiss his activities with condescending laughter: “Let him write stories that only he can read, his parents or his children will not read them and our children will not fall into the danger . . . we will give him all the government prizes for Arabic literature without having read a word in his books.” But the reversal of forgetting seems to take hold on the streets of Jerusalem, and not merely in the unthreatening bastions of art.

The narrator’s intergenerational complexity grows as the previous generations’ hopes and aspirations for him are given plaintive voice. The grandfather’s ghost speaks for the “generation of the desert.” This ideological term (Dor HaMidbar) derives from the wanderings of the ancient Israelites, who were ultimately judged to be unworthy of entering and dwelling in the Promised Land, and applied by Zionists to those whose modern yearnings of Return they fulfilled. He bemoans the confusion that encroaches on his grandson’s hitherto uncomplicated sense of place and identity, the clarity and purpose that the end of diasporic wandering should have ensured: “why is this history of mine mixed up with yours, how I have come to trouble your life . . . you are the generation for which we waited so that there would be no difference between its past and the past of its teachers, because our past was already very painful and we remained in the desert for the birds to eat us for your sake, so that you would not remember.” Traumatized by his strange condition, the narrator finds himself paralyzed (“I am not being, and I am not becoming”) and mute, which in turn anguishes his parents who look on helplessly as their material ambitions are defeated by their recalcitrant offspring: “speak, if you don’t speak how will you get a scholarship, how will you continue your studies and what will you do.” In the end, the narrator’s silence is deemed as politically transgressive as his speech—the police take him to jail where his parents stoically await his repentance. Instead he pleads: “read my story, Mother, Father, read all my stories that I have hidden from you for many years, you too are the same exile, the same silence, the same alienation between heart and body and between thought and speech.” The final sections of the story take on a peculiarly biblical cadence, drawing on Ezekiel’s prophecy (a valley of dry bones that are resurrected and invigorated with life once again) which presents a rich allegory of a return to life for the entire Israelite nation who was stripped of their humanity through the cruelty of oppression.[32] Invoking this fecund imagery, Behar playfully suggests something extraordinary about his own identity, that death is not death, and that what is genuinely vital in this world cannot be silenced forever.

Alternatively, he imagines a Levantine Israel in which the unpredictable rewards of renewal—and cultural ambivalence—are still possible. In fact, it is tempting to regard Behar’s work as fulfilling the kind of radical paradigm shift Hochberg posits: “Unfolding the imagined space between . . . two ends of the spectrum, between, that is, past and future, actuality and potentiality, loss and hope, history and imagination, the Arab Jew ‘we were’ and the Arab Jew ‘we might become’ . . . literary texts . . . revisit forgotten narratives and figures and missed opportunities as a means for envisioning the future. . . . Articulated in terms of a restless movement across borders and in between familiar precincts—Haifa and Beirut, Hebrew and Arabic, the Mellah and the Medina, lover and enemy, Islam and Judaism, the Arab and the Jew—such possibilities of being escape the limits of the separatist imagination.” And to a stirring degree, Behar’s tale also conjures up something Cynthia Ozick once wrote in a different context: “To remain Jewish is a process—something which is an ongoing and muscular thing, a progress, or, sometimes, a regression, a constant self-reminding, a caravan of watchfulness always on the move; above all an unsparing consciousness.” Here Ozick addresses the need for a spirited and enduring struggle of the Jewish self caught between Jewishness and the West, but it seems to me that her language (“sometimes, a regression”) of arduous becoming must ultimately apply to the inherent plurality of Jewish identity, with all its fissures and contradictions, within Israel itself. And I can think of no more mindful embodiment of this imperative than Behar’s quirky and profound Levantine allegory of creative potency and cultural possession—“Ana min al yahoud”—a formulation that gestures urgently to the kinds of cultural bridges that might yet be built in the Middle East.[33]

Herzl Haliwa, the absurdly named protagonist of Sayed Kashua’s story “Cinderella,” is tormented by a similarly mischievous metamorphosis.[34] The juxtaposition of “Herzl” and “Haliwa” (which means “sweetness” in Arabic) is especially ironic given his historical namesake’s famous 1896 pamphlet “The Jewish State” wherein he observes of the Zionist enterprise that “For Europe we will constitute a bulwark against Asia, serving as guardians of culture against barbarism.”[35] The genesis of the protagonist’s plight stems from the desperate prayer of a hitherto childless woman who at the Western Wall “begged God for a son, even if he was born half Arab.” Of course, in the perverse tradition of such prayers, hers is answered. Consequentially, his childhood nights are haunted by fearful nightmares of “expulsion, war, and refugee living,” the significance of which he cannot possibly comprehend. Thirty-odd years later, the long-suffering Herzl Haliwa still has a lot of explaining to do, especially to his girlfriend Noga, with whom he has never spent a single night in their two-year relationship. Nor does it help that his Jewish half drinks wine at dinner with Noga and the Arab side, “Haliwa,” indulges in heavy arak drinking after midnight. From that liminal time, the Arab elects to spend his nights in the company of pro-Palestinian European tourists (never an Arab girl because “Arab girls aren’t to be found after midnight”). On the verge of losing her forever, Herzl Haliwa can think of no alternative but to spend the entire night together, which Noga endures as “this idiotic game.” As the night ensues, she experiences the fact that her lover doesn’t understand her Hebrew and insists on spending their date in East Jerusalem, “the Arab sector of the city, which no nice Jewish girl has any business visiting.” Moreover, when a cab stops for them, he curses the driver in English when he recognizes that it belongs to a company that refuses to hire Arab drivers.

As in Behar’s story, Kashua’s young man encounters Jerusalem as both a Palestinian Arab and a Jewish Israeli. But there the doppelganger motif is even closer to home as Kashua himself is an Arab citizen of Israel who, as a journalist whose personal essays frequently appear in the pages of Haaretz (where “Herzl Disappears at Midnight” first appeared), writes in Hebrew and thus dwells between Israel’s Jewish and Arab communities, a life lived in perpetual translation, so to speak. Now in his early thirties, Kashua was born in the Arab town of Tira, not far from Haifa in central Israel. As an adolescent, Kashua won a scholarship to attend the Israel Arts & Sciences Academy, a Jewish boarding school. His experiences there of occupying a low position in the Jewish school’s social hierarchy eventually inspired the novel Dancing Arabs (2004), which followed a similar boy’s struggle to belong and even leave behind his Arab identity altogether. At certain junctures, he resembles A. B. Yehoshua’s Arab adolescent, Na’im, in The Lover, who is tempted by the seductive prospect of “passing” and mimicking Zionist culture to overcome the burden of being part of a minority. Of his current work, a humorous and mildly satiric column that appears in the Haaretz weekly magazine, he says: “I hope people identify with the person and forget for a moment that he is an Arab. For me that is the ultimate goal of my column. I learned quickly that it would be pointless to talk to the Israeli public about politics. My goal is to make people laugh and forget it was written by an Arab. Or cry and see that you can cry with an Arab, too.”[36] His second novel, Let It Be Morning (2006), also has autobiographical elements, presenting the painful cultural and political dilemmas of its protagonist, an Israeli Arab journalist who returns with his young family to his home village. Almost immediately alienated from his birthplace, the journalist and his family are trapped by a military curfew that bewilders and enrages the village residents. An astute observation of the enormous daily pressures faced by Israel’s minority citizens, it seems to reflect on its author’s own palpable lack of at-homeness. Obliquely commenting on the events and tensions portrayed in Let It Be Morning, he revealed his anxiety to the journalist Shoshana London Sappir: “If the state views me as a ‘demographic problem’ . . . and a ‘cancer in the heart of the nation,’ there is a chance that one day it will try to surgically intervene to rescue the country.” When asked why he doesn’t bother to exercise his right to vote, he responds: “I don’t feel like a citizen . . . I don’t feel like anyone is asking my opinion” (“Profile”). In both narratives, the unnamed narrator is a passive and resentful witness to the divided parties that surround him, discomfited by Israel through its discriminatory practices, by his fellow Arabs through their insularity and lack of compassion for West Bank Palestinians, and equally ill at ease over the fundamentalist ideology of the Islamists. Kashua’s two novels have been translated into seven languages to date, but the Arab world shows no interest in Arabic translations (though his work has been favorably reviewed in Arabic newspapers such as A-Nahar in Beirut).

Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod launch their study, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem, by examining a single day in which the Jewish residents celebrate Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), which was established as a triumphal secular holiday following the 1967 war and Israel’s assertion of sovereignty over the previously divided city, and the Muslim residents observe the religious holiday al-Isra Wal-Mi’raj, which commemorates the Prophet Mohammed’s night journey between Mecca and Jerusalem, from where he ascended to heaven mounted on the horse al-Burak. In their summary of the separatist dynamics of these celebrations, the authors declare that those lay bare the essential conflict:

Unlike Behar’s story of transformative change and recovery, the narrator’s bifurcation in Kashua’s story mirrors the reality of obdurate oppositions as described by Romann and Weingrod, fated to remain alien to one another.[37] The story concludes with the character’s Jewish half awakening from a deep slumber. When his beloved Noga tentatively asks what will “happen with this whole Arab story” his answer assures her that she has got her Jew back: “If you ask me . . . they can all go up in smoke.” What the two stories share is quite significant: their authors’ self-conscious sense of play in creating characters whose strange conditions challenge their Hebrew readers’ own sense of identity, their insistence that identities are never unequivocal, their subversive refusal to treat the Hebrew language as an exclusively Jewish possession, and finally a common resistance to the violently reductive narratives that increasingly entrap Israelis and Palestinians alike.

My focus on narratives written by Israel’s Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli citizens leaves open the important question of what cultural bridges are being built by its neighbors. On the surface, that remains unpromising: in Egypt and Jordan, where the governments have signed formal peace treaties with Israel, cultural boycotts of Israel’s intellectuals, writers, scientists, and educational institutions have been rigorously enforced. Nevertheless, over the years there have been glimmers of hope. No less renowned a figure than Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), the prolific chronicler of Cairo’s twentieth century social upheavals and transformations, long cherished his literary and political conversations with Israeli writers (Ronit Matalon, Sami Michael, and Sasson Somekh, among others). Mahfouz is the only Arab ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but many Egyptians resent his ardent support for President Anwar el-Sadat and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Another Egyptian literary figure, playwright Ali Salem, caused tremendous controversy in Cairo when he drove his old Soviet-built car across the border to meet everyday Israelis in 1994. He documented this provocative and highly entertaining journey in A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors where, impressed by the late poet Yehuda Amichai’s demand that more Israelis learn Hebrew, he calls for reciprocity: “I also ask those who want to have a role in the future of Egypt and the region to learn Hebrew. It is a wide entrance onto the road of peace.”[38] Unfortunately, Salem’s encouragement met with deep hostility, and on May 24, 2001, the Union of Egyptian Writers expelled him from its ranks for his support of normalization and his audacious return visits to Israel.

Such setbacks notwithstanding, by way of conclusion, it is crucial to take note of the recent emergence of more promising cultural developments transcending the dangerous seduction of antagonistic Othering. Ibis Editions (founded in Jerusalem in 1998), a small press entirely dedicated to publishing literary works from writers in Arabic, French, Greek, and Hebrew whose works engage with the history or idea of the Levant. The press’s mission statement declares that

In Berlin, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation funds scholarship that investigates “the rich and complex historical legacies and entanglements between Europe and the Middle East . . . reexamining genealogical notions of mythical ‘beginnings’, ‘origins’, and ‘purity’ in relation to culture and society; and rethinking key concepts of a shared modernity in light of contemporary cultural, social, and political entanglements that supersede identity discourses” through its Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe program. Finally there is the resourceful work of the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which notably was founded some months before 9/11. Its mission statement declares that, “Being equal parts ‘East’ and ‘West’ we resist the ‘us vs. them’ dialectic—the dichotomy of a ‘clash of civilizations.’ We don’t believe that the events of 9/11 have locked us into a binary reality” and that “whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Baha’i, Buddhist or secular, we embrace a larger vision of the Middle East that is inclusive, peaceful and forward-thinking.”[40] The proclamations of these three visionary enterprises (representative of many others) affirm what is already evident in the work of the Levantine writers addressed here; their soaring, sometimes whimsical, imaginations never lose sight of the concrete and quotidian complexities of the region. That there is a passionate appetite for the stereotype-defying bridges that can be built through the expression of such an ethos is vigorously apparent in the world beyond the text.

Notes

1. Loolwa Khazzoom, The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (Seal Press, 2003), xi.

2. Guy Lieberman, “Housing Minister: Spread of Arab Population Must be Stopped.” Haaretz, July 2, 2009. [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1097411.html]. Atias reiterated and defended that conception in subsequent interviews throughout that month.

3. The current government depends heavily on participation of the ultra-Orthodox Shas (Atias’s party). In its early days, Shas exhibited some flexibility on the Israel-Arab conflict, especially regarding the territories, but for some time he has supported the Greater Israel movement.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaisme (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1963), 165.

5. From the East the Sun, quoted in Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 71–72. The Baghdad-born scholar of Arabic literature Sasson Somekh (b.1933) calls her a prophet of the Levantinism that has taken hold of the Jewish imagination.

6. Today, many scholars find inspiration in the work of Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) often regarded as the most important French historian of the postwar era, who, in works such as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World (1995) and Memory and the Mediterranean (2001), theorized that as city-states and empires rose, the relative consistency of the natural environment throughout the Mediterranean basin created the conditions for a broadly congruent cultural space, a transnational unity. Historically, the notion of East and West as interdependent and comingling is also taken up by Shlomo Dov Goitein in his magisterial A Mediterranean Society (1999), a five-volume opus that provides numerous exemplars of the region’s rich history of intellectual and cultural exchanges and interpenetrations, emphasizing the ways that Levantine Jews were highly mobile and open to other influences.

7. In contrast, Finkielkraut writes admiringly of a prior heterogeneity that flourished between the world wars in which a self-identified Jew might “keep the Sabbath without looking like a bearded prophet, enjoy the Yiddish theater as well as Bizet’s Carmen, study the Torah and play Ping-Pong or volleyball, be fully Jewish and reject the Talmud’s rules. Modernity and Judaism were not the two mutually exclusive options, one set against the other, that we have retrospectively made them to be” (41).

8. The term “Mizrahi” applies here to Jews of North African and Middle Eastern heritage, an identity that extends back to the exile from the Land of Israel to Babylonia in the year 586 BCE and today includes a staggeringly diverse range of origins, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan,Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, and many other locales.

9. Barghouti is a Palestinian political and cultural analyst; Grima is a Maltese poet and academic. Their article appeared in Counterpunch, September 9, 2005.

10. For many of us, the perpetual seduction of this binarism distracts from what is most notable about the Jewish story. As Marshall Berman eloquently remarks, “It isn’t just that, over thousands of years, Jews have lived with fluid and elusive and contradictory identities, they’ve positively thrived on them. They have been poster children for what John Keats called ‘”negative capability,” the power to live with their inner contradictions. Why should Jews have evolved this way? I don’t know, but they have. . . . As the world has grown more modern, Jewish fluidity has turned out to have impressive value.” See “Israel: No Souvenirs.” Dissent 51.3. Summer 2004: 82–86.

11. A. B. Yehoshua and Marshall Berman. “A Brief Reply to Marshall Berman/Marshall Berman Responds.” Dissent 52.1. Winter 2005: 101–104. Quotation appears on pg. 102.

12. Interview with Ari Shavit, “A Nation That Knows No Bounds,” Haaretz (March 19, 2004): 9–12. Quotation appears on pg. 12.

13. Gershon Shaked, “Gershon Shaked Interviews A. B. Yehoshua,” Modern Hebrew Literature 3. (Autumn/Winter 2006): 157–169. Quotation appears on p. 167.

14. This novel is addressed at much greater length in Ranen Omer-Sherman, “on the verge of a long-craved intimacy’: Distance and Proximity Between Jews & Arabs in A. B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride,” Journal of Jewish Identities 2.1. (January 2009): 57–87.

15. Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953) was an important figure in Arab education in Palestine who with his family was one of the last Arabs to flee the Katamon quarter of Jerusalem on April 30, 1948, just hours before the Haganah and Palmach took over the neighborhood. He died in exile in Cairo but left an important legacy of educational works, poetry collections, and literary, ethical, and political essays. He is widely considered one of the most prominent intellectuals of Arab Palestine, a strong advocate of secular culture and progressive education. He remains a potent symbol of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe of 1948). See Gideon Shilo’s Khalil al-Sakakini (2007). The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre’s mission statement declares its goals, among others, as “nurturing the visual arts, recording & disseminating Palestinian narrative, and energizing cultural life.” Yeho­shua told me that he visited the center while researching the novel just prior to the Al Aqsa Intifada (unfortunately the violence of the latter ensured that a return visit was impossible).

16. Yehoshua’s inclusion of this last detail seems a wry allusion to the Mandate days when the British still ruled over Palestine, haplessly struggling to prevent the Holy Land’s increasingly dangerous Jews and Arabs from doing each other too much harm.

17. The speaker here suspiciously resembles the late poet Mahmoud Darwish (who was an official resident of the center). Significantly, Darwish once declared that “I want to create a stage for poetic spaces . . . where people can roam around with no boundaries, and where the search for identity will take place within . . . mixture, confrontation and cohabitation” (quoted in Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 133). In Yehoshua’s text, the Palestinian poet’s barbed rejoinder refers of course to the controversial legislation enacted by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) in 1950 which declares that any Jew throughout the world can return to their ancient “homeland” and be granted citizenship. As might be expected, Palestinians and others frequently express resentment toward this bastion of Zionism, regarding it as the insidious foundation of a larger system of discrimination (which they and others label “institutional apartheid”) that grants Israeli Jews superior civil and social rights over Israeli Arabs as well as Palestinian refugees and that ultimately undermines Israel’s assertion that it is a democratic state.

18. The Yiddish term dybbuk derives from the Hebrew verb ledavek, “to cling.” The notion of an “evil spirit” in Judaism can be traced to the Second Temple, and talmudic and kabbalistic literature, but the term dybbuk appears to have become prevalent only during the 1700s. Leading a Jewish ethnographic expedition through East European villages (1911–1914), Ansky frequently encountered the ritual exorcising of dybbuks among the Hasidim, who understood the dybbuk as a restless soul that possesses a living person, causing mental illness that expresses itself through its host’s mouth. Set in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Ansky’s drama revolves around a pair of ill-fated lovers—Khonnon, a penniless but devout student of Jewish mysticism, and Leah, the young woman he adores and is destined to marry. When Leah’s greedy father breaks the marriage contract to marry off Leah to a richer man, Khonnon dies instantly; his soul, however, lives on as a dybbuk, entering Leah’s body so as to gain possession of her love for all eternity. Aided by other rabbinical judges, the rabbi finally succeeds in exorcising the dybbuk, using incantations and rituals, followed by blasts of the shofar. Leah is forced to confront the choice between a loveless but conventional marriage or an unworldly union with her dead lover’s spirit. It is clear that in Ansky’s melancholy portrayal of a fatally intertwined union between two souls, Yehoshua recognized a potent allegory of present day political realities in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the same time, he cannot fairly be accused of prescribing a retreat to insularity as the remedy for tense reality. After all, the most disturbingly aberrant sexual union in the novel is that between the incestuous Yehuda Hendel and his youngest daughter, Tehila. Yet the difficulty of reaching certainty regarding Yehoshua’s ultimate convictions concerning the proper political boundaries between disparate peoples is manifestly evident even here. Indeed, a counterreading remains viable, for it might well be argued that this dysfunctional father-daughter relation is the inevitable outcome of the breakdown of sensible and essential boundaries.

19. There are hopeful signs of precisely the kind of Palestinian-Israeli cultural cross-fertilization that Yehoshua imagines here. Witness the recent Israeli adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s classic story “Returning to Haifa,” which explores the struggle of a Palestinian couple who flee during intense fighting in the 1948 war, abandoning their baby boy, and return two decades later to confront the Jewish immigrant family, Holocaust survivors, who has raised him as their own. Kanafani (a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was assassinated in Beirut in 1972) ended his original story with the Palestinian father asserting that only violence would bring justice, but the Israeli adaptation by playwright Boaz Gaon offers a somewhat more hopeful conclusion. The Return to Haifa was directed by Sinai Peter and performed both in Jaffa, a town south of Tel Aviv that is populated by Arabs and Jews, and in Tel Aviv’s prestigious Cameri Theater in the spring of 2008.

20. The full passage reads: “Jews and Arabs together, one as oppressor and the other as oppressed, have chosen each other for a struggle whose roots seem to go deeper with each year. . . . Neither people can develop without the other there, harassing, taunting, fighting; no Arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the Jew, that can rule out the Jew as a psychic factor in the Arab identity; conversely, I think, no Jew can ignore the Arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and lose the Palestinian Arab and what Zionism has done to him. The more intense the modern struggles for identity, the more attention is paid by the Arab or the Jew to his chosen opponent, or partner. Each is the other.” Edward Said, “Arabs and Jews,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3. 2 (1974): 3.

21. Yehoshua explained to me that in fact he regards this as the novel’s preeminent psychological, as well as political trope, applying to personal relations throughout the novel: the forbidden attraction between Samaher and Rashid, Rivlin’s invasion of Ofer’s privacy (“Personal Interview”). Moreover, he asserts that the first intertextual iteration of the dybbuk actually occurs in these lines of Al-Hallaj, where Yehoshua immediately was struck by its resonance: “When you see me, you see him / When you see him, you see us.” Thus, the medieval Arab poet and the twentieth century Yiddish drama of possession work in counterpoint to further underscore the dybbuk motif in the novel.

22. Ultimately, the Ramallah episodes conjure up a little of Peter Cole’s stirring cultural vision, as described in his recent edition of the Palestinian poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali: “There are of course coolly logical or harshly economic or military ways to change minds and alter positions . . . but by far the most organic way, and possibly the most effective, is Tolstoy’s—infection with feeling and shared experience” (Cole, xxv). Though in a conversation we had in the summer of 2006, Yehoshua clearly expressed a deeper pessimism (in the gloomy aftermath of the Al Aqsa Intifada and the escalating situation in Gaza), that foreboding did not intrude on these scenes of creative cross-pollination.

23. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage, 1994), 336. Yehoshua’s enduring engagement with the challenge of coexistence may have its origins in a 1950 family visit to Morocco when he was fourteen years old, as recounted by Adia Mendelson Maoz: “Visiting his mother’s family, he was overwhelmed by the views, the beaches, the colorful and prosperous way of life, and the nature of the relationships between Jews and Muslims”(30). In “The Question of Polygamy in Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium: Two Moral Views—Two Jewish Cultures,” Shofar 28.1 (Fall 2009): 15–31.

24. This reality is comprehensively examined in Michael Romann’s and Alex Weingrod’s aptly titled study Living Together Separately: Arabs & Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

25. See Chaim Chazan’s essay “The Way We Were” (Hebrew) in Tel Aviv-Jaffa Research, eds. Gila Menachem and David Nachmias (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1993): 261–279.

26. For those unfamiliar with the increasingly polarized nature of Israeli society, Vinitzky-Seroussi’s elaboration on its urban oppositions may prove greatly clarifying: “The two cities can be said to appeal to and define two distinct national Israeli Jewish identities. Jerusalem may be seen as representing the mostly religious and right-wing nationalists who are fiercely opposed to Rabin’s legacy. Tel Aviv represents the more secular and left-wing segment of Israel’s population that supported Rabin’s policies, particularly in regard to the conflict with the Palestinians. The difference in commemoration underlines the increasing bifurcation of Israel into (at least) two very distinct kinds of societies with two very different kinds of capitals. The social, political and cultural conflict between religious and secular life, between past and present, between universalism and particularism, between Right and Left, is not only marked, highlighted, reflected and represented by Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The ways in which each urban center collectively remembers this event has become an arena through which larger social conflicts and identities are constructed and defined” (199). In “Jerusalem Assassinated Rabin and Tel Aviv Commemorated Him”: Rabin Memorials and the Discourse of National Identity in Israel,” City & Society 10 (1998): 183–203.

27. Israelis often note that whereas Jerusalem always bears the full weight of its ancient ruins and sacred sites claimed by the three monotheisms, youthful Tel Aviv, which rose from sand dunes a little over a century ago, is relatively unburdened by history.

28. The full jury statement presenting its criteria for selecting Behar’s story was appended to the story’s original publication in the Culture & Literature weekend supplement of Haaretz (April 22, 2005), pg. 2 (my discussion cites this version). The English translation by Vivian Eden appeared on April 29, 2005, pgs. 24–26, and was followed a year later by the Arabic version in the cultural monthly Al-Hilal (June 2006),. 117–122.

29. Oud: a musical instrument of the lute family, native to North Africa and the Middle East; ahlan bik: standard response to a friendly greeting; ya habibi: my dear, my darling; salamatek: to your good health.

30. The kind of vision of a sacred city expressed in Behar’s story, one whose preservation truly respects its complex history, is increasingly challenged by those like Israel’s Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, a Likud party member who recently announced his intention to abolish Arabic place names (including Al-Quds for Jerusalem). See Ron Friedman, “ ‘Yerushalayim’ or ‘Jerusalem’?” Jerusalem Post (July 13, 2009), 6. The longstanding practice was to honor Israel’s three official languages (Hebrew, Arabic, English) as well as the traditional names for locales. Thus “Jerusalem” is identified as Yerushalaim in Hebrew, Jerusalem in English, and Al-Quds in Arabic. Under Katz’s proposed policy the Holy City will only be identified as Yerushalaim in all three languages. Similarly, Nazareth (Al-Nasra in Arabic) will be identified as Natzrat and Jaffa (Jaffa in Arabic) will be appear as Yafo. The vexed issue of naming seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009 on other fronts as well. On July 22, the Israeli Education Ministry announced that it would remove from school textbooks the Arabic term nakba, widely used by Palestinians to describe the events of 1948, in which 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, as a “catastrophe.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long argued that the word nakba in Israeli Arab schools amounted to disseminating propaganda against Israel. Yet previous Israeli governments embraced the teaching of comparative histories at least in the Arab sector. It was first introduced into a textbook used by Arab schools in 2007 when Yuli Tamir of the Labor party headed the Education Ministry.

31. Consider Herbert Gans, writing in the 1970s, observing the contrast between second-generation Jewish Americans, for whom ethnicity often carried severe economic and social costs and their children, for whom an ethnic Jewish identity became more desirable while the social stigma associated with it subsided. Gans analyzed the myriad ways in which Jews, like other “white” Americans, overwhelmingly shifted from religion to “ethnicity,” which has a voluntary, symbolic nature that increasingly eludes the constraints and definitive forms of religion. See his “Symbolic Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1979).

32. By reading about the valley of dry bones on Passover, Jews celebrate their own ritualistic rebirth.

33. Most promisingly, the story has been translated into Arabic and even garnered warm attention in Al-Hilal, an immensely popular Egyptian cultural monthly where it was published in its entirety.

34. Originally titled “Herzl Disappears at Midnight,” Kashua’s 2006 
story was also originally published in Haaretz and was translated by ­Vivian Eden. The English translation is available at Words without 
Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Cinderella. Accessed August 17, 2009.

35. Herzl did not harbor any animosity toward Arabs, and in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land, 1902), a major character is a Haifa engineer, Reshid Bey, who feels indebted toward his immigrant Jewish neighbors for improving the economic prosperity of Palestine’s inhabitants and is optimistic about the prospects for Jewish and Arab coexistence. In this visionary work, the secular writer even portrays a fanatical rabbi’s scheme to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens, a plot that ultimately fails in the aftermath of an election in which Arabs and Jews both vote and enjoy equal rights.

36. By all accounts, he has attracted an enthusiastic following. As one reader observed ironically, “Sayed Kashua is the only Jewish humorist living among us today. We lost our sense of humor. We do not have the ability to see ourselves as others see us. And we don’t have the ability to empathize with the other.” See Shoshana London Sappir, “Profile: Sayed Kashua,” Hadassah Magazine 88.2 (October 2006): http://www.hadassah.org/news/content/per_hadassah/archive/2006/06_oct/profile.asp. Kashua is also renowned for his writing for the highly successful Israeli television satirical series “Arab Labor,” which follows the exploits of Amjad, a Palestinian journalist whose work and Israeli citizenship lead to an unresolved identity crisis.

37. In a recent satirical editorial, Kashua revisited the phenomenon of cultural “passing” through his acerbic account of the mistarvim—undercover agents from Israel’s security forces trained to “be Arabs” but whose presence in his neighborhood he claims is all too obvious due to crude cultural gaffes and misapprehensions. See Sayed Kashua, “How to be an Arab,” Haaretz (October 23, 2009): http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1121401.html.

38. Ali Salem, A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors, Trans. Robert J. Silverman (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1994), 73.

39. The website of Ibis Editions contains rhapsodic endorsements by Mahmoud Darwish and many others: http://www.ibiseditions.com/home/about.htm. Ibis has produced many of the first English editions of books such as Marcel Cohen’s In Search of a Lost Ladino, which considers the peripatetic lives of his Sephardic ancestors, the native Palestinian poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali, whose work extols the vanquished village of his childhood; and Samih al-Qasim, as well as Esther Raab, early poets inspired by the natural and landscape of early Israel, including its kibbutzim.

40. The Levantine Cultural Center’s astonishing range of sponsored activities include music, dance, poetry, literature, film, painting, sculpture, and the gathering and dissemination of oral histories. Like those scholars and writers we’ve considered, the Levantine Cultural Center seeks to overcome nationalist forms of identification by celebrating the minority cultures of the region (Armenian, Bedouin, Kabyl, Kurdish, and Jewish Sephardi/
Mizrahi cultures, among many others), and above all, the values of interdependence, cultural infusion, synthesis, and permeability. The Center maintains an elaborate website that includes its online journal (Levantine Review) at: http://www.levantinecenter.org. The Center’s aspiration to serve as “an oasis of cultural exploration, peace, exchange and understanding” during a tumultuous period that has included violent upheavals such as the tragedy of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the Second Lebanon War, and the bloody conflagration in Gaza, as well as deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, would be laudable enough in this woefully unpromising first decade of the twenty-first century, but it is also worth noting the intellectual complexity of its mission to serve “as a crossroads between contemporary arts and traditional cultures” and its staggering inclusivity: “From the cultures of the Levant to the Arab spirit of Al-Andalus, from Greece and Turkey to North Africa, from the cultures of West Asia, including Iran and Pakistan to the Gulf States.”