Blue, Half-Forgotten Hills: Journeys into the Western Galilee, in Ilyas Khouri's Gate of the Sun and A.B. Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride

Abstract

The epicentre of the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride and the Lebanese novelist Ilyas Khouri’s Gate of the Sun is located in the Western Galilee and in Southern Lebanon. Both lie at the heart of the PalestinianUr-narrative of the War of 1948. If we look at satellite images of the region, we notice how seamlessly the Great East African Rift Valley melds into the rougher, coarser landscape of Southern Lebanon.1 Topography is theatre here: many of the Palestinians dispossessed in April 1948, as part of Tochnit Dalet or, later on, in October 1948, during Operation Hiram, crossed from the Galilee into southern Lebanon in their flight from war and despoliation.2 And then they tried to cross back again, across the fence: the most primitive form of irredentism. The essential connectedness of Northern Israel/Palestine and Lebanon is as ancient as the history of the peoples of the Near East. From ancient Ugarit, on the Lebanese coast, with its proto-alphabetic cuneiform script, to the early Aramaic inscriptions in Tel Dan, we are looking at an age-old continuum of conquest and settlement and reconquest. Armies and the objects of their malign attention have been wandering back and forth between Southern Lebanon and Northern Palestine/Israel from time immemorial. It is reasonable to argue that what Israel gained in 1948 in the Western Galilee, with its kibbutzim, moshavim and other towns and settlements, mirrors what Palestine, with its small towns and villages, lost in 1948. In the modern Galilee, the remnant of the Palestinian population lives within a patchwork of Arabicand Hebrew-speaking Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze