Rethinking “Jews” and “Arabs” through Palestine: Transcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay I investigate an unexplored transcolonial relation: that tying North African writers to Palestine. Examining three sets of texts from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, I argue that, in different ways, Albert Memmi, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Jacques Hassoun reconsidered the legacies of French colonial divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb—in particular those opposing Jews and Arabs—through the lens of Palestine. Whereas in the 1950s Memmi famously analyzed the colonial hierarchies of his native Tunisia, he later endorsed the opposition between Jews and Arabs, giving credence to these categories and proclaiming the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” To the contrary, the Moroccan Jewish writer El Maleh faulted French minority politics, Zionist discourse, and Israeli colonialism with the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghreb and beyond, disidentifying with Israel and allying with Palestine in an attempt to restore the link between Jews and Arabs. Finally, Khatibi, a Muslim Moroccan, and Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian, sought to deconstruct this opposition through philosophical exchanges on the Abrahamic. These diverse examples invite us to reconsider national and postcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature in light of transnational relations connecting the Maghreb to Palestine.