Rethinking theNakba

Abstract

In The Orchard (1972), the Israeli writer Benjamin Tammuz reformulated the image of the land as the arena of the struggle in Palestine.1 In this symbolic novella, the Israeli writer tries to go beyond the image of the Arab in the Israeli literature as a mute shadow. The mute in this novella is Luna, the woman who symbolizes the land, and the struggle between the two brothers who are her lovers results in their deaths and her son’s appropriation of the motherland. The highly symbolic style in Tammuz’s work overshadows the magic elements in the tale. The memoir of the narrator shows the limits of symbolism and how the story of pain in the Palestinian theater is erased by a poor imitation of the Old Testament myth of Abraham and his two wives and sons. In the novella Ishmael and Isaac take the names of Obadiah (Abdullah) and Daniel, two brothers born to a Russian German father, the first from a Muslim Turkish mother and the second from a Jewish Russian mother. Both meet in the orchard of Mahomet Effendi, a Turkish land owner in Jaffa, who has an adopted girl whose origins are vague: was she a Jewish or a Muslim Arab? No one knows. The fight between the two brothers for the woman, who takes the shape of a mythical character, ends with their deaths, and their mother becomes pregnant by her Palmachi son. One can read this novella as a new version of A. B. Yehoshua’s story “Facing the Forests.”2 The same dream of fire and the same ambiguities veil the story of the indigenous Palestinians. In “Facing the Forests” not only is the nameless Palestinian called an Arab but the name of his original village