Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction

Abstract

This article analyses literary mediations of francophone Jewish attitudes towards Israel, and particularly towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its primary corpus comprises two female-authored novels published during the Second Intifada: Olivia Rosenthal's Les Fantaisies spéculatives de J.H. le sémite (2005) and Chantal Osterreicher's L'Insouciance d'Adèle (2006). It demonstrates how these two texts represent antithetical stances towards Israel, the former intermittently critical and even censorious, the latter defensive and at least partly valorising. Given the status of both authors as French-born Jews (although Osterreicher now lives in Israel), both of these texts can be seen to mediate heterodox attitudes to the conflict. But the heterodoxy depends upon the context in which the reader places the two authors. In the context of the twenty-first-century France in which it was published, which, like most other countries in the global mediasphere, is heavily critical of Israel, Osterreicher's text is acidly contestatory of default-position anti-Zionism. On the other hand, in the context of the French Jewry to which Rosenthal belongs, which has traditionally evinced unflinching solidarity with Israel, her own critique of that country's dealings with Palestinians is equally contestatory, and, despite its ludicity, is no less impactful than Osterreicher's reverse discourse. A final axis of enquiry is the extent to which there may be some consensus as well as obvious dissensus between these two ostensibly antinomous texts.