The Duality of Arab Israeli Identity and the Politics of Survival in Sayed Kashua’s Let it Be Morning

Abstract

This essay closely reads the Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning to construe the complex survival trajectories of the Arab minority in Israel’s plural society. Kashua discusses the relentless struggles of Arab Israelis, caught in-between their social identification with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian nationalism. The novel captures the subjective and collective consequences of Israel’s ethnic democracy on the Arab community and demonstrates the social patterns in which Arab Israelis perceive, experience, and respond to systematic social segregation. This essay, through its interpretation of Arab Israeli experiences, manifested in the novel explores the conflict of contested minority identities through the Saidian discourse of orientalism and Anderson’s imagined communities. The nature of intra-communal rivalry among the minority groups for survival is also of interest to this study as the narrative locates the behavioural changes observed within the Arab community due to the negative environmental circumstances. The study also posits the sociological aspects of reinforcement theories to construe human behaviour in politically challenging environments.