Palestinian Authors Research Articles

Empathy in Post-Oslo Palestinian Literature: Reading between Identification and Recognition in Ala Hlehel’s Au Revoir Acre and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance

Abstract This article considers Ala Hlehel’s Au Revoir Acre and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, two Arabic-language novels published in 2014 by Palestinian authors with Israeli citizenship. It argues that both texts thematize empathy, despite its familiar pitfalls, as central to their imaginings of an inclusive political future in Israel/Palestine in the post-Oslo era. In revivifying eighteenth-century Acre and the city’s triumphant defeat of Napoleon in 1799, Hlehel’s creatively embellished historical novel curates an effortless cascade of emotionally contagious intergroup identification in a space of historic Palestinian triumph. Conversely, in positing the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all Palestinians from Historic Palestine, set against the backdrop of a troubled friendship and a searching soul, Azem’s speculative work offers a Fanonian critique of the politics of recognition and a concomitant turn to affect. Together, the texts constitute a future-oriented strand of contemporary Palestinian writing that counterintuitively thematizes intergroup empathy, drawing upon its symbolic currency to scaffold a pedagogical hermeneutics of decolonial overture.

Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film

Directed in 1982 and primarily screened to Western audiences, the film Return to Haifa is one of the first visual productions to show to the West a major episode of the Palestinian modern history, namely the expulsion of most of the Palestinian population from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948. This article examines the film of Kassem Hawal, an Iraqi filmmaker engaged in the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as a medium that writes the history of the Palestinian Nakba. Reproducing on the screen Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous novella (published in 1969), the film borrows major features of the Palestinian author’s visual style, specifically in the use of the narrators’ points of view and in its depiction of the individual experiences lived by the novella’s characters. Yet, far from being a mere adaptation, the film stands out in its representation of the collective experience of the Nakba by Palestinians. The predilection of Hawal for archival images is central to understand the film as a tentative to use the novella in a visual writing of the Palestinian history of 1948. The analysis of interactions between archival and fictional shots demonstrates that Hawal’s film reflects on the types of images that are necessary to write this history. The analysis finally shows the cinematic suggestion of the need of impossible images to visualize the collective experience of Palestinians in 1948.

Ambivalence, division, and critique: The collaborator in British Palestinian political thrillers

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of the collaborator as a literary figure and a critical tool in Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off and Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda. I argue that Hiller’s and Masoud’s political thrillers reclaim the collaborator as a figure of division and ambivalence, which facilitates engagement with local subtleties. These include the issue of collaboration and its implications for individuals as well as the Palestinian national struggle; the straightforward path from resistance to liberation and statehood; and the idea of a unified Palestinian ideology to which Palestinians, including Palestinian authors in the diaspora, need to be loyal. In this sense, Hiller’s and Masoud’s works offer important insights into wider trends in Palestinian writing, including an emphasis on non-heroic and ordinary characters, while using the political thriller, as a popular anglophone genre, to bring awareness of the Palestinian cause, in all its ambivalence and complexity.

Individualism, Collectivism, and Identity Politics in Palestinian Life Writing

ABSTRACT This article examines the tensions, (dis)continuities, and precariousness of postcolonial identities in the autobiographical writings of Palestinian authors Ghada Karmi and Raja Shehadeh. The question of identity will be examined considering Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualisation of strategic essentialism and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s collective identity politics in the texts, as well as concepts of multiple affiliations by Amin Maalouf and Chantal Mouffe. Through the textual and contextual analysis, I demonstrate that emphasising an individualist sense of identity is a vital means of empowerment for the subject in a patriarchal and collectivist culture. Simultaneously, identifying with the national collective emerges in these texts as an indispensable means of anti-colonial resistance and steadfastness. Particularly in a context of ongoing settler colonialism, collectivist affiliation becomes inevitable to safeguard Indigenous identity and to challenge the hegemonic colonial discourse that aims to eliminate the native collective. Therefore, a conflict arises between the authors’ desire for nonconformity and individualist expression on the one hand and the imposed collectivist affiliation due to the urgent anti-colonial cause on the other. I argue that the individual author finds him/herself trapped in an unresolvable predicament of identity that dramatises questions of belonging and affiliation. These personal narratives are thus paradoxically and unavoidably relational, dependent, and speak to the collective experience of the Palestinian people. The article concludes that identification in contexts of colonial struggle challenges both the binary opposition of individualism and collectivism, and the notion of a unified and autonomous selfhood.

Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture by Reuven Kiperwasser

Reviewed by: Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture by Reuven Kiperwasser Matthew Goldstone Reuven Kiperwasser. Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2021. 237 pp. Reuven Kiperwasser’s Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture explores how narrators of the Yerushalmi and Bavli constructed regional identities through portrayals of rabbinic interactions with internal Others (i.e., rabbis from one location visiting or residing in another location). Grounded in both theoretical and literary methodologies, this work encourages readers to redirect their attention from rabbinic interactions with groups typically understood as outsiders in the eyes of the rabbis (e.g., minim) to the prevalent experiences of alterity among those within rabbinic circles. Kiperwasser presents a compelling case for understanding narratives about Babylonian and Palestinian rabbinic interactions as important sites for the negotiation of the respective storyteller’s geographic identity. Moreover, he highlights the greater significance of Babylonian visitors impacting Palestinian rabbinic identity than the role of Palestinian figures impacting Babylonian rabbinic identity. In conceptualizing travel narratives, Kiperwasser adopts the helpful framework of hospitality. This perspective allows him to reflect on the roles and [End Page 178] expectations of both host and guest as rabbinic characters uphold or deviate from these positions. In articulating the nature of hospitality, Kiperwasser draws upon certain Derridean theorizations, such as the interrupted self, that at times enhance his textual readings throughout the eight main chapters. Following an introduction that provides background and some methodological considerations, the first six chapters of the book focus on depictions within Palestinian literature (primarily the Yerushalmi) of Babylonians (most of whom are rabbis) coming to Palestine. The first chapter adopts a bird’s eye view of Palestinian perceptions of Babylonians. In addition, this chapter discusses the erection of geographic boundaries through the need for Palestinian rabbis to ask permission before leaving Palestine and explores the use of humor as a form of defense mechanism. The subsequent two chapters revolve around the ways lay and elite visitors from Babylonia impact the formation of Palestinian rabbinic selves. According to Kiperwasser, through mocking stereotypes about Babylonians and the reinforcement of hierarchies in which Babylonians remain inferior to their peers, Palestinian narrators construct their own identities in response to the presence of internal Others. Chapters 4 and 5 narrow in on a few specific rabbis, examine rabbinic openness to absorbing elements of their peers’ cultural particulars, and explore the ways in which Palestinian leaders might have felt reliant upon their Babylonian colleagues. Chapter 6, the last of the chapters that focus on Palestinian sources about Palestinian hosting of Babylonian figures, looks at the use of shared traditions in the Yerushalmi and Bavli, paving the way for an articulation of the differences between the Palestinian and Babylonian employment of hospitality narratives for the cultivation of regional rabbinic identities. The final two chapters revolve around Bavli narratives about Palestinians coming to Babylonia (chapter 7) and Babylonians going to Palestine (chapter 8). Within these stories, Kiperwasser observes the way in which the Bavli minimizes conflict between figures and transforms what appeared in Palestinian sources as an interacademy episode into an internal Babylonian story. The foci of these accounts lead Kiperwasser to conclude that the narrators of Bavli hospitality episodes were less drawn to utilizing such interactions as a basis for the construction of Babylonian rabbinic identities than were Palestinian authors. Kiperwasser consolidates his observations in the conclusion, which delineates three forms of rabbinic selves: the more empathetic self, torn between xenophobia and philoxenia; the xenophobic self, as captured by a passage in Song of Songs Rabbah; and the more benevolent Babylonian narrator who uses Palestinian figures to embellish his sense of self. These abstracted representations map the variety of sources onto a simplified framework for basic comparison, allowing Kiperwasser to posit core geographic differences in the rabbinic depiction and use of hospitality narratives. Bearing in mind that an author can never include everything relevant to a particular topic, there are two lacunae that stand out as areas that would have strengthened the work. First, although Kiperwasser devotes attention to a theoretical Derridean framework for thinking about hospitality, he...

Palestinian Literature in Hebrew Translation: Between Cultural Appropriation and Resistance Eyad Barghuthy's An Acre-Esque Tale as Case Study

This article focuses on the complex cultural and political dynamics of translation of Palestinian literature into Hebrew, from a Palestinian perspective. I focus specifically on translation of the literature of Palestinian Israeli citizens, and on a recent, unique model of translation praxis developed by the Maktub project, based in the Van Leer Institute of Jerusalem. The model, entailing dialogic and bi-national translation, aims to turn translation into an act of resistance, through which Palestinian presence ‘infiltrates’ Hebrew cultural consciousness. The article analyses the Hebrew translation of the novel Burdaqaneh (translated as ‘An Acre-esque Tale’) by the Palestinian author Eyad Barghuthy. Specifically, the article attempts to shed light on the process of translation, its aims and methods, and their overall cultural and political import.

Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar (review)

Reviewed by: Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature by David Hadar Naomi Taub (bio) Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. By David Hadar. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ix + 216 pp. "How do we know what we know about authors?" David Hadar asks at the start of Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature. "My answer," he quickly supplies, "is that we know them through the networks in which they are a node" (2). He then sets about mapping the networks of some of the best-known contemporary Jewish American authors, explicating their identity work and deconstructing their public identities in both text and paratext. In this, Hadar chooses his interlocutors effectively—they include the sociologists Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour, as well as cultural theorists Mark McGurl, Dan Miron, Harold Bloom, and Edward Said—though he omits voices like Marianne Hirsch, whose concepts of filiative and affiliative postmemory are intimately related [End Page 413] to his theoretical base. The bulk of Affiliated Identities is dedicated to Philip Roth, both the affiliations and public identity Roth crafted for himself as well as those others have projected onto him. Working through many of Roth's texts, Hadar produces a comprehensive catalog of Roth's literary network. As thorough as Hadar's treatment of Roth's public identity may be, his early chapters fail to tap the rich vein of political and cultural histories of post-World War II Jewish America. He often seems curiously incurious about the public itself, about the broader context in which this identity work was performed. In discussing The Counterlife, for example, Hadar asserts that when Zuckerman's brother absconds to the West Bank, "the family setting makes Zuckerman face issues (Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) that otherwise would not enter his consciousness with any real force" (25). The Counterlife, however, takes place mere weeks after the Camp David Accords, a moment when, as many historians have demonstrated, these issues had a great deal of "real force" in the Jewish American psyche. Such an oversight matters precisely because part of the project's stated intention is to deconstruct Roth's engagement with the American Jewish public sphere, which, both in 1978, the year in which the novel is set, as well as in 1986, the year in which the novel was published, devoted plenty of attention to Israel/Palestine. The more relevant (and perhaps more interesting) question would be why Roth needed to, or at least decided to, mediate his commentary on such an exigent issue by filtering it through a familial conflict. Indeed, the most engaging parts of Affiliated Identities come when Hadar makes a point of bringing in historico-political context. His review of how the Israeli reception of Jewish American texts evolved along with attitudes toward Zionism offers several cogent insights. He also effectively critiques the persistence of the masculinist framing of the Diaspora/Zion binary and renders an intriguing portrait of how the characterization of Israelis in Jewish American literature shifted around the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet while his network theory of Jewishness is helpful, Hadar's approach is often strained to the point of breaking when he attends to non-Jewish authors. The prime example is the chapter on Israeli Palestinian author Sayed Kashua, whom Hadar accuses of "us[ing] Roth to be Jewish and not Jewish at the same time," thereby "[a]ligning and misaligning himself with Roth" as part of a "longterm project of marking himself as… deserving the attentive reading that goes along with the literary authority he seeks" (153). For a non-Jewish author, neither the desire to be legible to a Jewish audience nor identifying with a Jewish author necessarily translates into a desire to be or to be seen as Jewish, and [End Page 414] the political implications of such a claim are more or less unexplored. What's more, Hadar's linguistic and referential choices seem to imply throughout that Kashua has committed some kind of crime: for example, he refers to Kashua's column on meeting Roth as "misprision," a deceitful or treacherous act often meant to cover up knowledge of a felony. The sole example of ethnic passing in Israel...

The Drone Eats with Me: The Violent Intimacy of Life under Drones in Atef Abu Saif’s Gaza Diary

This article analyses The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (2015) by Atef Abu Saif, which documents Israel's military offensive against Gaza in 2014. It argues that the aesthetic choices Abu Saif makes are indicative of his status as a Palestinian author producing a work of testimony for a non-Palestinian readership. Written in English, the text clearly aims to persuade its readers of the challenges of life under the surveillance and targeting of drones, and the long-standing nature of Palestinian subjugation, especially in Gaza. By focusing on this mediation of Abu Saif's testimony – by both author and publisher – the article reflects on what is at stake when Palestinian narratives are produced for an Anglophone readership. It also demonstrates that Palestine's historical and socio-cultural context generates its own particular narration of drone warfare, conversant with other works of Palestinian literature.

Functions and Translation of Palestinian Dialect in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses

The problems that translators of fiction, especially novels, face when translating dialects from one language to another vary because dialects are distinct as much as cultures and language systems are distinct. It is noticeable that Palestinian authors use colloquial language in dialogues and special expressions, striving to attain aesthetic and cultural merits or more realism in the text. Thus, an accurate translation of literary dialect is necessary to preserve the effect of the colloquial language that increases the authenticity of the testimony and adds a sense of reliability since mistranslation of it might undermine the subject matters of the literary work. Therefore, studying dialect translation issues by situating these studies into their contexts can be very effective since it helps both translators and readers recognize their own functionality. This paper examines Nancy Roberts’ translation of the Palestinian dialect from Arabic into English in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses. It seeks to identify the problems experienced by the translator when dealing with dialect in the novel under study. It also focuses on how the loss of translation can lead to the loss of repertoire of implications embedded in the dialects employed in Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses. The data of the study consists of Palestinian dialect utterances and expressions and their English translations. The novel is teeming with utterances having traces of the Palestinian dialect. However, the researchers analyze a number of random examples that are assumed to be the most representative of each function on basis of their own judgment. The paper analyses the source text dialectical utterances for their functions as well as their socio-cultural implications. The study involves a descriptive analysis in tandem with a comparative textual analysis. The data of the ST will be classified according to their different functions, and then data will be compared with their English counterparts to examine the different strategies used in translating the dialect. House's model (1997) of register analysis in tandem with Venuti’s (1995) theory of domestication and foreignization is adopted as the theoretical framework of the analysis. In light of these models, the study proceeds to discuss translation strategies used to deal with dialect and how these strategies affect the implications and messages encoded in dialectical usage. Furthermore, it deals with dialect markers and the extent to which these markers were preserved in the target text. We suggest in this article that Nasrallah’s use of local dialect in his work is testimonial and historical in attitude. The dialect the author uses retrieves collective memories that local collective memoirs also share while bearing witness to historic events remembered and commemorated. The study reveals that there are mismatches in the register variables between the source and the target text considering that the majority of the dialectical utterances are standardized. It also shows that Palestinian dialect performs various functions in the novel such as signalling familial relationships, signalling social distance, asserting the Palestinianism of the story, generating humor, and codification. Furthermore, the study reveals that the identity of the dialect is attained through phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical markers. Standardization of dialect markers conceals the traces of the existence of dialect in the text. Thereby, the study contends that domesticating the dialect markers utilizing standardization strategy threatens and undermines the contours of the national identity of dialect and consequently the national identity of the text as whole. Thereby, domesticating the dialect by the means of standardization hurdles the functions meant by the employment of Palestinian dialect in the text as well as the Palestinianism of the text constructed through the use of dialect.

Identity of writing and the writing of identity: Ayman Sikseck's novel Tishrin

ABSTRACT While most Palestinian authors living in Israel write Arabic, a small group of writers, belonging to three separate generations, has chosen to write in Hebrew. Palestinian Hebrew writing is a phenomenon which is limited in scope but rich with significance. The Palestinian Hebrew text performatively creates a space for the emergence of a distinct literary, cultural and political identity. The article examines this space, in which the writers in question operate, and in which they produce works that cannot be said to belong squarely to either Hebrew or Arab Palestinian literature. Thus, such works insist on the “betweenness” of identity: a Hebrew “tongue” used to express the experience of a displaced Palestinian subject. I argue that in order to address such writing, a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach is required. I therefore focus on the Hebrew novel Tishrin (2016), written by the Ayman Siskseck (b. 1984 in the city of Jaffa) with particular attention to the question of language choice as it relates to the themes underpinning Sikseck's novel. Such themes are then contextualized according to certain trends in contemporary Palestinian literature.

Beyond the land of Palestine: deserts, shores, seas

ABSTRACT How the land of Palestine is imagined goes to the heart of Palestinian identity, making the process a significant and fraught endeavor. However, while the centrality of land to the imagined geography of Palestine has long been acknowledged, less attention has been paid to Palestine’s sea. This paper therefore explores how the canonical Palestinian authors, Ghassan Kanafani and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra represent – or omit – the sea in their works. I argue that, as members of the Nakba generation, for these two authors the sea signifies a one-way passage into exile, thus casting Palestine’s shores and sea as abject spaces, severed from the imagined geography of homeland, producing what I term “terracentric” discourses of Palestinian homeland. The paper’s conclusion turns its attention to contemporary Palestinian cultural production to address the ways subsequent generations of Palestinians have begun to reconceptualize the relationship between the land and sea of Palestine.

Brexit literature’s present absentees: Triangulating Brexit, anti-Semitism, and the Palestinian crisis

ABSTRACT This article addresses a blind spot in Brexit literary criticism: Britain’s relationship to the Middle East, particularly its historic responsibility for the plight of Palestinians. Although fiction that directly engages both Brexit and the Israeli–Palestinian crisis has not yet appeared, oblique connections can be illuminated. Shared conceptual fields, albeit ones only partially brought into view in contemporary British fiction, emerge from intersecting historical experiences. The article considers a range of recent literary texts, with an emphasis on A Stranger City (2019) by British Jewish author Linda Grant and Fractured Destinies: A Novel (2018) by British Palestinian author Raba’i al-Madhoun. When viewed in a certain light, Brexit motifs of enclosure, displacement, and propinquity limn the Palestinian crisis as well as the spectre of anti-Semitism, revealing Britain’s role in the shaping of the modern Middle East as part of contemporary British literature’s political unconscious.

State of the Field—Mahmoud Darwish and His Poetics: Between Women and Intellectual Duties

Abstract This article focuses on women and love in Mahmoud Darwish's cultural and intellectual projects. Darwish (1941–2008), the most well-known Palestinian poet and author, evolved over time within the milieu of Palestinian and Arab poetic trends. How did his poetics affect women's status on both national and social levels? To what extent did women's issues or status in society preoccupy Mahmoud Darwish before and after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1994? Finally, to what degree did the poet's writings vis-à-vis women reflect his personal experiences and values? The article finds that in the early part of his career he used imagery that fused the woman with the homeland. In his later years, Darwish sided with those who argued that the improvement of the status of women must wait until after Palestinian independence is achieved.

Comedic resilience: Arab women’s diaries of national struggles and dissident humour

This article explores the potential strategic functions of humour in diaries that record national struggles by contemporary Arab women, namely Palestinian author Suad Amiry's Sharon and my Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2006) and Egyptian writer Mona Prince's Revolution is my Name: an Egyptian Woman's Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir (2014). Drawing on existing research into postcolonial and feminist comedy, the article argues that the use of humour to articulate revolutionary moments constitutes what I describe as 'comedic resilience' through which comedy is intentionally, reflectively and strategically deployed by the authors under discussion as a dissident strategy to intersectional dominant structures of power to which Arab women are subjected. This subjugating, concentric power structure comprises colonial/state hegemony, nationalist dogmatism, local and external patriarchies and cultural/representational silencing. Equally, I consider the ways in which the intersection of war diary-writing and comedy problematises the representational literary traditions of national struggles. Using humour in contexts where they are expected to grieve, the authors under scrutiny rework the conventional understanding of war life-writing and with it the role and position of Arab women in militarised contexts of conflicts.

Humor and the Law of Rights: Voltaire’s Cosmopolitan Optimism and Emile Habiby’s Dissensual Pessoptimism

Abstract This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pessoptimist (1974) and compares it to Voltaire’s humor in Candide, which it explicitly cites. The differences between the two authors’ modes of humor are read as an index of their different relations to the law, and specifically, to international law as the guarantor of human rights. Voltaire’s humorous critique is limited to the current content of the law, reflecting his confidence in universalist ideals and rights attainable by legal reform. Habiby’s humor, however, protests the law as such, exposing universalist ideals as not merely unhelpful for the Palestinians’ struggle but also as complicit in the oppression and fragmentation of Palestinian society. Habiby therefore redirects the emphasis toward interpersonal manners and intimacies that are external to the realm of the law yet underwrite it. Against Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment-era ideals, Habiby’s humor thus offers a differential and conflictual community that prioritizes a practice of decolonization over ideal solutions and their dichotomous logic.

Voices against Erasure, Loss, and Dehumanization: The Year in Palestine

Voices against Erasure, Loss, and DehumanizationThe Year in Palestine Adam Yaghi (bio) Rooted in the land just like other Indigenous populations who have endured settler colonialism, Palestinians use different venues to humanize their struggle for freedom and equal rights. From popular resistance and international solidarity activism to textual and visual productions, they share their voices and hopes with the world. More specifically, in life narratives published between 2017 and 2018, Palestinians speak with urgency. The individuals who populate the life narratives I survey in this essay remember the physical loss of historical Palestine and draw attention to numerous barriers that stand between them and their right to return to and inhabit the land. Their voices attest to their ongoing collective displacement since 1948, wrestle with thorny political questions, unveil the multifaceted damage settler colonialism has brought upon their communities, and genuinely yearn for a normal future. Their texts have one eye on the past—as the past is never past—with the other fixed on the present to report the horrors of decades of ongoing dispossession. The following discussion samples a few of these publications and does not promise in any way to be comprehensive. The works covered here include Where the Line Is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine by Raja Shehadeh, Young Palestinians Speak: Living under Occupation by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story by Ramzy Baroud, and Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre by Samia Halaby. A Palestinian author, lawyer, and human rights activist, Shehadeh speaks directly to Western misrepresentations of Palestine. His narrative unveils injustices rarely addressed in Western discourses. Shehadeh was born in the city of Ramallah shortly after his family was forced out of Jaffa to make room for Israeli Jewish settlers. In his 2008 book entitled Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, not only does Shehadeh mourn a disappearing Indigenous landscape and show [End Page 103] irreversible forms of environmental injustice, but he also sounds the alarm when he draws attention to the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank where he lives: on our land, we are "unwanted strangers, constantly harassed, never feeling safe. We had become temporary residents of Greater Israel, living on Israel's sufferance, subject to the most abusive treatment" (180). Shehadeh does not stop here: "But worse than all this was that nagging feeling that our days in Palestine were numbered and one day we were going to be victims of another mass expulsion" (180). Palestinians in Shehadeh's West Bank endure harsh, inescapable realities under Israeli settler colonialism. They witness their neighborhoods rapidly shrink, and in their cities they live under permanent siege. Israeli military checkpoints cripple their movement, settler-only roads cut through their backyards, and Jewish settlements eat up every inch of their arable land. What remains is a disfigured landscape and captive Indigenous population with restricted access to water and essential natural resources. Their livelihood is on the line. Yet they endure. The West Bank recurs in Where the Line Is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine. Life for Palestinians there has become more and more difficult. Indeed, this 2017 life narrative describes some of the hardships Palestinians endure in the West Bank, but in it, Shehadeh, more importantly, offers a comprehensive personal and collective Palestinian history through recalling numerous crossings he had into Israel/Palestine from 1959 to 2013. He uses these crossings to comment on the Nakba and the course of the history of Palestinian struggle. In some of them, he reflects on his complicated friendship with an Israeli named Henry Abramovitch and shows the absurdity of the so-called peace process. Shehadeh's Israeli-sanctioned movement between the West Bank and cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa, or Jerusalem and the political debates he participates in with a few Jewish Israelis depict a beautiful but scarred land with an unpredictable future. Almost in each crossing, Shehadeh incrementally introduces different human rights violations Palestinians have endured under Israeli settler colonialism. For example, his narrative re-inscribes the Nakba. In so doing, Shehadeh demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of loss and challenges a hegemonic Zionist myth. According to this myth, Palestine was an empty land, but like countless...

Ban and backlash create a bestseller: The bestselling Palestinian author talks to Jemimah Steinfeld about why a joke on Yasser Arafat put his life at risk. Also an extract from his latest book, translated into English for the first time

Ban and backlash create a bestseller: The bestselling Palestinian author talks to Jemimah Steinfeld about why a joke on Yasser Arafat put his life at risk. Also an extract from his latest book, translated into English for the first time

Reassembling a World Literature: Anton Shammas' Arabesques between Iowa and the Galilee

The paper explores how the novel Arabesques (1986) by Israeli Palestinian author Anton Shammas (b. 1950) uses the Iowa International Writers Program in to interrogate and even relocate the consecration of world literature. Both creative writing programs and the concept and canons of world literature have become central issues in literary studies over the last two decades. My paper seeks to combine these two concerns with a view from outside Anglophone literature but in a way that comments on it and its institutions. It will do so through a critique of world literature and creative writing that can be found in the Anton Shammas’s writings. Arabesques is partly set in the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program and deals with the question of where the world’s literature is to be assembled and consecrated. The common assumption is that this process happens in big cities. But the novel (along with documents written by the founders of the Iowa program) shows how this program tries to mobilize the world’s wealth of literature into this new Midwestern location in Iowa. This is done through the movement of people and artifacts by way of international networks of cultural and technological mediation. The novel uses Iowa’s bid for centrality in the network of world literature to show how the canon and concept of world literature can also be assembled in the peripheral location of a small Galilee village. The mobility of texts and people turn out to have a potential for unsettling the global center/periphery and East/West dichotomies, even if only for the duration of the novel’s reading.

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

Revolt in the Novel: Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Ghandūr’s Thaʾr al-damm (Blood Revenge) and the 1936-1939 Rebellion in Palestine

Contrary to the inveterate opinion of most scholars, a Palestinian author actually dealt with political issues before the Nakbah in the novel Thaʾr al-damm (Blood Revenge). Published in Damascus in 1939 by Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Ghandūr from Acre, this work of fiction remained in oblivion for decades because the French Mandate authorities confiscated most of its copies soon after publication. It narrates the story of a young physician who forms an armed band to avenge the rape of his younger sister by British soldiers during the 1936-1939 uprising in Palestine; the woman, disguised as a man, joins the rebels and eventually dies in a fight. Through the symbolism behind the retaliation for the maiden’s rape, Thaʾr al-damm provides a literary interpretation of the Palestinians’ shift to organized insurgency against the British Mandate in the late 1930s. By pivoting the plot around the tropes of injury and revenge, Ghandūr translated the feelings of humiliation and threat, and the consequent quest for revenge and liberation shared by many Palestinians into a novel. The action of this story takes place in the Palestinian countryside, in a village community portrayed as a spotless model of national solidarity and harmoniously merged with its environment. Ghandūr sketches a protagonist who exemplifies the theme of the political radicalization of modern-educated youth and argues for the leading role that they should assume in the struggle, while the only female character illustrates village women’s actual involvement in the revolt.