Summary
An Israeli Arab novelist who, in Dowty’s Chapter 9, asks for “a new definition of the word ‘Israeli,’ so that it will include me as well.…” — an expansion of the concept of Israeli, as a territorial label, to encompass non-Jews, creating the common civic space that Dowty says has existed only in theory (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4423-4620).
Details
- Dowty sets Shammas’s request alongside A. B. Yehoshua’s response from a Jewish perspective: that during the First Temple period “Jewish religious identity was not at all a necessary element of Israeli identity”, and Yehoshua’s projection of a gradual cultural symbiosis leading to a common Israeli identity; the exchange is in Grossman’s Sleeping on a Wire, esp. 257, 270-71, on Chapter 9 note 107’s citation (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4423-4620, lines 4621-4980).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Ethnic Democracy, Consociationalism