Rhetorics of Belonging

Summary

Anna Bernard argues that Palestinian and Israeli writers in international circulation cannot avoid narrating the nation, and that their texts should be read as deliberate interventions in the contested definition of citizenship in Israel/Palestine, through what she calls the Demographic imaginary, rather than as rehearsals of two opposed national narratives (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.9, p.42-49). Chapter 1 re-reads the Jameson–Ahmad dispute as a theory of metropolitan reading and defends National allegory as both a reading and a writing practice. Chapter 2 reads Said’s Out of Place as converting Palestinian ‘origins’ into chosen ‘beginnings’ — belonging by political conviction rather than birth — and Chapter 3 sets Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah against Said, its existential materialist aesthetic foregrounding the fragmentation of the Palestinian collective, the Palestinians who remained, and a coalitional rather than identitarian national formation (PDF p.50-96). Chapter 4 reads Oz’s fiction as projecting a separatist demographic imaginary paradoxically, by disavowing national allegory and recasting politics as psychology, its endings recuperating dissent into the Zionist ‘living utopia’ while displacing the Palestinian catastrophe it repeatedly invokes (PDF p.97-122). Chapter 5 reads Castel-Bloom and Khalifeh through Intersectionality: Human Parts as a satire of the ‘state of siege’ novel whose protagonists are victimized by Israeli patriarchy, race and class, and The End of Spring as a dissensual Bildungsroman that demystifies the heroic narrative of Palestinian nationalism by appropriating human rights discourse, the two writers proving unexpectedly complementary on gender and national liberation (PDF p.123-143). Chapter 6 reads Shammas’ Arabesques as the book’s most radical demographic imaginary and its only genuinely post-Zionist gesture: a Hebrew novel whose ‘Tale’/‘Teller’ arabesque structure projects a non-ethnic, civic national belonging for a nation that does not yet exist (PDF p.144-167). There is no separate Conclusion; the argument closes with Chapter 6, followed by Notes and references (PDF p.168-184), a Bibliography (PDF p.185-203) and an Index (PDF p.204-213).

What the file is

First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press, ISBN 978-1-84631-943-3 cased, in the series Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 14 (PDF p.1-4). The book began as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge under Priyamvada Gopal (PDF p.7). Printed pagination runs to p.205, where the Index ends (Contents lists Index at printed p.196); the PDF has 216 pages, of which the last three (PDF p.214-216) are blank apart from the production line. The text copy supplied is clean, with === PDF p.N === markers, occasional hyphenation across line breaks, and printed page numbers shown at the head of most pages. Contents (PDF p.5): Introduction (printed p.1), 1 Reading for the Nation (17), 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said’s Out of Place (42), 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (67), 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz’s Living Utopias (89), 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh (115), 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques (136), Notes and references (160), Bibliography (177), Index (196).

Section by section

Front matter (PDF p.1-8)

Series page, title page, publication page, Contents and Acknowledgements, with a Note on transliteration: IJMES generally, common English spellings for the authors studied and well-known names (PDF p.8).

Introduction (PDF p.9-24 / printed p.1-16)

The book is “about the cultural representation, transmission, and circulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (PDF p.9), examining how Palestinian and Israeli writers whose work achieves World literature status intervene in asymmetrically waged contests over the region’s past and future, and treating National narration as both a reading and a writing practice in a settler-colonial context controversially recognized as such in North America and Europe (PDF p.9). Bernard complicates a reader-response account — readers read these texts as national allegories for ‘cultural information’ — with how writers anticipate such readings and wrestle with envisioning a future territorial and demographic nation-state (PDF p.10).

Literature is defended as the medium despite not being the most influential or the main way national publics imagine the nation: Timothy Brennan calls the novel an ‘elitist and minority form’ (1990, 56), and Nicholas Brown notes the forms of attention literature requires no longer come naturally even among elites (2005, 174) (PDF p.10). In Israel/Palestine literature retains authority: in Israeli Hebrew culture what would elsewhere be ‘high’ and elite “is in Israel popular and public” (Gover, 1994, 2, quoted PDF p.10), a privileging dating to the Haskalah revival of Hebrew literature; poets Haim Bialik, Natan Alterman and Yehuda Amichai are national heroes and Amos Oz and David Grossman prominent public intellectuals (PDF p.10). Palestinian writing lacks those conditions: Edward Said, after the 1982 assault on Beirut, records “The archive speaks of the depressed condition of the Palestinian narrative at present” (1984, 38, quoted PDF p.10-11), the archive remains diminished and dominated by a few writers, yet Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani attained iconic status and Palestinian poets are known across the Arab world (PDF p.11).

Translation history and markets: Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s PROTA in the 1980s–90s, Banipal magazine, post-2001 commercial interest in Arabic literature in translation, the market for Palestinian autobiography in English as testimony, and Israeli writing in British and American trade publishing since the 1970s centred on Oz, Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua, with Etgar Keret and Orly Castel-Bloom as the younger generation’s shift to black comedy and wry surrealism (PDF p.11-12). The corpus is the subset Brennan describes as entirely discussed in English while registering as foreign (1997, 314) (PDF p.12-13): Said, Barghouti, Oz, Khalifeh, Castel-Bloom and Anton Shammas, read as ‘worldly’ in Said’s sense, as texts located in their historical moments including their metropolitan reception, whose writers expect and exploit being read as documents of the conflict (PDF p.13). Bernard positions herself as a student of Arabic and Hebrew rather than a ‘native informant’, analyses the Anglophone context specifically — dearth of translation giving translated texts a disproportionate burden of national representation, and the history of British and American imperialism in the region (PDF p.13-14) — and gives three selection criteria: high visibility in English, most work after 1980 when the ‘two sides’/‘two narratives’ paradigm gained purchase after the 1982 siege of Beirut (excluding Kanafani, assassinated 1972, and Emil Habibi), and narrative forms, memoir and novel (PDF p.14-15).

The nation is not just a locus of cultural identity but a political structure responsible for representing its citizens (PDF p.15). Against postcolonial studies’ disavowal of the nation and its celebration of the postnational — imperial and anticolonial nationalisms rendered indistinguishable — Bernard argues national narration is incomplete if it stops with mid-twentieth-century decolonization: after 1989 and in the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, movements were fought in the name of diverse ideas of the nation, and dismissing them as ‘belated’ mistakes what is not new for what is unimportant (PDF p.15-17). “[T]o wish class or nation away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now in the manner of some contemporary poststructuralist theory, is to play straight into the hands of the oppressor” (Eagleton, 1990, 23, quoted PDF p.16-17). In Israel/Palestine national self-determination remains the most fundamental desire of political life, illustrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Mahmoud Abbas’s same-day UN General Assembly speeches, whose shared vocabulary of roots, indigeneity and ancient lineage is hard to distinguish rhetorically, while their formations differ sharply: Zionism is a settler-colonial as well as a national movement, established with European imperial support and since the 1960s dependent on American sponsorship, while Palestinian nationalism seeks self-determination for a largely stateless indigenous population displaced by force and living under occupation, aligning with anti-imperial movements (PDF p.17-18).

The Anderson/Rushdie prototype of the national novel — the ‘old-fashioned novel’ of “steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (Anderson, 1999, 25, quoted PDF p.18), today exemplified by Midnight’s Children, itself a parody of a parody — fits Palestinian and Israeli literature badly: no ‘moment of arrival’, not typically epic or realist, borders not internationally agreed, journeys staking out contested territory rather than affirming a fixed ‘sociological landscape’, and internal boundaries separating ‘second-class’ (Mizrahi, Ethiopian) and ‘third-class’ (Palestinian) citizens (PDF p.18-20). A relational literary history is proposed instead: not two parallel narratives but ‘settler-native relations’ (Piterberg, 2008, 57), derived from contest and describing extreme asymmetry, holding together commitment to national liberation and to “one secular state for all the inhabitants of the territories of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the returned Palestinian refugees” (Parry, 2004a, 60, quoted PDF p.21). Israel as a “pure settlement colony” (Piterberg, 2008, xii, quoted PDF p.22) shaped Israeli society (Shafir, 1996, 6), yet the field of postcolonial literary studies has kept the region tangential; the book seeks the difference greater attention to its literature would make to that field (PDF p.21-22).

Chapter summaries given in the Introduction: Chapter 1 defends the Jamesonian National allegory and introduces the Demographic imaginary; Chapters 2–3 contrast Said’s Out of Place, where suppressed Palestinian ‘origins’ become chosen ‘beginnings’ through exile and liberation, with Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, whose existential materialist aesthetic counters Said’s exilic emphasis by foregrounding Palestinians who remained in the West Bank and the fragmentation of the collective (PDF p.22-23); Chapter 4 reads Oz as exemplary of Anderson’s national novel yet subverting allegorical reception by recasting politics as psychology and the Palestinian as emotional excess (PDF p.23); Chapter 5 reads Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City and Human Parts and Khalifeh’s The End of Spring as defensive national allegories embedding critiques of the gender-nationalism nexus, with a Jewish Israel and an independent Palestine as the frameworks for women’s liberation (PDF p.24); Chapter 6 reads Shammas’ Arabesques as the book’s only genuinely post-Zionist gesture, a fictional analogue of an Israel that is the state of all its citizens, premised on a rejection of Zionism (PDF p.24).

Chapter 1: Reading for the Nation (PDF p.25-49 / printed p.17-41)

Epigraphs from Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and Fredric Jameson (1986) mark the poles of the debate over metropolitan reading (PDF p.25). The market for ‘postcolonial’/‘third-world’ literature — Huggan’s ‘adversarial internationalization’ contending with a market that seeks to contain oppositional gestures (2001, 10–11) — cannot be wished away, since the formation exists “if only in the mind of the metropolitan reader of books” (Brennan, 1997, 26, quoted PDF p.26); the world ‘underdeveloped’ by empire (Rodney, 1981) looks different from the peripheries (PDF p.26). Fatigue with national narration stems from reading for the nation as theme — Larsen’s “mock-expedition in search of national-allegorical correspondences” (2001, 173, quoted PDF p.26) — and from a restricted corpus of post-independence Anglophone writing and its ‘literature of disillusionment’ (Lazarus, 1990, 18) (PDF p.26-27).

Palestinian and Israeli texts are in the field as the ‘present absentee’ was in Israel: the ‘abject’ Palestinian is ubiquitous as a figure, Said’s presence makes the situation visible, yet the region is largely absent from curricula and publishing, bracketed as an exception despite British rule (1923–48), the crushing of the 1936–39 uprising, the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the Peel Report (1937) (PDF p.27-28). “How can we not be working on Palestine?” (Williams, 2010, 91, quoted PDF p.28). The settler-colonial analysis — Palestinian and Arab scholars and the international communist movement since the 1920s, Matzpen in the 1960s, Rodinson (1967/1973), the New Historians — is traced, with Matzpen’s distinct claim that Israel is a ‘Zionist-colonial project that is constitutively aligned with Western interests in the region’ (Abu-Manneh, 2006, 37) and Israel “as a watchdog in the Middle East, funded and privileged for serving this purpose” (Hagnebi, Machover and Orr, 1971, 12, quoted PDF p.29). Shohat’s suggestion that postcolonial study is privileged in the US by its remoteness from US racial matters, and institutional pressures on Palestine scholarship, are offered as explanations for the omission (PDF p.29). The section closes arguing the exhaustion of national narration derives from what and from where critics read, not only how (PDF p.30).

The Jameson–Ahmad dispute is re-read: Jameson’s definition — “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986, 69, quoted PDF p.31) — is a theory of metropolitan reading, a corrective to the first-world reader’s ‘radical split’ between poetics and politics, with ‘third-worldness’ naming a political desire for national autonomy (Lazarus, 2011a) rather than a geography (PDF p.31). Two senses of national allegory are distinguished: an automatic metropolitan reading confirming what is ‘already known’, and allegory as a ‘structural tendency’ (Larsen, 2001, 19; Lazarus, 2004b, 58) of literary production where unrealized national liberation determines everyday experience — the ‘conscious and overt’ allegories of The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) against the first-world reader’s fragmentary allegorical thinking (PDF p.31-33). Palestinian texts put themselves forward “explicitly and self-consciously as the vehicles of a national consciousness” (Lazarus, 2004b, 58, quoted PDF p.33) after the nakba of 1948; the harder claim is that Israeli writers, geopolitically ‘first world’, must also respond to the demand to represent a national consciousness, from a pervasive sense of Jewish embattlement, so that even texts refusing the collective dimension do so actively, along a continuum from Barghouti and Khalifeh’s explicitness to Oz and Castel-Bloom’s irony (PDF p.33). Authors know they are expected to narrate the nation: Samir El-Youssef’s complaint — “My narrator does not want to act out his life according to the fact that he is a Palestinian – so what that he is?” (Greene, 2004, quoted PDF p.34) — is belied by The Day the Beast Got Thirsty (2004), where Bassem in a Lebanese refugee camp has no private narrative without the public predicament (PDF p.34-35). The reading and writing demands are in practice inseparable, as for apartheid-era South African writers, with the difference that Israeli texts in circulation are not mainly anti-Zionist though often critical of the occupation (PDF p.35-36). Bernard takes seriously the “invitation to allegorize” (Attridge, 2006, 77, quoted PDF p.36) while insisting Zionist and Palestinian nationalisms are not politically interchangeable; both sets of writers face the comparable aesthetic challenge of representing a collective national consciousness (PDF p.36).

The section “What we ‘already know’” argues dismissal by boredom is a defence: the reasoning “we know all this!” is often a defense (Brennan, 1997, 67, citing Adorno, PDF p.36), applied to Chomsky, to Hochberg’s and Lesch and Lustick’s claims of familiarity, and to Sternhell’s dismissal of Piterberg’s colonialism theory as ‘antiquated’ (PDF p.37). National narration and the Palestinian question persist because their conditions persist: “[the Palestinian question] is as intransigent as it was in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was issued” (Massad, 2006, 166, quoted PDF p.38); like human rights in Slaughter’s account, national narration is not yet redundant because the world is not yet post-national and Palestinian self-determination is not yet won (PDF p.38). The popular ‘Two narratives’ paradigm is then analysed: from Said’s ‘Permission to Narrate’ (1984) — “[The Palestinians] are there all right, but the narrative of their present actuality – which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine, later Israel – that narrative is not” (1984, 29, quoted PDF p.39) — it gained currency with the cultural turn and the two-state diplomacy of Oslo, which Said called a ‘Palestinian Versailles’ (1993), and lost its oppositional force, becoming a liberal commitment to ‘balance’ in which a Palestinian voice requires its Israeli echo (Khalidi, 1997, 146–47), a ‘tragedy’ of “right versus right” (Oz, 1994, 37, quoted PDF p.40), and a term used to delegitimize Palestinian claims, as by Tal Becker and the Anti-Defamation League’s director (PDF p.39-41). It has not produced metropolitan interest in the region’s actual cultural production; texts are received as already read, obscuring the “contestatory nature of the struggle for nationhood” (Gopal, 2005, 19, quoted PDF p.41). National literature is Fanon’s ‘literature of combat’ giving national consciousness its “forms and contours” (Fanon, 1963, 240, quoted PDF p.42 / printed p.34).

The final section in this part, “The demographic imaginary: Literature and citizenship in Israel/Palestine”, restores the link between national narration and the state: territory as bounded and administered, characters linked by recourse to a common political authority, the protagonist as citizen-protagonist (PDF p.42 / printed p.34). Citizenship is defended for its strategic value in the battle for “just membership” (Benhabib, 2004, 3, quoted PDF p.43): in Israel/Palestine it links the Law of Return to the Palestinian right of return. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) on the stateless — “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (1967, 300, quoted PDF p.43) — is read as prescient for stateless Palestinians; governance is zoned as full citizenship, weak citizenship, or “no citizenship at all” (Weizman, 2007, 7, quoted PDF p.44) for Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel and stateless residents of the territories respectively. Rancière’s reply to Arendt — citizenship as a ‘litigious name’, “The very difference between man and citizen is not a sign of disjunction proving that the rights are either void or tautological. It is the opening of an interval for political subjectivization” (2004, 304, quoted PDF p.44) — makes Palestinians already political subjects claiming an alternative relation of inclusion against the ethnocratic regime (Yiftachel, 2006, 16). Belonging in material terms is “a simpler, more knifelike communal sense based upon the passport, the green card, and the open-ended residency permit” (Brennan, 1997, 124, quoted PDF p.45). The 1948 Israeli and 1988 Palestinian declarations of nationhood both mobilize democratic citizenship language to legitimate collective national self-determination (PDF p.45). The Demographic imaginary is defined against the ‘Demographic problem’: it names literary representation of the national ‘same’, not ‘the Other’, and can project more expansive polities, as in Said’s 1995 speech on Jerusalem projecting “an image of the whole of Jerusalem that is truer to its complex mixture of religions, histories and cultures” (2011, 66, quoted PDF p.46). The chapter closes (PDF p.47-49) by proposing, in place of reading narrative literature as an analogue of the macro-narratives of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, reading for how texts in international circulation intervene in the conflict over definitions of citizenship. The templates are the US-led ‘peace process’ outcome of two states on the 1967 borders with ‘mutually agreed land swaps’ — Obama’s formulation (‘Obama’s AIPAC Speech,’ 2011), which Bernard says ratifies much post-1967 settlement and assumes partition on ethnic division — and the single state in all of historical Palestine, variously binational/federated or a de-ethnicized one-citizen-one-vote polity, against which Moshe Behar warns of an Israeli establishment ‘one-state solution’ of ‘further consolidation of Israeli-Jewish domination over the whole territory comprising Mandatory Palestine’ (2011, 360, quoted PDF p.47). Through Lukács’s ‘recourse to biographical form’ (1971, 81) and Larsen’s extension of it (2001, 180–81), the nation is the mediated form that constitutes the protagonist as a social subject and, politically, as a citizen; any text structurally reliant on biographical form therefore produces its own demographic imaginary and its own criteria for citizenship and belonging, across the old-fashioned novel, modernist and experimental fiction, testimony, memoir and autobiography (PDF p.47-48). Bernard is not claiming the texts have ‘nothing else to narrate’ (Ahmad, 1987, 9, quoted PDF p.48): the framework presents narrative literature as a laboratory for testing ways of organizing a polity, like pre-independence writing in other colonial contexts (Gopal, 2005, 23), and ‘world literature’ as a key site for imagining the region’s political future (PDF p.48-49).

Chapter 2: Exile and Liberation: Edward Said’s Out of Place (PDF p.50-74 / printed p.42-66)

Epigraph from Said’s After the Last Sky: “For where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digression, all residence is exile.” (quoted PDF p.50). Said, the West’s best-known Palestinian spokesperson, is introduced through two wide-reach texts: After the Last Sky (1999a [1986]), with Jean Mohr, written after the 1982 defeat in Lebanon and before the 1987 first intifada, between coffee-table activism and illustrated prose poem; and the memoir Out of Place (2000 [1999]), written in English in 1996–98 after Oslo’s ‘crushing disappointment’ and during Said’s leukaemia, his only full-length narrative work, using the young Edward’s life to address Palestinian national identity, indigeneity and statehood (PDF p.50-51). Said’s stated motives were personal — to ‘leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world’ (OP, xiii, quoted PDF p.51) and to defend himself against chemotherapy’s agony (1999c) — yet virtually everything he wrote was received and conceived biographically: from J. Hillis Miller’s 1976 Diacritics review of Beginnings, which opened from Said’s biography, through Brennan’s observation that identitarian reception groups Orientalism with the ‘poetical testimonies’ of his Palestinian writings rather than as a ‘profoundly American book’ (2006, 94, 120, quoted PDF p.51), and Ashcroft and Ahluwalia’s claim that his place as an exiled Palestinian is ‘constantly inflected’ in all his work (2009, 1, quoted PDF p.51). Said’s own self-presentation fed this — opening works as an ‘Oriental’ (1979, 25), an Arab (1994a, xxx) or a Palestinian (1992, xxxv), and early titles like ‘The Palestinian Experience’ (1970b) posing as ‘a laboratory specimen of “the Arab” or “the Palestinian”’ (Howe, 2007, 61, quoted PDF p.52) — as Hayden White noted, biography-watching is ‘fully within the spirit’ of Said’s own method of grounding judgment in authorial intention (1976, 9, quoted PDF p.52), and for Brennan his work ‘has always been biographical’ and ‘shrewdly autobiographical’ (2010, 103, quoted PDF p.52).

The memoir is the book’s most self-conscious text about its anticipated reception as a document of the Palestinian ‘narrative’: it reclaims an ‘essentially lost or forgotten world’ (OP, xiii, quoted PDF p.52) — pre-1948 Palestine, ‘the country I was from’ (OP, 20), and cosmopolitan, colonial, bourgeois Cairo before 1952 — while warning readers seeking refugee-testimony confirmation of a post-1948 ‘Palestinian experience’. Said’s childhood was unrepresentative: born in Jerusalem in 1935, brought up in Cairo, only son of a wealthy self-made businessman whose American citizenship (from World War I military service) passed to his children; Anglican, Arabic- and English-speaking at home, English names, expensive British- and American-run schools, servants, villas and transatlantic travel (PDF p.53). Yet the early chapters are marked by oppressive anxiety at being ‘out of place’, relieved only on family visits to Palestine, which end in 1948 (OP, 21). Two parallel lines structure the memoir: an intellectual awakening in the modernist Bildungsroman/Künstlerroman line — the ‘conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demand of socialization’ (Moretti, 2000, 15, quoted PDF p.53) resolved for the solitary genius — and a political education from dim awareness of 1948’s displacements to politicization after 1967, in which Palestinian ‘origins’ are transformed into ‘beginnings’, an ‘intentional act’ (Said, 1975, 32, quoted PDF p.53): he becomes an intellectual by temperament, a Palestinian by conviction (PDF p.53). Read with Brennan’s persona point, the trajectory is purposefully crafted to produce a model of Palestinian belonging: the memoir’s Demographic imaginary is more ambiguous than the secular-democratic/binational single state of Said’s political writings of the period, and Said calls the memoir ‘deliberately unpolitical’ (1999c, quoted PDF p.54), yet it traces the move ‘from contemplation to a sort of worldly action’ (1976, 39, quoted PDF p.54), away from the desire to be ‘at home’ and ‘in place’ (1983, 8) — equated with nativism and with complacent acceptance of privilege — toward commitment to Palestinian self-determination based in political belief, not origins: “I was no longer the same person after 1967: the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine.” (OP, 293, quoted PDF p.54). That belonging is specific but not singular — Hallward’s ‘ongoing taking of sides’ (2001, 51, quoted PDF p.55).

This plotline has been misread, Bernard argues, partly because of the controversy over the memoir’s publication: Justus Reid Weiner’s Commentary ‘exposé’, ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’ (1999), ‘revealed’ Said’s Cairo childhood and tied it to the Palestinian cause’s credibility — ‘now substitute the Palestinian people’ (1999, 31, quoted PDF p.55) — and defenders have since endlessly reaffirmed Said’s familial claims and the memoir’s Palestinian status rather than addressing what kind of Palestine emerges from its anti-identitarian account of belonging (PDF p.55). Bernard therefore reads Out of Place against the grain as a National allegory: Edward’s personal Exile and liberation carry collective significance — his liberation from parents and teachers evoking the Palestinians’ perpetually deferred liberation, his alienation their unchosen displacement — undoing the ‘natural,’ filiative link between protagonist and imagined community and replacing it with the political goal of ending Palestinian statelessness (PDF p.55-56).

The ‘Exile and liberation’ section answers the scepticism that Said romanticizes exile as the intellectual’s advantage — Cocks’s ‘nonpopular tinge’ (2002, 154, quoted PDF p.57), ‘[e]xile is a model for the intellectual’ (Said, 1994b, 63, quoted PDF p.57), Collini’s ‘spiritual self-help’ (2006, 432). Against decontextualized quotation, Bernard follows Said’s own dialectical handling of Adorno’s ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’ (2005, 39, quoted PDF p.57) and the structure of ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984), which moves between the exile of Joyce and Nabokov and ‘the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created’ (2002c, 175, quoted PDF p.57-58) and ends not on the ‘contrapuntal’ plurality of vision (2002c, 186) but on exile as ‘a mind of winter’ (Stevens, quoted PDF p.58). Parry is cited that Said circumvented dialectics as he reductively understood it (2010, 504–7), yet his methods were not divorced from it (PDF p.57). In Out of Place likewise, exile-as-advantage is countered contrapuntally — by his mother, who spent her last weeks in Washington DC far from Beirut and was threatened with deportation while unconscious (OP, 294, 133) — and the title’s meanings multiply: non-belonging, belonging to a self-excluding Anglophilic elite, and victimhood of colonial rule (PDF p.58). Personal liberation is tied to unrealized Palestinian liberation through Culture and Imperialism’s Fanon — liberation as trans-personal, transnational force looking beyond colonialism and its nationalist antagonist (1994a, 325, quoted PDF p.59) — even though Said appropriates Fanon’s socialist liberation for a non-aligned left humanism, missing its communist standpoint (Parry, 2010, 508), while insisting change requires resistance, taking up arms and imagining ‘a new national community’ (1994a, 241, quoted PDF p.59). ‘Independence’, ‘exile’ and ‘liberation’ are overdetermined words, as Lazarus shows for Mistry’s A Fine Balance (2004b, 59), and Said promotes the association (PDF p.59). To Buruma’s charge (1999) that Said puts Palestinian suffering in the service of his credentials as an intellectual hero, Bernard answers with Jameson’s discontinuous allegory — ‘breaks and heterogeneities’ rather than ‘the homogenous representation of the symbol’ (1986, 73, quoted PDF p.60, spelling as printed) — and Said’s own retort: ‘I have been moved to defend the refugees’ plight precisely because I did not suffer’ (1999b, quoted PDF p.60).

The ‘Affiliation and dissent’ section answers Marrouchi’s question — ‘How do we get from the lone, fragile child to the consummate public intellectual?’ (2004, 147, quoted PDF p.60) — through the Bildungsroman: classical/‘great man’, ‘late’ (Moretti on Kafka, Mann, Conrad, Joyce: a world ‘solidified into impersonal institutions’, ‘uselessly painful tasks’, ‘all-encompassing trials’, 2000, 233–34, quoted PDF p.61) and ‘dissensual’ (Slaughter, 2007, 27, 181: the genre as the outsider’s claim for inclusion in a regime of rights, its promise invested in even as unfulfilled). Against Taha Hussein’s al-ʾAyyām, where family is revered and schools educate, Said’s schools ‘were dreadful colonial establishments’ (1999c, quoted PDF p.60); his early ‘out of place’ is institutional alienation — Arabic classes where he must pretend Arabic is not his native language (OP, 82–83), the posture truss bought when he is twenty-one (OP, 64) — before boarding school in the United States makes it a longing for Cairo (OP, 234) (PDF p.60-61). His family is not a social pact but an enforcer of ‘archaic initiation rituals’ of class, state and empire: his parents ‘were at the heart of the administered system that determined my time minute by minute’ (OP, 28, quoted PDF p.62); his father, ‘a devastating combination of power and authority, rationalistic discipline, and repressed emotions’ (OP, 12), builds a ‘gigantic cocoon’ (OP, 12); his mother, his ‘closest companion for twenty-five years’ (OP, 12), rules through consent and sudden withdrawal producing ‘a metaphysical panic’ (OP, 13) — the father as government and law, the mother as culture and the social world, with allegorical resonances (pre-state Zionism as a ‘Benthamite policy of detail’, 1999a, 101; the children-to-mother relation as ‘colony to metropole’, OP, 60, both quoted PDF p.62). The opening name passage — ‘Edward,’ ‘a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arab family name Said’ (OP, 3–4, quoted PDF p.63) — is read not as symmetrizing ‘bicultural’ doubleness (Porter, 2001; Ruthven, 2003; White, 2000) but as power imbalance: the English name signals membership in an Anglicized native elite affiliated with the colonizing power in the waning British empire and the start of American neo-imperial rule (PDF p.63-64). Affiliation in Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983, 20, 22) names the modern bonds replacing filiation — ‘guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture’ — and is no liberation from coercion, since the affiliative structure ‘more or less directly reproduce[s] the skeleton of family authority’; in Moretti’s terms the classical Bildungsroman offers the bourgeois reader ‘the happy belonging to a harmonious totality’ ‘in exchange for freedom’ (2000, 65, quoted PDF p.64), and the reconciliation Edward’s family and schools offer is acquiescence to the colonial order — at his British-run primary school the English classmates are ‘just right’ and ‘home’ is something he is excluded from (OP, 42, quoted PDF p.64). Being ‘out of place’ is first defined as entrapment in an order demanding mimicry of an imperial ruling class (PDF p.64-65).

Self-liberation, which Said said ‘didn’t completely succeed’ (Rose, 2000, 15, quoted PDF p.65), begins in escape: the home-video child diving out of shot from his father (OP, 78–79), the fantasy of becoming a book (OP, 76; the same fantasy appears in Oz’s 2002 memoir, as a means of surviving enemy attack), and reading Kant, Hegel and Plato into an exultant pattern-spotting freedom (OP, 165) opposed to the ‘appalling limitations’ (OP, 164) of administered life — freedom as solitude, an ‘absolute separation’ of private reading from public school life, integration and liberty ‘endlessly postponed’ (OP, 202, quoted PDF p.65-66). At Mount Hermon in Massachusetts from 1951, exile becomes active resistance by a ‘newfound will’ and another self (OP, 230), resisting ‘the American leveling and ideological herding’ (OP, 236) — a solitary, gendered-male quest relying on wandering rather than emplacement, staking intellectual territory (OP, 231) found at Princeton despite its ‘poisonous social atmosphere’ (OP, 276–77), ascending to the ‘Utopian space still provided by the university’ (1994a, xxix, quoted PDF p.66). Bernard stresses the unresolved tension: the resolution looks idealist-Bildungsroman — individuality coexisting with normality (Moretti, 2000, 16) — ending with an adult Said who no longer subscribes to ‘the idea of a solid self’ (OP, 295, quoted PDF p.67), yet self-liberation by exceptional talent is no model for collective endeavour (PDF p.66-67). The split between ‘Edward’ and the other self parallels Said’s Diacritics account of his two separate lives, establishment critic and Middle East political involvement, published just before his 1977 election to the Palestinian National Council and The Question of Palestine (1979) (1976, 35, quoted PDF p.67); metaphorical Exile is the counterpoint and inversion of literal exile, an alternative to Affiliation as acquiescence, not its vehicle or precondition (PDF p.67-68). Nor does the memoir offer Slaughter’s ‘triple uhuru’ of simultaneous individual, national and racial liberation (2007, 125): Edward’s ‘endlessly postponed’ integration evokes Palestinian liberation’s ‘protracted not-yet’ (1999a, 165), the dissensual Bildungsroman’s fission rather than fusion (Slaughter, 2007, 239), and ‘liberation as a process’ in Fanon’s idiom (1994a, 330–31; Fanon, 1963, 247) — intellectual liberation is incomplete without political awakening and commitment to wider social liberation (PDF p.68).

The closing section, ‘Palestine as history and cause’, reads the memoir’s intermittent Palestine strand as a political Bildungsroman — a genre marginal in Europe and North America, where mass movements were imagined as destructive of identity (Moretti, 2000, 232) and political commitment is psychologized, but in Palestinian memoir and fiction coming of age is virtually synonymous with politicization — while Said denaturalizes its grammar of ‘becom[ing] positively what one already is by natural right’ (Slaughter, 2007, 98, quoted PDF p.69). His Palestinian ‘credentials’ are given defensively, as Palestinians are ‘required to show proofs of identity more or less constantly’ (1999a, 16, quoted PDF p.69): his mother Hilda, ‘Born in Nazareth… she was Palestinian’ (OP, 5, quoted PDF p.69), her father the Baptist minister in Nazareth from Safad via Texas; his father born in Jerusalem, schooled at St George’s, surnames Shammas and Ibrahim, the Khleifawi clan in Nazareth (OP, 6–7) — Palestinian experience not limited to expulsion in 1948, and on his 1992 return: ‘my family had owned property in Jerusalem barely a mile from where I now stood… was in fact as Palestinian as you could be’ (1995, 177, quoted PDF p.70). Pre-1948 Palestine is remembered, admittedly retrospectively and sentimentally, as taken-for-granted ease and play — the Jerusalem home’s garden, supervised Cairo park play ‘within range of my mother’s voice’ (OP, 22, quoted PDF p.70) by contrast — so Palestine first figures as exemption from the regime forming around him in Cairo and provides the contrast-point for being ‘out of place’ (PDF p.70). Thereafter Palestine appears only as catalyst for political beginnings: his twelfth birthday, 1 November 1947, the eve of the Balfour Declaration’s thirtieth anniversary, ‘the blackest day in our history’ to his cousins Yousif and George (OP, 107, quoted PDF p.70); bewilderment at a loss ‘relatively repressed’ by his parents (OP, 117) and at faces he ‘couldn’t really comprehend’ (OP, 114, quoted PDF p.71); then his aunt Nabiha in Cairo, through whom ‘I first experienced Palestine as history and cause’ — the refugees as ‘those Others’, statelessness as having no country to return to and no national authority’s protection, ‘poverty, hunger, and humiliations’ (OP, 119, quoted PDF p.71), dispossession as ‘an ongoing state of medical emergency’ (OP, 121) with Nabiha’s reports of malnutrition, dysenteries, leukemias, families of ten in one room (OP, 118) — the locational relation to Palestine disrupted into a positional one, his anger from abstract justice, not personal affliction (OP, 120) (PDF p.71). The next episode, family friend Dr Farid Haddad — whose Palestinian father; he had treated Nabiha’s refugees without charge — killed in police custody in 1959 for Egyptian Communist Party membership, is a missed mentorship: he might have explained what his work and political life ‘meant’ (OP, 123) and the ‘social and national cause he and I weren’t able to discuss’ (OP, 124, quoted PDF p.72). Other mentors fail too — Charles Malik, Lebanese UN and US ambassador and Said’s relative, whose Christian Lebanese separatism and Cold War Americanism are ‘the great negative intellectual lesson’ of Said’s life (OP, 264, quoted PDF p.72) — so the epiphany is self-generated at the June 1967 conquest, in the memoir’s most Jamesonian moment, the nation returning ‘again and again like a gong’ (Jameson, 1986, 65, 86) (PDF p.72). Said can be criticized for presenting as particular to him an effect 1967 had on virtually all Palestinians and Arabs — his sister Jean Said Makdisi: the June war ‘shattered us, as it did an entire generation… I know of no Arab in America at that time who did not feel the same way’ (2005, 126, quoted PDF p.73), and Aboul-Ela names the foreign-policy turn the most Arab-American element of his profile (2006, 20) — but Said articulated it from an elite Ivy League location and became a liaison/emissary figure (Fanon, Antonius, C. L. R. James, Guha in Culture and Imperialism, 1994a, 312), and unlike After the Last Sky’s running together of experiences — land’s continuity ‘completely disappeared from my life and the life of all Palestinians’ (1999a, 19, quoted PDF p.73) — Out of Place makes the difference between his life and other Palestinians’ its very subject and engine (PDF p.72-73). In his Palestinian advocacy, less ambivalent than his literary criticism about national liberation, Said insisted Palestinians ‘represented an alternative […] a non-exclusivist, secular, democratic, tolerant, and generally progressive ideology’ (1995, xix, quoted PDF p.73) and, following Fanon, that Palestinians ‘projected a vision, and in their own lives embodied a nation in exile rather than a collection of individuals’ (1999a, xviii, quoted PDF p.74). The chapter closes: Said later spoke sceptically of the ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state unless land ownership and sovereignty are conceded (2002a, xvii), and the memoir itself refuses to imagine a future state, ending in limbo; its citizenship is a humanist, universalist ‘engaged (and, indeed, enraged!) citizenship’ (Lazarus, 2011a, 199, quoted PDF p.74), and, via Williams on domination’s limits (1979, 252, quoted in Said, 1983, 29), ‘the idea of Palestine… remains a site that prompts us to imagine alternatives’ (PDF p.74).

Chapter 3: ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (PDF p.75-96 / printed p.67-88)

Epigraph from Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, on longing for the past in Deir Ghassanah and wanting, seeing it still there ‘like a dog forgotten by its owners’, to kick it forward ‘to a better future’ and tell it: ‘Run.’ (quoted PDF p.75). Barghouti, without Said’s or Darwish’s visibility, has joined the short list of Palestinian authors widely recognized by an Anglophone metropolitan readership; Raʾaytu Rām Allāh (1997, Eng. I Saw Ramallah, 2000/3) is chiefly responsible — part memoir, part essay, part prose poem, an account of his first return to Palestine after thirty years of enforced absence resulting from the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, interspersing his life outside Palestine with impressions of Ramallah and Deir Ghassanah, the village of his early childhood, pursuing an accurate portrait of a hometown he is no longer legally allowed to call home (PDF p.75). It won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997 and the Palestine Prize for Poetry in 2000; the English edition (American University in Cairo Press, 2000), translated by Ahdaf Soueif with a foreword by Said, linked him to two of the best-known Arab writers in English; US release by Random House (2003) and UK release by Bloomsbury (2004) followed, with an afterlife on university curricula and growing scholarly attention (Mullaney, 2010; Bugeja, 2012; Farrier, 2013) (PDF p.75-76).

Its metropolitan reception assumed national representativeness — National allegory as reading practice: Tom Paulin in the Independent praised Barghouti as ‘temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad’ ‘outside any political faction’ (2004, quoted PDF p.76), while David Pryce-Jones in the Daily Telegraph warned that Palestinians have ‘more to fear from their own intellectuals who promote and justify [violence] than from the Israelis’ (2004, quoted PDF p.76); both assume Barghouti’s typicality, as does Fouad Moughrabi in the Journal of Palestine Studies: ‘I see myself in every paragraph and page of this book’ (2003, 109, quoted PDF p.76). One source of the consensus is Said’s foreword, calling it ‘one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have’ (ISR, vii, quoted PDF p.76), where ‘existential’ both denotes the ‘lived circumstances of Palestinian life’ (ISR, ix) and maps private existence onto the collective; Said’s conclusion, quoted PDF p.77, has Barghouti ‘uprooted forever’, his return re-enacting Exile rather than repatriation, ‘the Palestinian experience’ humanized in a new way (ISR, xi). Bernard argues that in Said’s foreword the distinct, discontinuous notions of individual and collective exile from Out of Place slide into one another, refracting Barghouti’s existential materialism through existentialist individualism and making Barghouti a metonym for all Palestinians — overlooking Barghouti’s persistent refusals of too-easy equivalence between his private experience and the group’s. Against a national narrative defining the collective by shared identity, I Saw Ramallah employs a materialist aesthetic attentive to the circumstantial diversity of Palestinian lives and the poet’s responsibility not to reify it: a move away from Said’s claim that exile is the ‘fundamental condition of Palestinian life’ (1992, xxxi, quoted PDF p.77), narrating occupied Ramallah alongside the ‘bourgeois diaspora’ (Bowman, 1988, 36, quoted PDF p.78) and the ‘fragmentation’ of the Palestinian collective (Khalidi, 1997, 34; Zreik, 2004, 71), striving for a Palestinian unity not reliant on shared identity and a role for the poet distinct from national representative (PDF p.77-78).

The section ‘Autonomy and commitment: Barghouti’s “Palestinian aesthetic”’ takes Barghouti’s Autodafe essay (2003b), written in English alongside the American edition, as a manifesto: ‘The prolonged Israeli occupation has brought sclerosis to our language. Our poems have been more pulverized than our streets… we, the Palestinian poets, have to struggle not only against all this existential danger and defenselessness but also against the aesthetic vulnerability of our poetry.’ (2003b, 40, quoted PDF p.78). The opposite of aesthetic vulnerability is not detachment but engagement with material detail — the poetic imagination now works ‘to confront’ reality, constructing a perception in ‘oppositional dialogue’ with everyday reality (2003b, 45, quoted PDF p.78). This shifts debates in which Ashrawi and Jayyusi criticized texts that ‘neglec[t] exigencies of style and form for the pressures of politics’ (Ashrawi, in Said, 1999a, 157), ‘exigencies’ being implicitly defined by Western avant-garde experimentation (PDF p.78-79). Barghouti shares the disapproval of reducing ‘the painting into a poster, the lyric into a military anthem… or the poem into slogan’ (2003b, 43, quoted PDF p.79), but evaluates an aesthetic by its success in conveying Palestinian individuals’ everyday experience, putting how literature does political work at his project’s heart: ‘What can I do with my poetry and my own language here and now, in my part of the world?’ (2003b, 42, quoted PDF p.79). The poet’s responsibility is to ‘embrace the universal, the human, as well as the intimate and the personal… For a fanatic it is always useful to simplify; for a poet it is categorically suicidal. The suffering of a nation should not be used as a pretext to justify the mediocre, the clichéd and thumb-worn’ (2003b, 43, quoted PDF p.79) — an attempt, against both political exigency and discrete-spheres aestheticism, to make aesthetic and political demands coincide, in line with Said’s need ‘to universalize the crisis’ (1994b, 32–33) (PDF p.79). Language is approached as human agents’ creation, revisable and capable of effecting change: ‘Language is the key word… our attempt to restore to each word its specificity and resist the process of collective vulgarization’ (2003b, 45, quoted PDF p.80), a premise Bernard aligns with Williams’s gloss of Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) — signification as material process, ‘practical consciousness’ involved from the beginning in all social and material activity (Williams, 1977, 38, quoted PDF p.80). Hence Barghouti condemns ‘that rubbish they call the “poetry of the stones”’ for blurring the human condition it pretends to celebrate: ‘the eternal difference between profundity and shallowness. Between art and political rhetoric.’ (ISR, 160, quoted PDF p.80).

His narrative mode privileges the senses over accepted truths, above all the idyllic pre-lapsarian Palestine: the Occupation ‘has created generations without a place whose colors, smells, and sounds they can remember’ and generations who ‘have to adore an unknown beloved’, turning Palestinians ‘from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine’; the poet’s belief in himself began when he ‘discovered how faded all abstracts and absolutes were… the accuracy of the concrete detail and the truthfulness of the five senses’, the camera’s language, and got rid of ‘the badness of beginnings’ (ISR, 62–63; 2008b, 74, quoted PDF p.80-81). Bernard notes Wordsworthian affinities but stresses the commitment is a collective political strategy, not spiritual gain: sanctifying Palestine is identified as an effect of occupation, to be countered by attention to life in Palestine now (PDF p.81). This is not a rejection of narrative — knowing the ‘real life process’ independently of language is Williams’s ‘objectivist fantasy’ (1977, 60, quoted PDF p.81) — but a claim that some narrations are truer; those who ‘dare to make it [Palestine] into an abstraction’ (ISR, 6, quoted PDF p.81) mistake received understanding for complete knowledge. Bernard notes, as significant and perhaps problematic, that the work Barghouti calls for can be done fully only by those resident in historic Palestine or allowed to visit, while those in exile must refuse abstraction as an imaginative effort (PDF p.81).

Chapter 3’s reading of the memoir’s first chapter, ‘The Bridge’, exemplifies the aesthetic: the crossing opens in sensory catalogue — heat, sweat sliding to his spectacles, the Jordan’s wood creaking, ‘Behind me the world, ahead of me my world’ (ISR, 1, quoted PDF p.81-82) — with patriotic/symbolic description deliberately purged, though perception is soon shown as mediated by memory and emotion, beyond a Heideggerian celebration of the land’s ‘thingliness’ (Brennan, 2006, 15; Heidegger, 1975) (PDF p.82). The bridge is ‘no longer than a few meters of wood and thirty years of exile’ (ISR, 9, quoted PDF p.82): its absent human controllers are the point, objects taking symbolic significance from social function, and Barghouti’s Brechtian metaphors — the dried-up Jordan as a ‘river like a parked car’ (ISR, 5), ‘at once precise in its deliberate, slightly surreal, banality’ and ‘quietly ominous’ (Paulin, 2004, quoted PDF p.82) — force attention back to material function. Moughrabi’s reading (2003, 109–10) of the bridge as collective humiliation and a metaphor of endurance misses this interdependence: the bridge’s meanings are made by its users — ‘Fayruz calls it the Bridge of Return. The Jordanians call it the King Hussein Bridge. The Palestinian Authority calls it al-Karama Crossing… My mother… call it simply: the Bridge.’ (ISR, 10, quoted PDF p.83) — and Barghouti weighs whether his crossing is ‘a political moment? Or an emotional one?… A moment of the body? Or of the mind?’ (ISR, 11, quoted PDF p.83). Its primary function remains political control: the Israeli soldier ‘wearing a yarmulke’ prompts ‘[t]his is a real hat and not a literary conceit’ (ISR, 12; 2008b, 17, quoted PDF p.83), as the bridge is a real object enabling control of traffic into Palestine, not merely its symbol (PDF p.83).

The landscape in the taxi ride to Ramallah is then confronted: the hills are ‘Bare and chalky’ where he had told Egyptian friends Palestine was ‘green and covered with trees’; ‘when [my son] Tamim comes here he will think I have been describing another country’ (ISR, 28; 2008b, 35, quoted PDF p.84). Bernard reads the exaggerated dismay — against Samir El-Youssef’s review reading it as a genuine epiphany about the gap between real land and poetic image (2001, 132) — as an artificial staging of the returnee’s discovery, and a critique of post-1948 Palestinian landscape writing’s ‘pastoral’ quality (Cleary, 2002, 89): Barghouti asks whether he had been describing Deir Ghassanah’s olive groves, or lush Ramallah, as the whole country (ISR, 29), and identifies the distortion as occupation’s effect — ‘it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed into the memory of its people into a bouquet of “symbols.” Merely symbols.’ (ISR, 69, quoted PDF p.84). Opposing the pastoral imaginary to urban development’s material benefits — in contrast to Raja Shehadeh, who foregrounds the West Bank’s environmental degradation (2007) — Barghouti directs attention to the landscape as a physical and economic space where people still live, and to national literature’s failure in glorifying a lost past instead of articulating a different future (PDF p.84). Trees, which in Bardenstein’s account (1998; 1999) carry symbolic force in a discourse of rootedness and rootlessness, are recycled and resituated: the ‘green fig that covers a third of the hill next to Abu Hazim’s house’ poses the challenge to ‘distinguish between ideologies… and this green fig’ (ISR, 37, quoted PDF p.85) without substituting symbol for presence; and Husam’s palm tree growing out of the wall of his second-story room in Dar Salih — ‘Mourid! I burned it down! But it came back and grew again.’ (ISR, 65; 2003a, 77, quoted PDF p.85) — draws on both of Bardenstein’s paradigms (1999, 153), invoking Sumoud as collective embodiment while making the obstacle a Palestinian home, the flourishing tree also an indicator of powerlessness and poverty, a parasite on a decaying house (ISR, 65) (PDF p.85-86). Taken together, these refusals challenge a Palestinian national consciousness based on a vanished past instead of a shared civic future: against Anderson’s nation as a ‘cultural artifact’ first ‘imagined’ then passed down (1999, 4), Barghouti’s nation is continually produced through Williams’s ‘real processes – all of them physical and material’ masked as ‘consciousness and its products’ (1977, 62, quoted PDF p.86), and the poet is especially responsible for recognizing language as a form of that action (PDF p.86).

The section ‘The fundamental condition of Palestinian life’ (PDF p.86-96) aligns Barghouti’s project with Said’s: both conceive literature as representing events in the world and the intellectual’s work as counter-hegemonic representation, dependent on aesthetic considerations specific to the Palestinian context — for Barghouti ‘the language of the camera’, for Said a text’s structure or form, exemplified by Kanafani’s use of the scene (1999a, 38) (PDF p.86-87). Because their projects share these premises, Said reads Barghouti’s exile in his own terms in the foreword, as a collective experience constant across circumstances, and calls the return a re-enactment of exile rather than repatriation (ISR, viii, xi) — literally correct, since no independent Palestine exists, yet glossing over the intellectual and emotional repatriation in Barghouti’s depiction of Ramallah as it is now and overlooking his critique of the idealized exilic perspective (PDF p.87). Bernard situates the divergence historically: in addition to the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees in 1948, 400,000 people were displaced in the war of 1967, about half of them 1948 refugees displaced a second time (Pappé, 2004, 139, quoted PDF p.87); Said’s and Darwish’s aesthetics of placelessness — Darwish’s ‘We Travel Like Other People’ (1983) and Said’s Palestinians as ‘migrants and perhaps hybrids in, but not of, any situation’ (1999a, 164, quoted PDF p.87-88) — belong to the moment after the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut, when, as Salim Tamari writes, the politics and poetics of exile so dominated that the Palestinians who remained in Palestine, almost half the total, ‘were virtually forgotten’ (1999, 3–4, quoted PDF p.88). I Saw Ramallah, written in the early post-Oslo years when debate shifted to the ‘juridical aspects of [Palestinian] identity’ and ‘the politics of statehood’ (Tamari, 1999, 3, quoted PDF p.88), with the Palestinian Authority redirecting attention from the ‘places of exile’ (‘al-manāfī’) to the ground of a potential state (ISR, 134), makes occupation the most immediate obstacle — though Barghouti is deeply critical of both Oslo and the Authority (PDF p.88).

Bernard shows Said’s reading rests on an incomplete citation: Barghouti’s passage on exile as catastrophic and irreversible — slipping on a staircase’s first step, a driving wheel breaking off (ISR, 131) — is only its first stage; it continues that strange cities become less strange, that ‘Life does not like the grumbling of the living’ (ISR, 131, quoted PDF p.88-89). Barghouti’s ‘stranger’ (‘al-gharīb’, also ‘exile’) is compelled to go on living and forming new connections; the injustice is that this is forced, the tragedy partly in trapping oneself in the initial horror intent on retrieving an irrecoverable past. He refuses to thematize exile, with its connotations of nostalgia or heterodoxy, as the defining characteristic of collective Palestinian existence (PDF p.89). Instead the memoir juxtaposes his own exile with Palestinians whose lives are defined not by displacement but by occupation — a differentiated Demographic imaginary correcting the foreword’s privileging of exile, without claiming those who remained have a more authentic view: writers under the Occupation who lived the Intifada ‘fell into the same error as the writers of the Diaspora’ by failing to ‘penetrate to the essence of their material’ (ISR, 160, quoted PDF p.89).

The juxtaposition is carried out materially, Deir Ghassanah against Budapest: the childhood village that ‘grew every plant that would grow in the climate of this land’ (ISR, 86) and the huge fig tree that had ‘fed our grandfathers and our fathers’ (ISR, 55), against farms now ‘overrun with brambles’ (ISR, 87) and the fig tree cut down, leaving a cement block, by his aunt Umm Talal, alone in the five-family home: ‘People have emigrated and people have died [hājar illī hājar u māt illī māt]. To whom should I feed the figs, my son?’ (ISR, 56, quoted PDF p.89-90). Bernard reads the scene, against a simple pastoral-past/‘bad modernity’ (Cleary, 2002, 90) contrast, as illustrating Deir Ghassanah’s economic collapse: land confiscation for settlements producing ‘land hunger’, modern agricultural methods reducing agricultural jobs, West Bank employment within Israel between 1967 and Oslo, and mass emigration to the Gulf in the 1970s (Pappé, 2004, 206; Farsakh, 2002), leaving income from ‘the olive and its oil’ and from sons, grandsons or husbands working in the Gulf, hit when ‘thousands of Palestinians were thrown out of Kuwait after the Gulf War’ (ISR, 57, quoted PDF p.90). The fig tree’s loss signifies dispersal and the narrowing of local industry to a single cash crop as much as lost sovereignty. Against it stand Barghouti’s Budapest apple tree, ‘as though it bore both apples and children’ (ISR, 134, quoted PDF p.90), and the decorative houseplants — ‘my yucca, my syngonium, my dracaena, my shefflera, my bear’s foot, my fern’ (ISR, 91) — abandoned at each move: not food-bearing, their loss does not affect survival, so the ‘pleasures of exile’ (Lamming’s phrase in Said, 2002c, 186) signify for Barghouti the material disparity between the occupied West Bank and the bourgeois diaspora (PDF p.90-91).

These different constituencies nevertheless share common goals identifying them as a national collective on political grounds, and Barghouti’s strategic ‘we’ puts forward a coalitional rather than identitarian national formation (PDF p.91). His childhood Ramallah ‘we’ — in the ‘strong tradition of what might be called urban patriotism’ predating the encounter with Zionism (Khalidi, 1997, 153, quoted PDF p.91) — is shaken by fellow student Raja Abu ‘Amasha’s martyrdom in demonstrations against the Baghdad Pact, celebrates Egypt and Syria’s union as the United Arab Republic and weeps at its dissolution, and hears of Egypt’s ‘socialist’ revolution (ISR, 39–40), awakened through illegal pamphlets, the ‘Voice of the Arabs’ radio programme and the newspapers al-Difāʿ, al-Jihād and Filasṭīn to sharing goals with people never met, as in Anderson on print media (1999, 47–65) (PDF p.91-92). The account then turns to retrospective critique: Ramallah’s Palestinians privileged Arab nationalism over solidarity with other Palestinians — ‘we on the West Bank treated our people [ʾahlanā, lit. ‘our relatives’ or ‘our family’], as refugees [al-lājiʾīn]? […] we called them refugees! We called them immigrants [muhājirīn]!’ (ISR, 40–41, quoted PDF p.92). The nation advanced is not natural or simply filiative: it rests on common presence in a defined territory (al-waṭan) and on shared interests distinct from Egyptians’, Syrians’ and Iraqis’ and from the Israelis who control the territory; Arab nationalism’s failure was an insufficiently particular understanding that upheld divisions between Palestinians (PDF p.92). In the present, Barghouti’s ‘we’ includes any Palestinian Arab whose quality of life is degraded by Israeli economic, military or immigration policies, extending to the right to life: his grief for his brother Mounif and his assassinated friends Naji al-Ali and Ghassan Kanafani is collective bereavement — ‘Our catastrophe and our pains [wājiʿunā wa mawājiʿunā] are repeated and proliferate day after day’ (ISR, 171, quoted PDF p.93) — and the nation is continually produced by human action, including those assassinations and Mounif’s forced exile in Paris. Its members are joined by total subjection to Israeli policy — each has had to ‘adapt – even though with difficulty – to the dictated reality’ (ISR, 140, quoted PDF p.93) — and by a general demand for self-determination, qualified by Barghouti’s border anxiety: ‘Am I hungry for my own borders? I hate borders, boundaries, limits. […] Now I want borders that later I will come to hate’ (ISR, 38, quoted PDF p.93).

Barghouti refuses to define those shared goals further and problematizes his ability to identify them, above all at his Deir Ghassanah poetry reading: he recites before ‘my uncles’, ‘the headman, the plowman, the shepherd, the mothers, the grandmothers, the educated, the illiterate, and even the children’ (ISR, 83, quoted PDF p.93-94), then asks, ‘What does Deir Ghassanah know of you, Mourid? What do your people know of you now?’ (ISR, 84–85, quoted PDF p.94). The villagers have changed too — Umm Talal speaks about politics, many young people are enthusiastic Hamas supporters — and their decisions, cutting down the fig tree or supporting Hamas, are human actors’ choices to comprehend rather than condemn; his prestige at the reading is itself a privilege of exile and long absence (ISR, 85–86) (PDF p.94). Literature offers a provisional way of ‘patch[ing]’ the ‘two times’ together: the poet ‘clings to his own way of receiving the world and his own way of transmitting it’ (ISR, 133, quoted PDF p.94), yet a dynamic collective consciousness can briefly take shape in transmission itself — ‘When I write poems, the audience is not defined. But they become defined when I am asked to read.’ (ISR, 79, quoted PDF p.94-95); ‘These people need no more bitterness. Let there be in your poems an indication – however faint – that, in the end, life goes on with the living’ (ISR, 82, quoted PDF p.95). Near the end Barghouti writes: ‘I want to attach [waṣl] one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now. We have not lived together and we have not died together.’ (ISR, 163, quoted PDF p.95). By staging the ‘Palestinian experience’ (ISR, xi) as an encounter between diasporic and non-diasporic Palestinians, the memoir makes defining common desires now — not only on the deferred day when ‘the scattered peoples of Palestine […] gath[er] together in a single place called “Palestine”’ (Bowman, 1999, 57, quoted PDF p.95) — the urgent task: differences must be neither elided nor essentialized if viable solidarity is to be achieved. The chapter closes by conceding the possible criticisms — no pragmatic agenda for unity, a utopian insistence on materialist poetics amid ongoing catastrophe — and answering that the narrative avoids identifying a Palestinian essence or a representative, authentic speaking position, a problem in some of Said’s writings and many others; it ends not with exile reinvoked but expectantly: ‘In Amman I will wait for Tamim’s permit. I will return here with him. He will see it. He will see me in it, and we shall ask all the questions after that’ (ISR, 182, quoted PDF p.96).

Chapter 4: ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz’s Living Utopias (PDF p.97-122 / printed p.89-114)

Epigraphs from Oz — ‘My books are often seen as political statements, but they’re not.’ (1994, quoted PDF p.97) — and from Yerach Gover: the Israeli Hebrew author resolves the historical order to a narrative order ‘superseded by the telos of the living utopia, the Zionist’s Israel’ (1994, quoted PDF p.97). The chapter opens with Oz’s memoir Sipur ʿal ʾahavah ṿe-ḥoshekh (2002, Eng. A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004): post-World War II Jerusalem’s anxious, impoverished European Jews ‘bent over a sheet of paper, correcting, erasing, writing, and polishing’ (2004b, 298, quoted PDF p.97), and the young Amos deciding he wants to ‘be a book’ — ‘Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.’ (2004b, 298–99, quoted PDF p.98) — because ‘hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the lot of us’ and a book might survive in ‘some remote library’ (PDF p.98). Bernard reads the passage both ways: its affective power evokes European Jewish immigrants’ perceived existential precarity and the Israeli artist charged with preserving collective memory, while its hyperbole exposes the threat as a fantasy that did not come true in Palestine — in 1946 it was Palestinian Arabs about to face catastrophic dispossession. Oz’s influence rests on sustaining this balancing act, summed up as ‘right versus right’: no moral or political alternative to the Jewish state, alongside stern critique of expansionism and insistence on compromise for a negotiated two-state settlement (PDF p.98).

Oz’s standing is documented: nearly thirty books in Hebrew — eleven novels, six collections of short stories and novellas, two children’s books, the memoir, two volumes of literary criticism, five collections of political essays — nearly all translated into English, usually by Nicholas de Lange, and into more than thirty other languages; the Israel Prize (1998) and Goethe Prize (2005); founder of Peace Now in 1978 and a drafter of the unofficial Geneva Accord in 2003; commentary in the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel (PDF p.98-99). Jacqueline Rose: Oz is ‘for many what Israel – in English literary and cultural consciousness – is allowed to be […] He’s the voice that repeatedly gets through’ (1996, 22, quoted PDF p.99). As a commentator he is cast as reason and empathy against the Zionist right; Nadine Gordimer’s foreword to How to Cure a Fanatic praises his ‘brilliant clarity’ (Oz, 2006b, vii, viii, quoted PDF p.99). Bernard shows his private-sphere language working two ways: at times a pedagogic national allegory, parables ‘to be read in primarily political and social terms’ (Jameson, 1986, 72, quoted PDF p.99) — ‘two victims of the same oppressor. Two children of the same cruel parent do not necessarily love each other’ (Oz, 2006b, 15, quoted PDF p.99) — and at times inverted, psychology producing politics: fanaticism as ‘an evil gene’, ‘Fanaticism begins at home’ (Oz, 2006b, 40–41, 59, quoted PDF p.99), with ‘fanatics’ indifferently Jewish, Muslim or Christian, anti-smoking campaigners, vegetarians or pacifists (2006b, 42, 50, 60–69) — like Arendt’s totalitarianism, rejecting distinctions between commitments in favour of the ‘virtue of moderation’ (1958, 191, quoted PDF p.100), and eschewing allegory for the ‘first-world’ public-private split (Jameson, 1986, 71) (PDF p.99-100). Metropolitan reception reinforces the circuit: A. S. Byatt on My Michael as ‘a remarkable, percipient portrait of the nature of women’, New York Times reviewers on Black Box’s protagonists as ‘thoroughly human’ (Goodman, 1988, quoted PDF p.100) and To Know a Woman as ‘mercilessly domestic’ (Pritchard, 1991, quoted PDF p.100) make Oz a writer of the human condition, his fiction legitimating his public-intellectual status and vice versa (PDF p.100).

Against the ‘conscience of Israel’ (Bragg, 2000) / ‘voice of sanity’ (Gordimer) image, Bernard sets Yitzhak Laor: ‘Amos Oz has never suffered for his opinions. He has always been a favourite son of the Israeli establishment, not least the Army’ (2001, 54, quoted PDF p.100). Oz championed Oslo and Barak’s ‘generous offer’ at Camp David in 2000 and supported Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in July 2006 and Gaza in December 2008, subsequently criticizing disproportionate force (PDF p.100-101). His 1989 Guardian essay, repeated elsewhere, rejects the colonial analogy in advance: ‘ours is [not] a case of good old-fashioned colonialism […] The occupation itself was not the cause of the war but its consequence. And the solution is not integration, but separation through self-determination: two states for two peoples.’ (1994b, 84–85, quoted PDF p.101). The strategy makes the Zionist left seem progressive and pragmatic against an inflexible Palestinian movement, and helps explain, with Williams (2010, 91), Palestine’s absence from postcolonial studies: left Zionist writers promoted a compassionate Zionism whose defenders ‘shoot and cry’ (yoreh ṿe-bokheh), normalizing the contradiction Said describes as believing ‘although it was morally wrong to expel Palestinians [in 1948], it was necessary to do so’ (1998, para. 4, quoted PDF p.101). Oz’s Zionism is not Netanyahu’s, Sharon’s or Begin’s maximalism, and Labour, Mapam and Meretz differ from Kadima, Shas and Likud; but his dissenting image belongs to an abbreviated spectrum — another ‘right versus right’, between ‘the socio-economic liberal right of the capitalist upper classes—called in Israel “the left”’ and ‘the ethnoreligious fundamentalist right of the labouring lower classes – called in Israel “the people”’ (Ram, 2001, 236, quoted PDF p.101-102) — squeezed by Israel’s status as an American client state: ‘this creates a permanent pressure shifting the Zionist left to the right’ (Hagnebi, Machover and Orr, 1971, 24, quoted PDF p.102). Within that order, acknowledging Palestinian self-determination looks like a magnanimous concession instead of an axiom of anti-imperialist politics (PDF p.101-102).

Bernard turns to Oz knowing critics already call his imaginary separatist and devoid of Palestinians: Gabriel Piterberg finds ‘a perfect congruity between Oz’s contributions to Zionist ideology as a novelist on the one hand, and as a non-fiction writer and public speaker on the other’ (2008, 228, 231, quoted PDF p.102). She reads Oz rather than Ballas, Swissa or Matalon because none has his metropolitan reach, and follows Rose — not ‘placing Oz (simply condemning, simply condoning) but […] following the psychic and political tension of the writing’ (1996, 36, quoted PDF p.102) — to show how the narratives construct an attractive, marketable Jewish nation-state and naturalize a separatist demographic imaginary, exemplifying Gover’s dilemma: dissident Zionist writing ‘both challenges Zionist moral and political themes and, despite itself, ends up by reiterating the episteme upon which those themes are based’ (1994, 3, quoted PDF p.102). Oz is a quintessential Andersonian national narrator — the ‘old-fashioned novel’ of kibbutz, Jewish Jerusalem, 1950s development towns and affluent Tel Aviv suburbs, populated by Palmach fathers, sabra sons and sabra women, its conflicts ‘ponderously allegorical’ debates about Jewish identity and the state’s future, individual experience as ‘the experience of the collectivity itself’ (Jameson, 1986, 86, quoted PDF p.103) — and his protagonists are avatars of ‘the Author’, his Jerusalem–Kibbutz Hulda–Arad trajectory making him ‘a kind of Israeli everyman’ (Omer-Sherman, 2006, 61, quoted PDF p.103). Through Lukács’s biographical form the national is circumscribed to post-1948 Jewish Israeli experience mediated by male, native-born, Ashkenazi left Zionists, affirming Gover’s ‘telos of the living utopia, the Zionist’s Israel’ (1994, 31, quoted PDF p.103) and the ‘constant return to allegory’ by which Israeli narratives achieve plausibility and community (Gover, 1994, 9, quoted PDF p.103).

Yet Oz also anticipates and resists allegorical reading, in the same dismissive tone as his resistance to the colonial identification: at the 1992 Frankfurt Book Fair Peace Prize, ‘You think you have written a piece of chamber music, a tale of one family, but your readers and critics say, “Aha! Surely the mother represents the old values; the father is the government; and the daughter must be the symbol of the shattered economy.”’ (1994b, 74, quoted PDF p.103-104). His novels put forward national allegories only to cancel them, recuperating nationally resonant losses as personal bereavements and domestic disputes — a father’s death signalling the pioneer (ḥaluts) generation’s demise in A Perfect Peace or mainstream left Zionism’s in Black Box, undermined by precise renderings of private grief; Fima’s meta-allegory, in which a dying dog’s horror too ‘was the result of what was happening in the Occupied Territories’ (1993a, 142, quoted PDF p.104), makes the reader question her own search for correspondences (PDF p.104). His self-description relies on Sherwood Anderson: reading Winesburg, Ohio in Hebrew translation, ‘where you are is the center of the universe’ (2004b, 491, 493, quoted PDF p.104) — a commitment to psychological realism and to small, circumscribed communities that critics deride as ‘best Bronx kitsch’ (Laor, 2001, 54, quoted PDF p.105) but whose insistent particularity makes the disavowed allegories of Jewish separatism more ‘palatable’ (Makdisi, 2011, 238, quoted PDF p.105). Domesticating Zionist settler-colonialism’s grand narrative reverses Jamesonian allegory’s trajectory, reframing a political will to power as private yearning; yet the move recuperates the political, recasting the desire to live as a Jew among Jews as a non-dominatory expression of personal freedom (PDF p.105).

The section ‘Allegories of dissent’ (PDF p.105-122) traces the contradiction across Oz’s career and fiction. In In the Land of Israel (1984, 238) history is ‘interwoven with biography’ — ‘Our oldest son was born while Joel [Yoel] was in the bunkers, during the War of Attrition’ — the private destiny bound up with the ‘embattled situation’ (Jameson, 1986, 69) of ha-matsav, ‘the situation’ (PDF p.105-106); in a 1972 essay, time and place ‘will always burst in’ even into writing about ‘desert islands or Nebuchadnezzar in Tahiti’ (1996a, 31, quoted PDF p.106). As he became established, especially addressing metropolitan audiences — where, in Larkin’s phrase, ‘the force of national allegory is released’ when a text is ‘translat[ed] across difference’ (2009, 166, quoted PDF p.106) — he insisted novels do not promote political ideas: ‘I would do this if I lived in a dictatorship and had to take refuge in allegory. But I don’t have to do that here.’ (1994b, 58, quoted PDF p.106). The two stances converge in his persistent storyline: a dissatisfied protagonist alienated from a complacent society, whose located dissent (at Zionist triumphalism, elders’ hypocrisy, repressed knowledge of the Palestinian past) is transformed into an existential crisis, its principled objections revealed as impossible idealism, immaturity, narcissism, loneliness or sexual desire, ending in crisis or catharsis, abandonment of unrealistic ideals, and communal reabsorption (PDF p.106-107). That closure fits Anderson’s ‘old-fashioned’ and Miller’s ‘traditional’ novel and Ezrahi’s ‘enhanced sense of teleology and closure’ in twentieth-century Zionist culture, restaging Jewish history’s apparent ‘end’ in Zion and asking what happens to utopian desire once the ‘living utopia’ is realized (Ezrahi, 2000, 6–7, 18) (PDF p.107). The individual/collective conflict is itself national-allegorical in a context where ‘collectivism has long been perceived not as a threat to the autonomy of the individual but rather as an emancipating force’ (Weiss, 2002, 5, quoted PDF p.107): Zionist emancipation eliminates the stateless condition preventing collective Jewish power, contradicting Israeli culture’s simultaneous liberal investment in individual autonomy (PDF p.107).

A Perfect Peace (1982), Oz’s best-known ‘kibbutz novel’, gives the ‘Israel-Israel’ conflict (Piterberg, 2008, 226) its most explicit rendition (PDF p.108): set 1965 to June 1967, focalized through Yonatan Lifshitz, twenty-six — Oz’s age in 1965 — planning escape from fictional Kibbutz Granot, against his Palmach father Yolek, the Holocaust survivor Azariah, and his wife Rimona, distant after a stillbirth resulting, the novel says, from complications of an earlier abortion. Yolek’s rebuke — ‘all this spoiled capricious nonsense of self-fulfilment [mimush ʿatsmi]’ (1993b, 8; 1982, 11, quoted PDF p.108) — stages the canonical sabra/‘state generation’ conflict (Almog, 2000, 16). Yonatan’s disaffection is also tied to Sheikh Dahr, the Palestinian village next to Granot depopulated and destroyed in 1948, whose sheikh Hajj Abu-Zuheir he remembers touching his cheek (1993b, 129): ‘And now there’s not a dog left in Sheikh Dahr and all of the fields […] are ours. Nothing is left now but those blackened walls on the hill and maybe their curse hanging over us.’ (1993b, 129–30, quoted PDF p.108-109). Critics read Sheikh Dahr as discordance between Zionist liberation and Palestinian dispossession (Omer-Sherman, 2004, 109) or as negative belonging defined by the site’s hostility and vengefulness (Grumberg, 2011, 50), juxtaposed to Yolek’s Tel Aviv — insufferably bourgeois yet ‘intrinsically miraculous’, a ‘mob of the strangest individuals […] who ever pretended to be a people’ (1993b, 110, quoted PDF p.109) — in a ‘right versus right’ frame (PDF p.109). But the plotline’s obviousness undermines its resonance: its political readings are voiced by the characters in clichés, and Yonatan’s departure speech — ‘Just do me the favor of dying so I can live.’ (1993b, 211, quoted PDF p.109) — draws its energy not from its trenchant critique of labour Zionism but from interior monologue, oedipal rage and the sabra body’s equal capacity for labour and violence, as in Oz’s account of his boyhood ‘dark, oedipal pleasure’ in Livne’s Me-ʿal ha-ḥoravot (2004b, 463, quoted PDF p.110). The flight’s catalyst is not Sheikh Dahr, as Omer-Sherman suggests, but ‘revulsion’ and ‘a biblical abhorrence of uncleanliness’ (1993b, 208, quoted PDF p.110) after a three-way sexual encounter with Azariah and Rimona: collective guilt over 1948 is sublimated into juvenile defiance and fear of his father, and his return — as father and as a soldier in the 1967 war — demands he relinquish his anger and participate in common life, one component of which is forgetting Sheikh Dahr (PDF p.110). Bernard does not follow Cleary that the novel claims Sheikh Dahr should be forgotten or calls exhuming the past ‘macabre and grotesque’ (2002, 171); it simply avoids accounting or atoning, marking Yonatan’s anguish as adolescent angst, ‘the vertical dimension of the personal trauma’ displacing the ‘essentially social nightmare’ (Jameson, 1986, 72, quoted PDF p.111). In later novels the reversal is completed by the characters themselves: Yoel in To Know a Woman thinks of living with others through ‘the disagreement between Shamir and Peres’ (2001b, 173–74, quoted PDF p.111), the conflict becomes parental small talk in The Same Sea, and Fima, bereaved, refuses to be drawn on ‘the situation in the Territories’ (1993a, 288, quoted PDF p.111). Oz states the method himself: ‘I use political materials, not in order to promote a political cause […] but as a way of observing the deeper and more mysterious dimensions of human existence’ (Cohen, 1990, 188, quoted PDF p.111) — a defiant answer to Gover’s Israeli-fiction ‘subtexts’ operating as ‘supertexts’, the meaning ‘always outside of itself’ (1994, 9, quoted PDF p.111-112), bringing meaning ‘inside’, bypassing Freud for Jung and Spinoza, a move that first requires keeping the ‘outside’ conflict with the Palestinians at bay (PDF p.112).

The section ‘The Bedouin on the hillside’ (PDF p.112-118) shows that structure repeated: the text vividly invokes the Palestinian catastrophe, then deflects and contains it. In the memoir, Ephraim of Kibbutz Hulda answers teenage Amos’s ‘murderers’: ‘From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land […] we’ve craftily grabbed more and more of their land […] And now that we’ve inflicted a crushing defeat on them and hundreds of thousands of them are living in refugee camps – what, d’you expect them to celebrate with us and wish us luck?’ (2004b, 435, quoted PDF p.112) — apparently endorsing a settler-colonial account including 1948 and a Palestinian right of resistance, and noting the settlers’ white man’s burden rhetoric — then mitigates it: the Arab armies made it ‘a simple question of either them or us’ (2004b, 236, locator as printed, PDF p.112). The same mitigation structures Oz’s complaint that there is no ‘Palestinian Peace Now’ (1994b, 126), his attacks on Arafat, his description of the Palestinian national movement in The Slopes of Lebanon as ‘one of the most stolid, wicked, and fanatical movements of this century’ whose goals are Kahane’s, ‘to destroy a movement and expel a people’ (1991, 235–36, quoted PDF p.112-113), his jacket praise for Dershowitz’s The Case for Peace (2005) as ‘based not on sentimentalist wishful thinking and not on dogmatic theorizing, but on reason and empathy’ (quoted PDF p.113), and his acceptance of the West Bank ‘separation wall’ in principle on the pre-1967 border, with Frost’s ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ (2006b, 14, quoted PDF p.113). Fictionally, the tension between liberal sympathy for the Palestinian ‘point of view’ and vilification of the actual national movement appears as imaginary interactions stopping short of mutual recognition between equally realized characters: protagonists troubled by signs of the Palestinian past, or by ‘Bedouin’/‘Arab’ figures in fantasies and at neighbourhood peripheries posing simultaneous attraction and threat — most extravagantly Hannah Gonen’s violent, sexual dreams of the Arab twins Aziz and Khalil Shahada in My Michael — whose appearances signal social alienation and whose overcoming enables communal reincorporation; recent non-threatening encounters (the two Palestinian children in the memoir, the adolescent Adel in Scenes from Village Life) have little to do with the main storyline and ‘rin[g] false’ (Remnick, 2004, 94, quoted PDF p.113-114). Bernard qualifies the ‘late imperial romance’ label (Cleary, 2002, 148–49): like Conrad, Oz knowingly uses colonial literature’s racist clichés — the overly sexualized Arab, the itinerant Arab, gendered settler-native encounters, the native as danger and excitement — but well past African and Asian decolonization, invoking them to challenge their relevance to Israel and dispel Zionism-as-colonialism by exaggerating it to banality, upholding through irony that ‘Israel is not South Africa, and the Israeli-Arab conflict has very little in common with imperialist and colonial histories’ (1994b, 69, quoted PDF p.114). The encounters thus both maintain the Palestinian’s haunting presence, making the Jewish state’s definition seem provisional and ethically ambiguous, and diminish its power by converting political urgency into private trauma (PDF p.114).

The dangerous/noble-savage figure is most prominent in the early work. In ‘Nomad and Viper’ (in ʿArtsot ha-tan, 1965, Eng. Where the Jackals Howl, 1981), the nomad is first described in monstrous, sub-human terms — ‘set with long, curved fangs like a fox’s’ (1992, 24, quoted PDF p.114) — while for Geula (‘redemption’) his difference carries a sexual charge: ‘The man was repulsively handsome, Geula decided to herself’ (1992, 31, quoted PDF p.114). When she seeks to assert power over him he stops speaking Hebrew, makes ‘a very long and solemn remark in his own language’ and leaves; feeling rejected, she imagines rape and wishes revenge — ‘let the boys go right away tonight to their camp and smash their black bones because of what they did to me’ (1992, 35, quoted PDF p.115) — then begins remorse, but is bitten by a viper and dies as the ‘boys’ raid the camp. Bernard reads the story as openly allegorical and defiantly subjective at once: the Jewish woman’s body aligned with the nation’s body, the encounter refracted through imagined sex — as in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North in reverse — Geula’s death extinguishing the Zionist dream of national ‘redemption’ as Israelis wreak pointless violence on already defeated Arabs, while lyrical attention to her private passions makes the allegory seem disappointingly obvious and registers her desire, like Yonatan’s, as distance from her community and as suicidal (1992, 38) (PDF p.115). In My Michael, Hannah’s fantasies of the twins — real childhood playmates expelled from Katamon in 1948 (2001a, 5) — express alienation in colonial guilt’s language (‘the Arab village of Shaafat dozing over the border’; birds singing ‘songs in a language I cannot understand’, 2001a, 70, quoted PDF p.115) and attention to the unspoken present (the Shahadas probably now in a refugee camp, 2001a, 189); Brenner traces her melancholia to inability to accept 1948’s trauma, signifying nationally (2003, 223–27), but channelling protest through erotic, violent fantasy pathologizes her dissidence and returns attention to the bored housewife’s domestic plot, ending with a second pregnancy and an imagined, sexually charged bombing of an Israeli water tower by Aziz and Khalil (2001a, 216) (PDF p.115-116). In A Perfect Peace the imagery is exaggerated to parody: Sasha Tlallim, ‘[u]nwashed, insane, berserk [mitga’esh, lo shafuy, lo raḥuts]’ (1993b, 330; 1982, 338, quoted PDF p.116), terrifies Yonatan with the Atallah Bedouin’s imagined sexual revenge — ‘they’ll fall on you like darkness [kemo ḥoshekh]’ (1993b, 330; 1982, 338, quoted PDF p.116) — in light/dark, heterosexual/homosexual, human/animal oppositions apparently affirming an ‘impermeable racial boundary’ (Cleary, 2002, 175, quoted PDF p.116), then begins ‘shak[ing] with silent mirth’ (1993b, 331, quoted PDF p.116): ḥoshekh echoes Yonatan’s own earlier description of his parents working ‘from darkness to darkness [dawn till dusk] like slaves’ (1982, 221, Bernard’s translation, PDF p.117), and the laughter mocks Yonatan’s fear as European xenophobic iconography, linking colonial guilt to fantasy and horror of physical violation (PDF p.116-117). Crossing the border, Yonatan finds no Arabs; his epiphany is psychoanalytical, the Jordanian landscape lunar — ‘Lifeless silver flowed silently over the lifeless earth.’ (1993b, 340, quoted PDF p.117) — his realization of responsibility for Rimona’s two babies’ deaths, again associated with Sheikh Dahr, discharged in shooting, vomiting and flight back, remorse for 1948 superseded by shame over domestic transgressions and fear of expulsion from family and community (PDF p.117).

By Don’t Call It Night (1994, Eng. 1995), set in the late 1980s, the Arab figure no longer inspires such anguish: the novel severs it from its uncanny history by incorporating the ‘Arab’ into a new Israeli multiculturalism in which Mizrahi and Ashkenazi characters live in relative harmony; all its Arab characters are called ‘Bedouins’, nomads rather than people with a claim to a particular territory, sitting idly in Tel Kedar’s centre as a sign of economic stagnation and buying kebabs, while Noa’s window-watching — the ‘black figure among black goats’ inspiring ‘peaceful detachment’ (2004a, 140, quoted PDF p.117) — only weakly echoes Geula and Hannah. Theo’s memory of ʿAatef, his early-1950s Negev reconnaissance unit’s tracker, begins in the vocabulary for a good tracker dog and shifts to a humanized, still racially marked portrait (2004a, 117), yet ends in total alterity: the men called him ‘Night’ behind his back, careful never to use it before him because in Arabic layla is a woman’s name (2004a, 117–18; 1994a, 129) (PDF p.117-118). Bernard notes Theo does not acknowledge ‘Night’ as a racial slur, nor the conflation of subordinate racial status with subordinate gender; and Theo is not really talking about ʿAatef — the Jew/Arab barrier of understanding is mapped onto the man/woman barrier between Theo and Noa, ʿAatef disappears from the novel, and even the title, through the feminine imperative tagidi, becomes Theo’s plea to Noa to keep striving to resolve conflicts within families and communities while accepting perfect resolution is unattainable. The possibility that the Theo–ʿAatef divide derives from ‘good old-fashioned colonialism”s structural inequalities rather than essential difference ‘is emphatically repressed’ (PDF p.118).

The closing section, ‘Resolution and recuperation’ (PDF p.119-122), shows the public/private and Jew/Arab divisions formally confirmed by the endings. Oz describes the conflict as a tragedy resolvable as in Shakespeare, ‘the stage is strewn with dead bodies’, or as in Chekhov, ‘everybody [is] disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, absolutely shattered, but still alive’ (1994b, 113, quoted PDF p.119), and chooses Chekhovian truce: estranged families, clashing kibbutzniks and disruptive individuals reconciled or revealed as not so disruptive, through the national-allegorical trope of the surrogate family, an ‘urban kibbutz’ (2001b, 234; 1993a, 255). The fictions consolidate a moral order and demographic imaginary based on inherent shared identity and desire among Israeli Jews — in striking contrast to the positional, coalitional Palestinian models of Chapters 2–3 (PDF p.119). Following Libman on 1950s kibbutz novels’ pastoral-utopian ‘closure’ sentencing 1948’s trauma ‘to a compulsive repetition’ (2012, 124, 133, quoted PDF p.119), Bernard reads Oz’s wilful tidiness — ‘I like my readers to be able to smile about it all at the end’ (1994b, 63, quoted PDF p.119) — as possible only by displacing the external conflict beyond the narrative, a displacement that itself repeats trauma as the Palestinian defeat resurfaces, each time more reduced, in the next novel. In A Perfect Peace’s omniscient close, ‘Yonatan Lifshitz returned. The next day he was back in the tractor shed in his work clothes as if he had never been away’ (1993b, 369, quoted PDF p.120); the menacing Arab is reduced to ‘our watchman shot and killed an infiltrator by the perimeter fence’ between harvest dates (1993b, 368–69, quoted PDF p.120), and the 1967 war is narrated with no mention of Arab armies: ‘Israel won and pushed forward its front lines’ (1993b, 373, quoted PDF p.120). The compromises are not Mazor’s symmetrical ‘exchanges between the two sides’ (2002, 2–3): the hegemonic position softens on a point or two — the kibbutz accepts Yonatan’s non-traditional family; Batsheva in Don’t Call It Night diverts Noa’s drug-clinic money to computerizing schools — while dissidents must relinquish disquiet and forget their interest in the Palestinian (PDF p.120). Don’t Call It Night’s close neutralizes the residual Arab presence by ostensible inclusion: ‘the whole of Tel Kedar’ flows through the open door at Batsheva’s mother’s funeral (2004a, 190, quoted PDF p.120), the town expands along Eshkol Street to Ben Zvi Boulevard (2004a, 192) — names aligning Tel Kedar’s survival with Israel’s state institutions — yet Arabs appear as ‘the Bedouins from round about’ (‘min ha-sevivah’, ‘from the vicinity’), listed separately from family and neighbours (shekhenim), spatially from the ‘vicinity’ rather than the ‘neighbourhood’ (shekhunah) (2004a, 190; 1994a, 208) (PDF p.120-121). Oz’s utopian diversity claim — a German intellectual and an Ethiopian villager both ‘will have read and studied certain books, and they will both have been persecuted for being Jewish’ (1994b, 54, quoted PDF p.121) — binds Jews by shared religious textual record and a history of oppression portrayed as unique, singular rather than specific in Hallward’s terms (2001, xii). Its mouthpiece is Srulik, A Perfect Peace’s second kibbutz secretary — ‘in some ways, closer to me than any others I’ve ever written about […] He wants to protect people from pain […] How to avoid fanaticism. How to realize that everything is very relative.’ (1994b, 63, quoted PDF p.121) — a conciliator whose ‘We’ve been through worse times, and thank God we’re still here’ (1993b, 178, quoted PDF p.121) and reluctant Zionism — ‘I never did believe a Jew could really and truly assimilate. That’s what turned me into a Zionist’ (1993b, 236, quoted PDF p.121), echoing Oz’s ‘I am a Zionist because I do not want to exist as a fragment of a symbol in the consciousness of others’ (1996a, 81, quoted PDF p.121) — derive from a late nineteenth-century Eastern European Zionist argument Evron identifies, reminiscent of Fanon’s critique of négritude, as ‘an instance of the uncritical way in which Zionism echoes anti-Semitic claims, without examining their validity’ (1995, 71, quoted PDF p.121-122). Its implication is comparison not with universal suffering but with Jewish suffering through the ages, ‘the telos of total history that transcends the suffering of mere others’ (Gover, 1994, 31, quoted PDF p.122). Against it Gover counters that the morality-politics synthesis ‘is progressive only if the inclusive referent is a universal humanity rather than a segment of a population. It is regressive and reactionary if the posit of a living utopia is particularized and sectarian’ (1994, 7, quoted PDF p.122). The chapter closes: by overtly excluding Palestinians from his fictional rehearsals of conflict resolution, Oz fails to extend the imaginative empathy a ‘sad, painful, inconsistent compromise’ (1994b, 69, quoted PDF p.122) will require of the regime in power; his novels show Israeli identity defined also by 1948’s and 1967’s Palestinian defeats and the ongoing catastrophe, yet mock and undermine that recognition, rejecting that the ‘external’ conflict might be the ‘internal’ conflicts’ most important cause — ‘for a self-described humanist, it is a defeat’ (PDF p.122).

Chapter 5: Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh (PDF p.123-143 / printed p.115-135)

Epigraphs from Sahar Khalifeh — ‘our political defeat was the result of our cultural defeat […] Mothers can be both the dough-baker and the steel-maker of nations. Mothers are the nation because they are the source and the cornerstone.’ (‘My Life, Myself, and the World’, 2002, quoted PDF p.123) — and from Nira Yuval-Davis: intersectional analysis analyses ‘the differential ways in which social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other’ (2006, quoted PDF p.123). The chapter opens with Dolly City’s famous scene: Dolly carves a map of Israel into her adopted infant son’s flesh because she has an extreme case of ‘Jewish mother’-hood (Hoffman, 1997, 63) — cutting open his chest to check his heart, giving chemotherapy in case of cancer, travelling to Germany to steal kidneys from German orphans: ‘I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the land of Israel – as I remembered it from the Biblical period – on his back, and marked in all those Philistine towns like Gath and Ashkelon […] Drops of blood began welling up in the river beds cutting across the country. […] At long last I felt that I was cutting into the living flesh.’ (Castel-Bloom, 1997, 44, quoted PDF p.123-124). The scene graphically connects Dolly’s violent possession of her son’s body to the Zionist claim to historical Palestine, in her maximalist rendering to the Jordan River, yet the allegory is so ‘conscious and overt’ (Jameson, 1986, 80, quoted PDF p.124) it is hard to know how to understand it: Dolly City is an eccentric parody of the ‘masked autobiography’ genre of Israeli women’s writing, ‘reflecting – in different degrees of displacement – [the] authors’ struggles with the question of the female subject’ (Feldman, 1999a, 27, quoted PDF p.124), anticipating and subverting gendered expectations — if confessions of a struggling single mother are wanted, they are given as literal confession of extreme violence, humorous in deadpan narration and ludicrous action; the map likewise reads as a send-up of the expectation that all Israeli writing should be ‘about’ the nation (PDF p.124).

Castel-Bloom’s work thus responds to two intersecting kinds of readerly expectation, faced comparably by Israeli and Palestinian women writers: reception tends to privilege gender over national location, assuming women’s writing necessarily subverts masculinist national interpellation, so it is read as political only as ‘women’s war writing’, as ‘feminist’ writing about women’s oppression by nationalist or religious structures, or as a private-sphere document against a ‘masculine’ public focus (PDF p.124). The tendency is especially pronounced for Palestinian women’s writing, seen, like other Arab women’s writing, as evidence of Arab-Islamic culture’s inveterate sexism (Saliba and Kattan, 2000, 88), but also shapes Israeli women’s writing, in keeping with Israeli feminist scholars’ challenge to the ‘myth of Israeli women’s liberation’ under socialist Zionism, figured by female agricultural labourers and female soldiers (Hazleton, 1977, 21) (PDF p.124-125). Such gender-attentive readings, even when commendably challenging the nation’s relegating women to reproductive or symbolic roles, can fail to acknowledge the nation as Palestinian and Israeli life’s principal political desire: gender equality and national self-determination are extremely difficult to separate, and the nation remains the framework within which women’s liberation will necessarily take place (PDF p.125). The Dolly City scene illustrates how these imperatives are ‘enmeshed and constructed by each other’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 205, quoted PDF p.125), conflictingly: it can confirm that Israeli women’s writing challenges the nation’s primacy — irreverent about national literature, hinting at a critique of women’s incorporation as soldiers and mothers of soldiers — and, taken at its word, it shows Dolly’s agency in transmitting the nation between generations by ‘cutting [its borders] into [her son’s] living flesh’: women are not only victims of nation-building but participants in producing and transmitting the nation and enforcing its boundaries (PDF p.125). Nor need the scene require rejecting Zionism as such: Castel-Bloom wants to ‘refresh’ Zionism, ‘like the process when you press refresh on the computer’ (Pervos, 2008, para. 10, quoted PDF p.125), and the scene reads as a reformist critique of militarist Zionism temperable by empowering women politically, rather than encouraging them to ‘embrac[e] a romanticized notion of their role as victim’ or ‘appropriat[e] violence as a tool to control territory and their body’ (Starr, 2000, 230, quoted PDF p.125); Dolly could be psychically healthy in a less belligerent Jewish nation-state. When Dolly’s sister takes the baby away, promising to return him ‘when you return to the ‘67 borders’ (Castel-Bloom, 1997, 127, quoted PDF p.125), the suggestion that Dolly is Israel self-consciously engages the idea that Zionism is a collective pathology (Rose, 2005) which can be ‘cured’ (or ‘refreshed’) by ending the occupation (PDF p.125-126).

The two writers’ contrasting circulation frames the chapter’s claim. Castel-Bloom (born 1960) is the most significant Israeli writer of either gender to emerge in thirty years, the first woman in Hebrew literary history treated ‘as an important Hebrew writer – as opposed to an important female Hebrew writer’ (Hasak-Lowy, 2008, 108n13, quoted PDF p.126); translated into eleven languages, most commonly French, but only three of thirteen Hebrew novels and story collections in English — Dolly City, Human Parts (2003) and Textile (2013) (PDF p.126). Khalifeh (born 1941), a generation older, has a greater international profile, often named the most frequently translated Palestinian writer after Darwish; five of ten novels in English, translations also into Hebrew, Korean and European languages, and the Naguib Mahfouz Medal (2006), of which Barghouti is so far the only other Palestinian recipient; regularly described as a feminist writer, which has contributed to her visibility, but controversial at home for outspoken criticism of Arab social structures and, in post-1994 writing, the Palestinian Authority (Saliba and Kattan, 2000, 90–91, 93–95) (PDF p.126). Castel-Bloom’s accolades tend to overlook her gender, Khalifeh’s recognition and restriction have depended on it — responses overdetermined by national location and by style (postmodernist satire against historical and psychological realism). Bernard’s claim is that their writing is linked by a shared preoccupation with intersectionality as a literary strategy: their novels strive to depict the nation, however compromised, as a still-valid means of social organization, while also representing gender equality as a desire and a political goal (PDF p.126-127). Far from being anti-nationalist, both articulate the complementarity of women’s national and gender interests, anticipating and challenging their reception as chroniclers of a feminine private sphere (PDF p.127). Kandiyoti’s ‘Janus-faced’ nationalism invites women as national actors while reaffirming acceptable feminine conduct (1996, 8–9); in militarized Israel/Palestine the 1964 PLO charter bases membership on descent from a Palestinian father (Amireh, 2003, 754) and Rabin’s 1993 Oslo speech defines the Israeli ‘we’ as the men who fight (Sharoni, 1995, 24), yet West Bank women’s committees and first-intifada organizing (‘We will not be another Algeria!’) increasingly challenged patriarchal authority (Gluck, 1997, 101, 113), an effort left incomplete by post-Authority ‘reprivatization’ (Gluck, 1997, 121) and by conditions that make Abdo ‘more a “Palestinian” than a gendered being, a woman’ (Abdo and Lentin, 2002, 9, quoted PDF p.127-128). Israeli women, hampered by the ‘myth of Israeli women’s liberation’, likewise mostly remain ‘both Zionists and feminists’ (Feldman, 1999a, 19, quoted PDF p.128); the nation remains ‘an unforgoable site of liberation struggle’ (Lazarus, 2011a, 106, quoted PDF p.128), and appeals to ‘global sisterhood’ (Sharoni, 1995, 5) depoliticize the two groups’ unequal power. Read relationally — not as implying the two nationalisms are alike because ‘nationalism is conceived by and for men’ (Abdo and Lentin, 2002, 9, quoted PDF p.128) — the pairing approaches Intersectionality as a literary problem: motherhood, home and family oppress women while carrying national-allegorical resonance, women’s bodies become ‘the site of the public sphere’s penetration of private life’ (Grumberg, 2012, 162, quoted PDF p.129), and each writer seeks to ‘make gender visible’ (Sharoni, 1995, 14, quoted PDF p.129) within the nation, articulating the need for a new Demographic imaginary divorced from patriarchy.

The section ‘Life imitating art imitating life’ (PDF p.129-136) reads Castel-Bloom’s Human Parts (HP). Castel-Bloom is introduced to English audiences by reputation rather than gender or Mizrahi origin — ‘the most eminent and prominent Israeli writer in recent years’ (Kubovy, 2000, 244, quoted PDF p.129) — her postmodern stylistics (śafah razah, ‘flat’ characters, mockery of Zionism and the ‘New Hebrew Woman’) classing her with the ‘generation without dreams’ (Shaked, 2000, 242), though her explicit use of feminist fiction’s ‘obvious elements’ (Ginor, 2005, 239, quoted PDF p.130) anticipates and mocks feminist interpretation while objecting to the myth of Israeli women’s equality; her social alienation negatively figures a more egalitarian collectivity of Jewish Israeli women, her characters denied ‘a reprieve from hypocrisy’ (Grumberg, 2011, 118, quoted PDF p.130). Human Parts, a realist departure set in Tel Aviv in ‘the year 20__’ (HP, 9, quoted PDF p.131) amid second-intifada suicide attacks, casts three protagonists across the ‘three major social divisions’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 201, quoted PDF p.131) — Iris, Kati and Tasaro — with no Palestinian Israeli character. Against Hasak-Lowy’s reading of the novel as confirming a narrative of Jewish victimization by faceless Palestinian ‘terrorists’ (2008, 97–98) and a ‘post-post-Zionist’ turn (2008, 100, 102), Bernard reads it as satire of the social realist novel itself: the exaggerated ‘state of siege’ adds record winter weather (‘raindrops the size of olives’, HP, 10; pioneers’ trees felled, HP, 11; both quoted PDF p.132) and a ‘Saudi flu’ blamed by taxi drivers on the government’s ‘policy of restraint’ (HP, 26, quoted PDF p.132), while the Elkana settler-doctor’s Spanish influenza comparison (HP, 27, PDF p.133) satirizes perennial Jewish victimization — the Palestinian Authority’s inhabitants are also dying of the flu (HP, 27; 2002, 31, PDF p.133). The protagonists are victimized not by ‘terrorists’ but by Israeli patriarchy, their despair a reasonable response to gender, ethnic and class limits — Kati’s ‘great oppression extended across her chest’ (HP, 95; 2002, 111, quoted PDF p.133). The title’s ‘human parts’ are not created equal: Boaz’s death by Palestinian gunmen (HP, 218–19; 2002, 254, quoted PDF p.135) earns a state funeral and Kati’s ‘We have no other country’ (HP, 229; 2002, 266, quoted PDF p.134), while Liat, who dies of the flu and jealousy — ‘The last word she said was ‘Mother” (HP, 35; 2002, 41, quoted PDF p.135) — is commemorated by no one, rendered expendable by her gender. The closing flashback, whose last line is the president’s daughter’s in Boston — ‘Wait until you see the amazing view from the windows’ (HP, 230, quoted PDF p.135) — suggests, paraphrasing Okin (1999), that Zionism as currently constituted is bad for Jewish Israeli women; Bernard concludes Castel-Bloom’s desired imaginary challenges Zionism’s collective representation without contesting its exclusion of non-Jews, a partial effort to counter the myth that all Israelis are in it together (PDF p.136).

The section ‘Like the martyrs and victims of all ages’ (PDF p.136-143) reads Khalifeh, whose feminist reputation rests partly on her life — married at eighteen, she left her husband in 1972 after thirteen years: ‘I wanted words and ideas, I wanted color, my wings, and music’ (Khalifeh, 2002, para. 8, quoted PDF p.136). Wild Thorns (1976) is a ‘conscious and overt’ national allegory whose three male protagonists embody conflicting responses to the occupation (Siddiq, 1986, 145, 149–50), emphasizing the costs of ‘the masculinist – if conflicting – articulations’ of the struggle (Harlow, 2002, 122, quoted PDF p.137) for men themselves; Amireh’s charge that Khalifeh recycles Palestine as ‘a female body possessed by others’ (2003, 750–53, 764–66, quoted PDF p.137) leaves unexplored the possibility she stages such narratives to interrogate them, and even her ‘masked autobiographies’ make women the primary chroniclers of West Bank life, offering ‘a compelling argument for the reciprocities of the conversations that build communities and the diplomacies that establish states’ (Harlow, 2002, 126, quoted PDF p.137). The End of Spring (ES), set like Human Parts at the second intifada’s height and giving the 2002 siege of Jenin through the teenage Ahmad, is a ‘dissensual Bildungsroman’ (Slaughter, 2007, 181–82, PDF p.138): Ahmad, ‘an artist by nature’ (ES, 2, quoted PDF p.138) mocked for a girl’s ‘soft heart’ and urged to grow a ‘thick alligator skin’ (ES, 7; 2004, 15, quoted PDF p.138), is hardened in Israeli prison and dies driving an ambulance into Israeli soldiers — ‘His soul flies up like a kite, like ozone. His father cries, “My son has been martyred!”’ (ES, 276, quoted PDF p.138) — his Bildung completed by the masculinization that kills him, a process his father comes to regret: ‘like the martyrs and victims of all ages […] They’re playing a death dirge and we must dance to it’ (ES, 112–14, quoted PDF p.139). Through Laleh Khalili’s differently gendered narratives — the heroic liberationist narrative’s virile hero against the ‘trauma drama’ whose protagonist is ‘a suffering woman carrying a limp child’ (2007, 37, quoted PDF p.139) — Bernard shows Khalifeh inverting the woman-as-victim plot: Majid, a Gaza recruit and an Israeli soldier all sob, Majid telling Arafat he cries because he is human (ES, 168, PDF p.139-142), while Umm Suad figures as female hero. Against the left critique that victimization language creates a ‘victim subject’ (Khalili, 2007, 36–37) and ‘smuggles in a depoliticization of action and agency’ (Khalili, 2007, 38, quoted PDF p.140), Khalifeh’s use is a strategic appropriation of human rights discourse — Palestinian activism such as Al-Haq’s itself aims at national self-determination (Hajjar, 2001, 26, PDF p.140). The Jenin climax shifts from Bildungsroman to polyphonic human rights report, cataloguing IDF violations listed by Human Rights Watch (2002) — unlawful killings, human shields, attacks on medical personnel, denial of medical access, bulldozing of homes — including the minaret loudspeakers’ ‘People of Nablus! All you whores! We’re coming to fuck you!’ (ES, 194, quoted PDF p.141), alongside Palestinian violations (a collaborator’s execution, ES, 205; Suad’s condemnation of the Netanya attack that killed thirty Israeli civilians, ES, 117) and a dead international activist, Rachel, almost certainly Rachel Corrie (PDF p.141). Privileging dehumanization — ‘They killed his heart. They killed his mind’ (ES, 203, quoted PDF p.142) — demystifies the heroic narrative without discarding its emancipatory aspirations. The chapter closes: in both writers the nation remains the privileged form of narrative and social order and the deferred resolution of problems never merely private; their critiques are not equally emancipatory — Castel-Bloom’s cannot free itself from the settler-colonial vision of a treacherous landscape of hostile natives — but their means of representing gender liberation’s relation to national liberation are unexpectedly complementary, a reminder that negotiation of intersecting divisions ‘should be determined by common political emancipatory goals’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 206, quoted PDF p.142-143).

Chapter 6: ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques (PDF p.144-167 / printed p.136-159)

Epigraph from Shammas’ ‘Kitsch 22’ (1987), quoted PDF p.144: “The State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish State (or even ‘the State of the Jews’) and demands that its Arab citizens fulfill their citizenship. But, when they do so, it promptly informs them that their participation in the State is merely social and that for the political fulfillment of their identity they must look elsewhere (i.e., to the Palestinian nation); when they do look elsewhere for their political identity, the State at once charges them with subversion, and needless to say, as subversives they cannot be accepted as Israelis – and so on, in circles, ad infinitum.” The chapter opens with Shammas’ September 1985 Kol ha-ʿir piece (1985, 13–18) proposing Israeli nationality divested of its automatic equation with Jewishness and ‘Israeli-Palestinians’ included in a genuinely pluralist Israeli nation (PDF p.144). A. B. Yehoshua’s vehement reply — ‘arise, take your belongings, and move one hundred meters east, to the independent Palestinian state that will exist alongside Israel’ (Yehoshua, 1985, 11, quoted PDF p.145) — was argued by Shammas and others not significantly different from Meir Kahane’s ‘transfer’ call; Shammas retorted he would not leave ‘my motherland and my father’s home, for the country Yehoshua will show me’ (1986b, 45, quoted PDF p.145). In the 1992 Grossman-facilitated exchange Yehoshua insisted ‘“Israeli” is the authentic, complete, and consummate word for the concept “Jewish”’ (Grossman, 1993, 253, quoted PDF p.145) while Shammas countered that ‘an Arab in Jaljulia is Israeli just like A. B. Yehoshua’ (Grossman, 1993, 257, quoted PDF p.145); Yehoshua conceded nationality on identity cards — ‘“Anton wants ‘Nationality: Israeli,’ and I’ll give it to him,” […] “But without identity! Identity, no!”’ (Grossman, 1993, 276, quoted PDF p.145). ʿArabesḳot (1986, Eng. Arabesques, 1988) moves the relations of the two groups from the margins of post-1948 Hebrew literature to its centre, confronting ethnic-political conflation with non-ethnic, non-sectarian civic belonging (PDF p.145); Shammas was not the first Palestinian Israeli Hebrew novelist (Atallah Mansour, 1966) nor the best known now (Sayed Kashua), but Arabesques, his only novel, has had the most significant impact on discussion of Palestinian Israeli writing in Hebrew (PDF p.145-146). Its reception — a New York Times best book of 1988, Oz’s ‘triumph’ for Hebrew: ‘If the Hebrew language is becoming attractive enough for a non-Jewish Israeli to write in it, then we have arrived’ (qtd. in Hever, 1987, 48, quoted PDF p.146) — partly depended on its seeming to demonstrate an already existing Israeli multiculturalism (Alcalay, 1993, 9, 286n21), and on identitarian readings of Shammas’ ‘hybrid’ location that Bernard reads the novel as challenging, though it invites them: its narrator shares Shammas’ birth in Fassuta in 1950, Jerusalem residence, Hebrew writing, Iowa programme, father’s profession and conflict with a novelist named Yehoshua (PDF p.146).

The epigraph — ‘Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.’ (quoted PDF p.147) — undermines the documentary effect, as does the division into ‘The Tale’ (ha-sipur), folkloric anecdotes of Fassuta and the extended family, and ‘The Teller’ (ha-mesaper), a realist Paris/Iowa narrative centred on the fictional Jewish Israeli novelist Yehoshua Bar-On. The two are gradually ‘plaited into one another, embracing and parting, twisting and twining in the infinite arabesque of memory’ (A, 226, quoted PDF p.147), destabilizing the ‘oral Arabic’/‘scribal Hebrew’ divide (Brenner, 1993, 440); read collectively rather than as ‘hybrid’ self-affirmation, the synthesis projects a non-sectarian national vision. Published just before the first intifada, the novel aims at relations between Palestinians and Jews within Israel rather than linking ‘inside’ (fī al-dākhil) and ‘outside’ (fī al-khārij), which may account for the ongoing absence of an Arabic translation, yet it shares with single-state visions a nation defined by common political status rather than common identity (PDF p.147-148). Following Hannan Hever (1987), Bernard treats the novel as Minor literature that reterritorializes Hebrew ‘as the language of the Israeli’ (Hever, 1987, 70, quoted PDF p.148): Hever’s Shammas is ‘suspicious of the validity of the Israeli national allegory, both for the Israeli Jew, with his uncertain identity as master, and for himself as a half-slave’ (1987, 69–70, 72, quoted PDF p.148-149), but where Hever, understanding allegory traditionally, casts the arabesque as anti-allegorical, Bernard — accepting Jameson’s ‘the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous’ — reads the arabesque as allegory itself, embracing ‘the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol’ (Jameson, 1986, 73, quoted PDF p.149, spelling as printed). The novel is ‘neither anti-national nor anti-allegorical’ (PDF p.149): ‘The Tale’ parodies expectations of the ‘Arab-esque’ (‘Arab soap opera’, A, 58) and ‘The Teller’ the metropolitan ‘dialogue’ allegory — the Dutch writer’s Shammas and Bar-On as ‘two faces of a single person’ (A, 145, quoted PDF p.149) being the media’s conflict, not the book’s stance. In place of one-to-one identity equivalence, its exaggeratedly representative cast and multiple genres aspire to a comprehensive account of Israel/Palestine’s modern history, making it the ‘most Israeli novel yet written’ (Gluzman, 2004, 325; Hever, 1987, 50, PDF p.150) and the book’s most radical Demographic imaginary, connecting the ‘Two narratives’ in one visionary national narration (PDF p.150).

The section ‘Two faces of a single person’ (PDF p.150-157) reads the Shammas/Bar-On encounter: Bar-On attends Iowa solely to observe Shammas as model for an ‘educated Arab’ — ‘to get to know you from up close,’ ‘while at the same time preserving a certain amount of aesthetic distance between us, for the sake of objectivity, you know’ (A, 137, quoted PDF p.150) — targeting the Hebrew establishment’s shift from ‘savage’ to ‘educated’ Arabs and the security apparatus’s ‘Arab affairs’ experts (Eyal, 2006, PDF p.151), with the tables turned as the Palestinian Israeli author represents the Israeli Jew. Hebrew reviewers preferred ‘The Tale’ as more ‘authentic’, an effect produced by the contrast itself; ‘Père Lachaise’, the first ‘Teller’ section, is Bar-On’s only first-person narration. His ‘my Jew’ (ha-yehudi sheli) for Shammas registers, for Hever, both ‘genuine empathy with a fellow-minority’ and ‘the racist stance of a superior majority’ (2002, 185, quoted PDF p.152); Bernard reads Bar-On’s racism as self-conscious satire — the ‘human and warm’ Arab as ‘cardamoned coffee’, Shammas’ indelible smell against his thé au lait (A, 82; 1986a, 73–74, quoted PDF p.152) — staging left Zionism’s dilemma, in which recognition of Israeli-Palestinians’ subordinate status reifies their absolute difference, an incommensurability that expels political contest as in Parry’s ‘neutral, ideology-free zone’ (2004b, 65, quoted PDF p.153) and Gover’s Arab as ‘antifigure’ (1994, 29, 32, quoted PDF p.153). Shammas reverses the objectification Gover deems impossible, stereotyping Bar-On as pipe-smoking Palmach-generation writer — ‘a stereotype of the Jewish writer engaged in stereotyping the Israeli Arab’ (Siddiq, 1988, 2, quoted PDF p.154) — then undermines his authority by revealing ‘Père Lachaise’ was drafted by Shammas and Amira and attributed to Bar-On (A, 167, PDF p.154). The ‘Mayflower’ Bar-On abandons Shammas for Paco, the ‘pure Palestinian’ from Nablus — ‘I feel much close to this Palestinian’ (A, 168, quoted PDF p.154, wording as printed) — leaving Shammas ‘betrayed’ as Israeli-Palestinians are left out of the peace process (El-Haj, 2002, PDF p.154), attacks Amira over the pipe in an Amish household and leaves Iowa ‘without saying goodbye to anyone’ (A, 204–5, quoted PDF p.155). Neither party’s imagining brings understanding — ‘each of us will have to deal with the problem separately’ giving way to the private conclusion that ‘the gap between us would widen until there was no way of bridging it’ (A, 170, quoted PDF p.155) — yet Bar-On is Shammas’ only constant presence in ‘The Teller’, and what blocks rapprochement is not cultural difference but Bar-On’s refusal to acknowledge Shammas’ grievances or conceive him as a fellow Israeli; the same word ‘bitter’ (mar) links Bar-On’s coffee passage to Shammas’ residue (A, 203; 1986a, 182, PDF p.156). The Père Lachaise graves of Marcel Proust and the assassinated PLO representative Mahmoud al-Hamshari — ‘the man of the lost country and the man of the temps perdu’, ‘the Jew of Time’ and ‘the Arab of Place’ (A, 135–36, quoted PDF p.156) — who appear ‘to share nothing at all’ (A, 136, quoted PDF p.156) yet share one burial ground, echo Pappé’s history of one place (2004, 2, PDF p.156); psychological and identitarian aspects are ultimately subordinate to the practical problem of living together in equality (PDF p.157).

The section ‘The winding chambers of the arabesque’ (PDF p.157-163) turns to ‘The Tale’: against ‘The Teller”s diverse individuals seeking a ‘possible community’ under the ominously settler title ‘Mayflower’, ‘The Tale’ begins from biological filiation and narrates the Shammas family’s dispersion, its form moving in reverse — oral ritual repetition weaving episodes into a whole. Its narrator’s intervention takes precedence over ‘information’, as in Benjamin’s storyteller (1999): Shammas was not present at the opening scene (A, 3, PDF p.157), and Uncle Yusef the ḥakawāti, ‘not to be fully trusted in matters having to do with mosques’ (A, 11, quoted PDF p.157), is both source and inspiration — ‘as a prayer of sorts to the memory of Uncle Yusef’ (A, 64, quoted PDF p.158) — his stories ‘plaited into one another, embracing and parting, twisting and twining in the infinite arabesque of memory’ (A, 226–27, quoted PDF p.158) aligned with collective memory against official history. The arabesque, appearing five times in ‘The Tale’, stands for cyclical structure allowing multiple storylines, subverting official historiography (PDF p.158); via Naddaff it links to A Thousand and One Nights, whose repetition seeks ‘to kill the natural movement of linear time’ (1991, 94–95, quoted PDF p.158), a reference at once auto-ethnographic and recuperative against Jabotinsky’s ‘retarded art form’ dismissal — the arabesque as ‘the summation of all possible symmetries in two-dimensional space’ (Shammas, 1987, 25–26, citing Bronowski, 2011, 131–36, quoted PDF p.159). Against the oral/scribal opposition even Hever maintains (2002, 191–92), ‘The Tale’ cites a vast Arabic textual archive from its first pages — the 1874 Al-Jinan tobacco law, Al-Hilal, an article ‘in praise of the Inquisition’ (A, 7–8, 16, 19, 64, PDF p.159) — attesting an autonomous tradition centuries before Israel, disrupted within its borders since 1948; and the arabesque converges with modernism (fragmentation, meaning through form, the perceiving mind, Trotter, 1999, 71, PDF p.159-160) in a refusal of representational authority. The Laylah Khoury/Surayyah Sa’id episode enacts the suspicion of fixed origins: Shammas tracks down the woman he believes is the family servant expelled in 1948 to find ‘the key to certain enigmas in my family’s past’ (A, 36, quoted PDF p.160); she reveals his namesake cousin did not die but was stolen and lives in America as Michael Abyad, Shammas negates the trip — ‘in fact I never set foot in the village of Silwad, and the whole trip to see Surayyah Sa’id is just a tale’ (A, 60, quoted PDF p.160) — then finds Abyad in a photograph of Sabra and Shatila victims in the September 27, 1982 Time (A, 73, PDF p.161). At the second meeting Surayyah tells her own story instead — orphaned in Fassuta, Beirut, expelled to Jenin in 1948 after Fareed Mikha’eel reportedly told the soldiers where villagers hid, sexually abused by Sitt Sa’da, deported (A, 243–44, 57, 246–47, PDF p.161) — mythic memory resurfacing ‘as a dry and hard political history’ (Feldman, 1999b, 382, quoted PDF p.162). Against Feldman’s ‘Arab Christian nationalism’ reading (1999b, 382), Bernard notes injustice is not always by Muslims — ‘after what the Christians did to me, he didn’t need to ask’ (A, 244, quoted PDF p.162) — and Fassuta escaped expulsion by bribing the Jewish commander while Deir El-Kasi’s residents were dispersed and the village renamed Moshav Elkosh (A, 11, 126, PDF p.162); ‘The Tale’ represents the ‘corruption and weakness’, infighting and greed that played a role in the ‘drown[ing of] the rebellion’ (A, 190, quoted PDF p.162) and the 1948 defeat. Neither Zionist modernity nor a post-nakba ‘bad modernity’ (Cleary, 2002, 89, quoted PDF p.163) marks an absolute 1948 divide; the narrative returns 1948 to a comprehensible struggle over land and resources — ‘[t]o know a thing by halves is better than complete ignorance’ (A, 224, quoted PDF p.163).

The section ‘Which of the two of us has written this book I do not know’ (PDF p.163-167) makes Michael Abyad the engine of the two narratives’ delayed synthesis: the only character besides Shammas in both, conspicuously the Palestinian ‘bourgeois diaspora’ (Bowman, 1988, 36, quoted PDF p.163), his surname meaning ‘white’, he is the blank screen for the life Shammas might have lived — and his inclusion answers the territorial model’s exclusion of the millions of Palestinians living elsewhere, implicating all Palestinians in the Hebrew narrative’s creation (PDF p.163). Abyad’s own account changes the earlier versions (adoption in 1949 not 1948; the family fled Haifa in 1948 to Beirut; Almaza’s son Anton did die) and culminates in his claim to have written ‘The Tale’ as his ‘fictitious autobiography’, from information collected at the Palestinian Centre for Research in Beirut: ‘I decided to write my autobiography in your name and be present in it as the little boy who died. A piece of the Palestinian fate that would confuse even King Solomon […] Take this file and see what you can do with it. Translate it, adapt it, add or subtract. But leave me in.’ (A, 258–59, quoted PDF p.164). ‘The Tale’ is thus the invention of a Palestinian-American who never set foot in Fassuta, its ‘hard history’ included, while ‘The Teller’ remains the plausibly factual — and therefore ‘real’ — story of contemporary Palestinian Israeli experience (PDF p.164-165). Shammas’ counter-flourish inverts Cather’s My Ántonia portfolio passage (1995, 2, quoted PDF p.165) — ‘My Tale’ erased to ‘Tale’, drawing attention to collective construction against modernist individual self-invention — and paraphrases Borges: ‘Which of the two of us has written this book I do not know.’ (A, 259, quoted PDF p.165). The Borges discussion completes the section (PDF p.166-167): in ‘Borges y yo’ (1957) the ‘I’ laments the public Borges’ ‘perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things’ while conceding only through the public Borges can the private one be immortalized, its final line reading ‘I do not know which one of us has written this page’ (Borges, 1964, 247, quoted PDF p.166); Shammas expands Borges’ creators to include the fictional Shammas and his diasporic double. ‘The Tale’ thus becomes the creation and legacy of Abyad and Shammas together, collaborative as neither Bar-On’s nor the narrator’s unilateral ‘representation’ of the other was, and Shammas’ attempt to ‘un-Jew’ Hebrew (1989b, 10) asserts ‘the cultural space of Hebrew already includes the Palestinian and his past, present, and future dreams’ (Hochberg, 2007, 93, quoted PDF p.166). Arabesques advances an already existing demographic imaginary including not only the ‘non-Jewish Israeli’ but all Palestinians, refusing to address Israeli-Palestinians’ plight in isolation: Bernard cites Butler that ‘the relation between the quasi citizen, the subject of colonial occupation, and the exile are internally linked and that mechanisms exist for the conversion into ever more extreme forms of dispossession’ (2012, 212, quoted PDF p.166), the homology between Palestinian statelessness and Jewish galut (Butler, 2012, 214-15), and Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning (2006), whose Tira residents wake denationalized — ‘I think we’re Palestinian now’ (2006, 266, quoted PDF p.166). By showing an ethno-religious understanding of Israeli (or Palestinian) identity need not and already does not determine the state’s demographic make-up, Shammas makes possible a more inclusive, horizontal national definition based on political consent, not biological descent (Sollors, 1986) — articulated by none of the study’s other authors — as simply the logical extension of Israel’s democratic self-description; Shammas’ 1983 essay, on a Knesset proposal to reward ‘positive elements’ and punish ‘negative ones’ among Israeli-Palestinians, asks: ‘If the attitude towards the Arabs of Israel has been fixed along the gun-sights of that committee, why then was my generation deluded into imagining that we were to be the bridge to coexistence?’ (1983, 38, 40, quoted PDF p.167). Yehoshua finally admits he is not yet willing to take up Shammas’ position, calling him ‘a soul born too early that passed by us on his way’ (Grossman, 1993, 275, quoted PDF p.167). The chapter closes: the failure of Arabesques’ vision to be realized does not invalidate it — its conclusions may seem even more ”disappointingly’ utopian’ (Feldman, 1999b, 376, quoted PDF p.167) than they once did — and the Israel/Palestine it imagines is like the classical Arab house’s archway, which ‘binds and consolidates all the elements of structure into one entity, from which the removal of a single component part may jeopardize the whole’ (Shammas, 1987, 23, quoted PDF p.167): ‘In this sense, Arabesques is a nationalist novel, though the nation it champions does not yet exist’ (PDF p.167).

Notes and references (PDF p.168-184 / printed p.160-176)

Endnotes to the Introduction (38 notes) and Chapters 1-6 (Chapter 1: 39 notes; Chapter 2: 29; Chapter 3: 9; Chapter 4: 28; Chapter 5: 10; Chapter 6: 23), each recorded in full in the reading notes. The Introduction notes define the book’s terms and apparatus: ‘Israel/Palestine’ for the region comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza from May 1948 (note 3, PDF p.168); ‘metropolitan’ for the global metropoles of Western Europe and the US, excluding Israel, which functions globally as a ‘client regime’ of American empire (Abu-Manneh, 2006, 44, quoted, note 6, PDF p.168); and the settler-colonial, relational-history and one-state literatures cited in the text (notes 20, 26-28, PDF p.170-171). Notable substantive notes include: some 5,000 people killed or wounded between 2000 and 2004, most civilians and more than 80% of them Palestinians (Khalidi, 2006, 204-5, note 10 to the Introduction, PDF p.169); the March 2011 Knesset law making citizenship revocable for espionage, treason or aiding the enemy, seen as targeting Palestinian citizens, contrasted with the Palestinian Authority’s ceremonial use of citizenship for international supporters including the 2010 Gaza flotilla activists, Vittorio Arrigoni and Daniel Barenboim (Chapter 1, note 37, PDF p.174-175); Weiner’s St George’s claim and Said’s counter that the school records end in 1946 while he was a student there in 1947 (Chapter 2, note 25, PDF p.177-178); Barghouti’s Arabic wording for the ‘stranger’ passage, given in Bernard’s own translation (Chapter 3, note 7, PDF p.178-179); the political implications of portraying Negev Bedouins as nomads without individual ownership or fixed residence (Chapter 4, note 26, PDF p.181); ‘intersectionality’ as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coinage (1989) (Chapter 5, note 3, PDF p.182); Fassuta’s position since the 1949 Armistice Line though not included in Israeli territory in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and Shammas’ move to the University of Michigan in 1987, from which he has not returned to live in Israel (Chapter 6, notes 7-8, PDF p.183); and Hochberg’s Exodus reading of the Fassuta bribe scene, the commander’s heart ‘held to’ (va-yehezak) the money as Pharaoh’s heart was hardened (Chapter 6, note 23, PDF p.184).

Bibliography (PDF p.185-203 / printed p.177-195)

The full bibliography, alphabetical from Abbas (2012) to Zreik (2004), recorded entry by entry in the reading notes: the primary texts and editions of Said, Barghouti, Oz, Castel-Bloom, Khalifeh and Shammas in English, Hebrew and Arabic; the theoretical works (Anderson, Jameson, Ahmad, Lukács, Moretti, Slaughter, Yuval-Davis and others); the criticism on each author; and the political and historical sources (Khalidi, Pappé, Masalha, Shafir, Yiftachel, Human Rights Watch reports and the 1948 and 1988 declarations) that the Evidence section lists.

Index (PDF p.204-213 / printed p.196-205)

The Index, from its opening entries (1948; 1967 (war of)) through Zreik, Raef (PDF p.213), recorded headword by headword in the reading notes, with extended sub-entries for Barghouti, Castel-Bloom, Khalifeh, Oz, Said, Shammas, citizenship, collectivity, the demographic imaginary, Israeli and Palestinian subjects, national allegory, national narration, settler-colonialism, translation and Zionism. The Peace Now entry is complete on PDF p.211 (locators 91, 104, 171n3); the next headword, ‘peace process’, opens PDF p.212. PDF p.214-216 are blank apart from the production line, checked in the original PDF.

Key passages

• “This is a book about the cultural representation, transmission, and circulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” (PDF p.9)
• “In 1948 the Israelites walked on water to the promised land. The Palestinians walked on water to drown. Shot and counter-shot. Shot and counter-shot. The Jewish people rejoin fiction; the Palestinian people, documentary.” (Godard, Notre Musique, 2004, quoted PDF p.9)
• “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (Jameson, 1986, 69, quoted PDF p.31)
• “My narrator does not want to act out his life according to the fact that he is a Palestinian – so what that he is?” (El-Youssef, in Greene, 2004, quoted PDF p.34)
• “a simpler, more knifelike communal sense based upon the passport, the green card, and the open-ended residency permit” (Brennan, 1997, 124, quoted PDF p.45)
• “I was no longer the same person after 1967: the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine.” (Said, Out of Place, 293, quoted PDF p.54)
• “Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere, especially in a city like New York, where I shall be until I die.” (Said, Out of Place, 294, quoted PDF p.56)
• “It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine as history and cause” (Said, Out of Place, 119, quoted PDF p.71)
• “The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.” (Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 62–63, quoted PDF p.80)
• “Fayruz calls it the Bridge of Return. The Jordanians call it the King Hussein Bridge. The Palestinian Authority calls it al-Karama Crossing.” (Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 10, quoted PDF p.83)
• “Life does not like the grumbling of the living” (Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 131, quoted PDF p.88-89)
• “In Amman I will wait for Tamim’s permit. I will return here with him. He will see it. He will see me in it, and we shall ask all the questions after that” (Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 182, quoted PDF p.96)
• “Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.” (Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004b, 298–99, quoted PDF p.98)
• “Amos Oz has never suffered for his opinions. He has always been a favourite son of the Israeli establishment, not least the Army” (Laor, 2001, 54, quoted PDF p.100)
• “And now there’s not a dog left in Sheikh Dahr and all of the fields, those that we quarreled about and those that we didn’t, and all their sorghum and barley and alfalfa, are ours.” (Oz, A Perfect Peace, 1993b, 129–30, quoted PDF p.108-109)
• “I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the land of Israel – as I remembered it from the Biblical period – on his back” (Castel-Bloom, Dolly City, 1997, 44, quoted PDF p.123-124)
• “a heavy weight pressing on her chest [muʿaḳah gedolah hiśtareʿah ba-ḥazeh, lit. ‘a great oppression extended across her chest’], and she was afraid to peep into the future” (Castel-Bloom, Human Parts, 95; 2002, 111, quoted PDF p.133)
• “His soul flies up like a kite, like ozone.” (Khalifeh, The End of Spring, 276, quoted PDF p.138)
• “People of Nablus! All you whores! We’re coming to fuck you!” (Khalifeh, The End of Spring, 194, quoted PDF p.141)
• “Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.” (Arabesques epigraph, quoted PDF p.147)
• “His stories were plaited into one another, embracing and parting, twisting and twining in the infinite arabesque of memory.” (Shammas, Arabesques, 226–27, quoted PDF p.158)
• “Take this file and see what you can do with it. Translate it, adapt it, add or subtract. But leave me in.” (Shammas, Arabesques, 258–59, quoted PDF p.164)
• “Which of the two of us has written this book I do not know.” (Shammas, Arabesques, 259, quoted PDF p.165)
• “I do not know which one of us has written this page” (Borges, 1964, 247, quoted PDF p.166)
• “the cultural space of Hebrew already includes the Palestinian and his past, present, and future dreams” (Hochberg, 2007, 93, quoted PDF p.166)
• “I think we’re Palestinian now” (Kashua, Let It Be Morning, 2006, 266, quoted PDF p.166)

Evidence the work relies on

The argument is built from literary and theoretical texts as Bernard presents them: Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1999 [1983]), Jameson’s ‘Third-World Literature’ essay (1986) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), Ahmad’s rejoinder (1987) and In Theory (1992), Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990), and work by Brennan, Lazarus, Larsen, Culler, Szeman, Slaughter, Spivak, Parry, Chakrabarty and others, each credited in the reading notes. Primary literary evidence named includes Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, Grossman’s To the End of the Land, Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and El-Youssef’s The Day the Beast Got Thirsty. Political documents cited include Netanyahu’s and Abbas’s 2012 UN General Assembly speeches, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948) and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (1988). Historical claims are credited to Khalidi (2006) on British rule and the 1936–39 uprising, to Hagnebi, Machover and Orr (1971) and Rodinson (1967) on settler colonialism, and to Arendt (1951), Rancière (2004), Yiftachel (2006), Weizman (2007) and Davis (2000) on citizenship. In Chapters 2–3 the primary evidence is Said’s Out of Place (cited as OP, by its own pagination), After the Last Sky (1999a [1986]), Culture and Imperialism (1994a), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), ‘Reflections on Exile’ and Representations of the Intellectual (1994b), read against criticism by Brennan (2006, 2010), Parry (2010), Lazarus (2011a), Cocks (2002), Marrouchi (2004), Hallward (2001), Moretti (2000) on the Bildungsroman and Slaughter (2007) on its dissensual variant, and against Weiner’s 1999 Commentary article and responses to it; and Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (cited as ISR, with the Arabic edition 2008b for translated passages), his Autodafe essay (2003b), Said’s foreword to the English edition, and reviews and criticism by Paulin (2004), Pryce-Jones (2004), Moughrabi (2003), El-Youssef (2001), Bardenstein (1998, 1999), Bowman (1988) and Cleary (2002), each credited in the reading notes. In Chapters 5–6 the primary evidence is Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City and Human Parts (cited as HP, with the Hebrew 2002 edition for translated passages) and Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant and The End of Spring (cited as ES, with the Arabic 2004 edition), read against criticism by Kandiyoti (1996), Sharoni (1995), Gluck (1997), Abdo (1999), Amireh (2003), Harlow (2002), Hasak-Lowy (2008), Grumberg (2011, 2012), Khalili (2007) on heroic and tragic narratives and Human Rights Watch reports (2002, 2004, 2005) on the siege of Jenin; and Shammas’ Arabesques (cited as A, with the Hebrew 1986a edition), his ‘Kitsch 22’ (1987) and the Shammas–Yehoshua exchanges (1985; Grossman, 1993), read against Hever (1987, 2002), Deleuze and Guattari (1986) on minor literature, Brenner (1993), Feldman (1999b), Hochberg (2007), Naddaff (1991) and Siddiq (1988), each credited in the reading notes. Chapter 6’s close adds Borges’ ‘Borges y yo’ (1957; 1964), Butler’s Parting Ways (2012), Kashua’s Let It Be Morning (2006), Sollors (1986) on consent and descent, and Shammas’ 1983 essay and 1987 archway description. The Notes and Bibliography (PDF p.168-203) give the full citation detail for every work cited in the chapters, recorded in the reading notes.

Analysis

Bernard’s method is a materialist defence of National allegory as both a reading practice and a writing practice, applied relationally — not as two parallel national literatures — to Palestinian and Israeli narrative texts in English circulation, through the linked concepts of National narration and the Demographic imaginary (PDF p.9, p.25-49). Each author chapter is a close reading against the grain of the text’s metropolitan reception: Said’s memoir is read for a demographic imaginary its author calls ‘deliberately unpolitical’ (PDF p.54), Barghouti’s memoir is read against Said’s own foreword to it (PDF p.76-77, p.87-89), Oz’s fiction is read through the allegories it disavows (PDF p.103-105), Castel-Bloom and Khalifeh are read against receptions that privilege gender over national location (PDF p.124-126), and Shammas’ novel is read against identitarian ‘hybridity’ readings (PDF p.146-149). Bernard openly marks where her reading departs from an author’s framing and from other critics’, and credits each claim to its author in the notes.

The corpus is openly delimited, and that delimitation is the work’s main stated limit: six highly visible narrative writers (Said, Barghouti, Oz, Khalifeh, Castel-Bloom and Shammas), most work after 1980, in memoir and novel only, selected for high visibility in English, with the Anglophone reception context — the dearth of translation, the disproportionate burden of national representation on translated texts, and the history of British and American imperialism in the region — specified as the context analysed (PDF p.13-15). Kanafani and Habibi are excluded on those criteria (PDF p.14-15). The historical and political claims the readings rest on (the settler-colonial analysis, displacement figures for 1948 and 1967, the citizenship regime, the Jenin siege) are credited to the secondary sources Bernard cites — Khalidi, Pappé, Piterberg, Tamari, Human Rights Watch and others, listed under Evidence — rather than established from primary documents in this work; the book’s own contribution is literary-interpretive, and its central claims (that a text projects a given demographic imaginary, recuperates dissent, or demystifies a heroic narrative) are sustained by the quoted passages and locators gathered in the reading notes, not by evidence independent of those readings. There is no separate Conclusion: the comparative argument is left to stand on the chapter sequence, closing with Shammas’ Arabesques as its most radical case (PDF p.166-167).

People, organizations, places and events

Anna Bernard, Edward Said, Mourid Barghouti, Amos Oz, Sahar Khalifeh, Orly Castel-Bloom, Anton Shammas, Benedict Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Samir El-Youssef, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas, Hannah Arendt, Balfour Declaration, Peel Commission, Justus Reid Weiner, Farid Haddad, Raja Shehadeh, Salim Tamari, Yerach Gover, Gabriel Piterberg, Jacqueline Rose, Hamas, Peace Now, Palestinian Authority, Oslo Accords, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Meir Kahane, Hannan Hever, Laleh Khalili, Nira Yuval-Davis, Rachel Corrie, Jenin, Nablus, Sabra and Shatila massacre, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Judith Butler, Sayed Kashua

Concepts

National narration, National allegory, Demographic imaginary, World literature, Two narratives, Relational History, Present Absentees, Demographic problem, Ethnocracy, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Bildungsroman, Exile, Affiliation, Sumoud, Intersectionality, Two-state solution, Separation, Minor literature, Mizrahim, Separation wall

How it relates to other sources

Bernard’s relational-history framing explicitly builds on Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 as glossed by Piterberg (PDF p.20). Her use of the ‘present absentee’ category as a figure for Israel/Palestine’s place in postcolonial studies (PDF p.27) extends the legal category treated in Nakba and Survival, Stateless Citizenship (2013) and Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel. Her account of the ‘demographic problem’ (PDF p.46) agrees with Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights that the phrase suppresses the 1948 expulsions that produced the Jewish majority. Her Chapter 2 reading of Said’s memoir supplements The Question of Palestine with Said’s later autobiographical account of the same formation, and her account of Farid Haddad’s death (1959, police custody, Egyptian Communist Party membership, PDF p.72) differs in date and circumstance from the dedication account recorded from that work (1961, tortured to death in prison); see Open questions. Her contrast between Barghouti’s material attention to present landscape and Raja Shehadeh’s foregrounding of environmental degradation (PDF p.84) sets two West Bank landscape writings against each other without adjudicating them. Her citizenship framing — literary texts as laboratories for definitions of citizenship and belonging (PDF p.42-49) — stands beside Stateless Citizenship (2013) and The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, which treat Palestinian citizenship as a legal and historical problem for the periods after and before 1948 respectively.

Open questions

• The Introduction’s chapter summaries are Bernard’s advance descriptions; the chapters as read in full sustain them, including the Chapter 6 summary — Arabesques as the book’s only genuinely post-Zionist gesture and a fictional analogue of an Israel that is the state of all its citizens (PDF p.24, p.166-167). There is no separate Conclusion in the Contents or in the book as read in full; the main text ends with Chapter 6 at PDF p.167.
• The Notes and references for the Introduction and Chapters 1-6 are read in full (PDF p.168-184): Introduction 38 notes, Chapter 1 39, Chapter 2 29, Chapter 3 9, Chapter 4 28, Chapter 5 10, Chapter 6 23 (computed from the notes as printed, PDF p.168-184).
• In Chapter 4’s notes, Oz’s fictional versions of himself include Yonatan of A Perfect Peace dated ‘(1985)’ (note 10, PDF p.180), where the Bibliography gives Menuhah nekhonah as 1982 in Hebrew and A Perfect Peace as 1985 in Halkin’s translation (PDF p.196); both are recorded as printed.
• In Chapter 6, the Jameson quotation at PDF p.149 gives ‘the homogenous representation of the symbol’ (1986, 73), spelling as printed, as in Chapter 2 at PDF p.60.
• In Chapter 6, Bernard’s sentence on the Dutch writer scene gives ‘is by no mean the book’s own stance’ (PDF p.149), wording as printed (byte-verified against the original PDF).
• In Chapter 6, Bar-On’s speech gives ‘I feel much close to this Palestinian’ (A, 168, quoted PDF p.154), wording as printed (byte-verified).
• In Chapter 6, Surayyah Sa’id’s speech is cited ‘(A 243–44)’ without a comma after A (PDF p.161), where the book’s usual form is ‘(A, 243)’; recorded as printed.
• In Chapter 6, Abyad’s account is summarized with ‘but Abyad loved so her much that he imagined her as his mother’ (PDF p.164), word order as printed in the original PDF (byte-verified); not corrected here.
• In Chapter 3, Barghouti’s poetry-reading passage is cited “(ISR 85)” without a comma after ISR (PDF p.94), where the book’s usual form is “(ISR, 85)”; recorded as printed.
• In Chapter 4, Ephraim’s speech in Oz’s memoir is quoted first with locator (2004b, 435) and its concluding sentence, ‘they themselves made it a simple question of either them or us’, with locator (2004b, 236) (both PDF p.112); both locators are recorded as printed and not reconciled here.
• In Chapter 4, the Ram (2001, 236) quotation runs ‘the socio-economic liberal right of the capitalist upper classes—called in Israel “the left”’ with an em dash and no space before it, across the PDF p.101-102 page break; recorded as printed.
• Farid Haddad’s death: Bernard, following Said’s Out of Place as she presents it, gives Dr Farid Haddad as killed in police custody in 1959 for his membership in the Egyptian Communist Party (PDF p.72). The dedication material of Said’s The Question of Palestine, as recorded on Farid Haddad, gives Haddad as tortured to death in prison in 1961 (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.20 / printed p.xix). Both dates are recorded as their sources give them; the conflict is not resolved here.

Coverage

PDF p.1-216 of 216, read in full in parts 1-6 of 6.