The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film

229 Pages·2005·19.515 MB·English

by  Kamal Abdel-Malek (auth.)

THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE
THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE
ARAB-JEWISH ENCOUNTERS
IN CONTEMPORARY PALESTINIAN
LITERATURE AND FILM
I(amal Abdel-Malek
*
THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE
© KamaIAbdel-Malek, 2005.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1s t edition 2005 978-1-4039-6405-2
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ISBN 978-1-349-73231-9 ISBN 978-1-137-06667-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-06667-1
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To Angela Dawn with love-wa ana aydan
and
To the memory of my beloved nephew Basim
CONTENTS
Preface lX
Introduction 1
Chronology of Modern Palestinian History 9
Chronology of Modern Israeli History 17
1. Strangers at Home 21
2. Exile and Life on Border Lines 35
3. Encounters and Moments of Breakthrough 65
4. The Feminine Connection: Palestinian Women
Writers on War and Reconciliation 95
5. Reel Encounters: Palestinian Arabs and
us
Israeli Jews in Film
Conclusion 143
Appendix 1: Poetry 153
Appendix 2: Main Themes in Palestinian Films 163
Appendix 3: Prose 183
Notes 205
Bibliography 213
Index 223
PREFACE
T
his is a study of the ways Palestinian Arab writers and filmmakers
have depicted Arab-Jewish/Israeli encounters from the establishment
of Israel in 1948 till the present.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has been raging on for more than half
a century now. At present the news media show images of daily
killings of Palestinians and Israelis, of scenes of destruction and car
nage, and of dashed hopes for a peaceful settlement between Arabs
and Jews in our time.
No other conflict in modern history has caused so sharp a polariza
tion between Arab and Jewish communities the world over, so visceral
a hatred, and such calls for revenge. Sadly it has been customary for
Arab and Jewish observers and officials to trade blame and point
fingers at one another. Many books have been penned to defend one
partisan position against another, one exclusive claim over another, so
that it is at times hard, if not impossible, to come across a balanced
treatment of this conflict over the land that Arabs call Palestine and
Jews call the Land ofIsrael. This book is an attempt to come to grips
with the various aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its literary
and artistic manifestations. The main focus of the book is Palestinian
literary works and films, but whenever relevant some comparisons are
made with Israeli literature and films as well. These occasional compari
sons are mainly meant to be suggestions for further research.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
In order to make this book more readable and accessible to the
general reader I have decided to not use the cumbersome translitera
tion system often adopted in our field. The specialist, however, will
recognize the Arabic and Hebrew words and phrases in the book.
Simple spelling of common proper names is used; for example, Emile
Habibi, unless it is spelled otherwise in quotations (e.g. "Imil" or
"Habiby").
x PREFACE
NOTE ON ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Todd van Horn for his excellent editorial help, which
has rendered my text smoother and more felicitous. I am also grateful
to Angela Abdel-Malek for her help and many useful suggestions, but
above all else for her strong support and love. I have to thank several
individuals and institutions for their help over the years. I am indebted
to my former colleague at Brown University David Jacobson for all
the collaborative work that has contributed to my understanding of
the Arab-Israeli conflict and the kind of literature it has produced
over the years. Several terms and insights in this book can be traced to
this period of collaborative work with David and I am happy to
acknowledge my intellectual debt. Brown University through several
research grants and the prestigious Wriston Award for excellence in
teaching and research (1998) gave me more than a junior faculty
member could hope for. The American University of Sharjah (AUS)
has been good to me in granting me both time to do my research on
this book and funds to defray the cost of research trips to the UK and
Egypt, and I thank Vice-Chancellor Amr Abdel-Hamid and Dean
Robert Cook of the College of Arts and Science for having been
instrumental in the decisions to grant me the time and the funds
needed and for general support throughout the years at AUS. Lorin
Richie and the staff of the AUS library have rendered many services in
obtaining for me important sources for my study and have been
generally both professional and friendly. My unbounded love for my
daughters Amira and Layla has sustained me during the many months
I spent away from them while writing this book. They do now and will
always have my undying devotion.
The book includes excerpts from prose works as well as quotations
from poetry collections. I am grateful to all who have given me
permission to reproduce these. I am particularly grateful to the late
Fadwa Tuqan, Hanna Ibrahim, and Mahmoud Darwish, who gra
ciously granted me permission to include quotations from their works.
Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own.
INTRODUCTION
Publications on the various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict
abound; there are historical, political, social, military, and diplomatic
accounts that fill library shelves the world over. The vast majority of
these publications, however, largely ignore how the Arab-Israeli
conflict is portrayed in the artistic realms of literature and film. This
book is but an attempt to explore this terra incognita in order to glean
an understanding of how the creative word and the artistic image
depict the assumptions both sides have about their violent confronta
tions and moments of reconciliation. What is embedded deep in the
obscure poem, the little-read piece of fiction, or the cinematic screen
shot of Arab-Jewish encounters may be more revealing of the true
sentiments of either side than their respective political declarations to
world media.
The feature films and the literary works (novels, short stories,
poetry, autobiographies) presented in this book are mainly
Palestinian. A survey of Arabic literature produced by Arab writers
other than Palestinian reveals an astonishing paucity of works that deal
with Israeli Jews. Distinguished Arab novelists such as the Egyptian
Najib Mahfuz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, cannot
claim a single piece of fiction that has a sustained treatment of the
Arab-Israeli war or peace, or a well-developed Jewish or Israeli char
acter. There is of course no dearth of literary works by second-tier
writers, who, in one fashion or another, present crude plots in which
they include defamations against Jews and warnings against their
alleged conspiracies-the most noted of this kind of writer is Ali
Ahmad Ba-Kathir (d. 1969) of Hadramaut.!
There are however a few personal narratives penned by Arab and
Israeli writers in which they depict with various degrees of sophistica
tion and nuance Arab-Jewish encounters. Among these is the little
known 1957 narrative by the Egyptian journalist Izzat Ibrahim, under
2 THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE
the simple but telling title Kuntu fi Israifl (I Have Been to Israel).
The book describes a trip to Israel during which Ibrahim toured the
country and met with some prominent Israeli politicians, surprisingly
at a time of great enmity between Egypt and Israel. Other narratives
by Egyptian writers include Enemy in the Promised Land: An Egyptian
Woman)s Journey into Israel, by Sana Hasan (1986 ),3 RiMa ila Israil4
(Trip to Israel, 1994), by the noted Egyptian playwright Ali Salim
(commonly spelled Salem in English-language references), and Fi
Intizar al-Mukhallis: RiMa ila al-Ard al-Muharrama5 (Awaiting the
Messiah: A Trip to the Forbidden Land, 2000), by RaufMusad. Some
Palestinians writers and activists have published accounts of their
return to hometowns in the Occupied Territories or in Israel proper;
for example, the accounts by Edward Said,6 and Murid Barghouthi's
fictionalized Ra)aytu Ramallah (1998; I Saw Ramallah, 2000)?
Some prominent Palestinian political figures, such as Salah Khalaf
(Abu Iyad), Bassam Abu Sharif, and more recently Hanan Ashrawi,
have published personal memoirs which include relevant details about
their encounters with Zionist Jews inside and outside Israel. 8
Some Israeli writers have published their own accounts of their
contacts with Egyptians or their visits to Egypt, made possible after
the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty (1979), such as Amos
Elon's Flight into Egypt (1980) and Isaac Bar-Moshe's Arabic book,
Misr fi Qalbi9 (Egypt in My Heart, 1994). As early as 1974 the Israeli
Amos Elon and the Egyptian Sana Hassan published a book of dia
logue under the title Between Enemies: A Compassionate Dialogue
Between an Israeli and an Arab.10
The topic of Arab-Jewish encounters in history, literature, and
the arts has received relatively little scholarly attention. The first
major book-length treatment of Arab-Jewish historical relations is
S.D. Goitein's Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages
(1955),u It is a pioneering and informative study with a few unbal
anced judgments on Arab culture, written in a period of tension
between Israelis and Arabs. There are a few English-language articles
of uneven quality on the image of the Jew/Israeli in Arabic literature,
all published in the 1970s (see Abraham, Altoma, Alwan, Cachia,
Le-Gassick. )12 While not dedicated specifically to this subject, the
following books treat aspects of Arab-Jewish encounters in history,
literature, and film: Ami Elad-Bouskila, Palestinian Literature and
Culture (1999);13 Kamal Abdel-Malek and David Jacobson (eds.),
Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature (1999);14
Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
(1993);15 and David Shipler Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in
a Promised Land (1987).16