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    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination
    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination
    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination
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    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination

    By Gil Z. Hochberg

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    Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of alterity within the self--the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable.


    In a series of original close readings, Hochberg analyzes fascinating examples of such inseparability. In the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas's Hebrew novel Arabesques, the Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are a "schizophrenic pair" who "have not yet decided who is the ventriloquist of whom." And in the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa's Hebrew novel Aqud, the Moroccan-Israeli main character's identity is uneasily located between the "Moroccan Muslim boy he could have been" and the "Jewish Israeli boy he has become." Other examples draw attention to the intricate linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic, the historical link between the traumatic memories of the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah, and the libidinal ties that bind Jews and Arabs despite, or even because of, their current animosity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 28, 2010
    ISBN9781400827930
    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination
    Author

    Gil Z. Hochberg

    Gil Z. Hochberg is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    Read more from Gil Z. Hochberg

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    • 5/5
      Great insightful read. A must for scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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    In Spite of Partition - Gil Z. Hochberg

    In Spite

    of Partition

    TRANSLATION | TRANSNATION SERIES EDITOR EMILY APTER

    Writing Outside the Nation BY AZADE SEYHAN

    The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel EDITED BY MARGARET COHEN AND CAROLYN DEVER

    Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing BY KIRSTEN SILVA GRUESZ

    Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb BY RÉDA BENSMAÏA

    What Is World Literature? BY DAVID DAMROSCH

    The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress BY ISABEL HOFMEYR

    We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship BY ÉTIENNE BALI BAR

    Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation EDITED BY SANDRA BERMANN AND MICHAEL WOOD

    Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature BY NICHOLAS BROWN

    Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language BY SRINIVAS ARAVAMUDAN

    Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes BY MARTIN PUCHNER

    The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature BY EMILY APTER

    In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination BY GIL Z. HOCHBERG

    GIL Z. HOCHBERG

    In Spite of Partition

    Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

    PRINCETON AND OXFORD

    Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

    Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

    Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0X20 1SY

    All Rights Reserved

    Hochberg, Gil Z., 1969-

    In spite of partition : Jews, Arabs, and the limits of separatist imagination / Gil Z. Hochberg.

    p. cm.—(Translation/transnation)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12875-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-691-12875-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

    1. Palestinian Arabs in literature. 2. Israeli fiction—History and criticism. 3. Jewish-Arab relations in literature. 4.Jews in literature. 5. Arab-Israeli conflict in literature. 6. Arabic fiction—Palestine—History and criticism. 7. Zionism in literature. 8. Israel—Ethnic relations. I. Title.

    PJ5030.P34H63 2008

    892.4'09352039274—dc22 2006103037

    press.princeton.edu

    eISBN: 978-1-400-82793-0

    R0

    To

    the memory of Inbal Perlson, a true peace advocate.

    (1961-1999)

    We

    must now begin to think in terms of coexistence,

    after separation, in spite of partition.

    —Edward Said, What Can Separation Mean?

    CONTENTS

    PREFACE ix

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

    INTRODUCTION

    Between Jew and Arab: Probing the Borders of the Orient /

    ONE

    History, Memory, Identity: From the Arab Jew We Were to the Arab Jew We May Become 20

    TWO

    The Legacy of Levantinism: Against National Normality 44

    THREE

    Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place: On the Deterritorialization of Language 73

    FOUR

    Too Jewish and Too Arab or Who Is the (Israeli) Subject? 94

    FIVE

    Memory, Forgetting, Love: The Limits of National Memory / / 6

    AFTERWORD

    Going Beyond the Borders of Our Times 139

    NOTES 143

    BIBLIOGRAPHY /67

    INDEX 185

    PREFACE

    In Spite of Partition, as the title suggests, aims at challenging the dominant ideology of separation that informs the current relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel/Palestine with devastating ramifications on the relationships between the two people elsewhere in the world. But this book, it should be made clear from the very beginning, is first and foremost a literary study. As such, it offers an analysis of cultural imagination, not a political resolution.

    Attending to contemporary literary texts written by and about Jews and Arabs—about, more precisely, the intricate relationship between the figure of the Jew and that of the Arab in modern times, and most notably in the context of Zionism—this book seeks to expose deep cultural and psychological frameworks that bind the Jew and the Arab to each other, despite, or even due to, their current animosity. When I speak of such bonds, or about the inseparability of the Arab and the Jew, I am not speaking about a reality that can be easily or directly mapped onto the current sociopolitical state of affairs. Clearly, Jews and Arabs today, and certainly so in Israel/ Palestine, exist as radically separated and hostile communities. This grim reality is undeniable, and it is by no means my intent to suggest otherwise. My goal, however, is not to trace this hostile reality but rather to expose the conditions of repression and active forgetting that bring it about and make it seem pregiven and unchangeable.

    Exploring the imaginative territory introduced by literature, and focusing, most explicitly, on the manner by which literature situates the names or signifiers Arab and Jew in close proximity (either as traces of each other or as integral parts of each other), this book aims to free these signifiers, at least partially, from their current deployment as semantically constrained markers of polarized identities, communities, histories, and cultures. This, while revealing, in turn, the strong attachments that bind the Arab and Jew to each other despite the persistent political attempts to set them apart.

    The focus on literature is itself, in part, a politically informed choice. It is my belief that in today’s political atmosphere, the question of the relationship between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, cannot be adequately understood by an empirical analysis of the economical, sociological, political, or territorial realities at hand. There is no doubt that this reality is grim. But in simply describing the situation, even mourning over it, critics often end up not only mirroring the great animosities currently found on the ground, but further perpetuating the image of these ethno/national/religious conflicts as pregiven and unavoidable. The analysis of the empirical realities must, I believe, be accompanied and complicated by the study of cultural imagination. The importance of a literary analysis, then, for the study of the current antagonistic relationship between Jews and Arabs lies in the fact that literature, thanks to its relative political autonomy, is both a product of the present, reflecting the dominant political agendas, and a means through which we may be able to critically revisit such agendas. In the words of the Palestine novelist Sahar Khalifah: Literature [helps us to] transcend reality into another reality (Nazareth 1980, 81).

    To put it differently, it is precisely because, to quote Edward Said (199b), an apparently deep and unquestioning desire on the part of most Israelis and Palestinians today seems to be to exist in radical separation that we must, now more than ever, closely attend to literature and other cultural texts where we find a significantly more complex psychological and political reality: one that, while well informed by the current animosity between Jews and Arabs, nevertheless challenges the repeated attempts to set apart Arab from Jew, Hebrew from Arabic, Israeli from Palestinian, and the Jewish question from the question of Palestine.

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    This book emerged out of my dissertation work completed in 2002 at UC Berkeley, and so I would like to extend my first words of gratitude to my advisory committee: to Judith Butler for teaching me to always question the unquestionable, to Chana Kronfeld for bringing me back to Hebrew literature, showing me that one can be critical of the atrocities conducted today in Hebrew but still love the Hebrew language, to Saidiya Hartman for always pushing me to find my own voice, to Karl Britto for introducing me to the richness of Francophone-Maghrebian literature, to Robert Alter for his generosity and continual support.

    While at Berkeley I benefited from the insightful feedback of many colleagues and friends. I owe a special thanking to my dearest friend Melinda Y. Chen, who has followed this project from its very early stages throughout its final form, offering invaluable intellectual and emotional support. Many thanks also to Amir Banbaji, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Daniel Boyarin, Promita Chatterji, Jennifer Grieman, Abdul JanMohamad, Margaret Larkin, Katrin Pahl, Noha Rejwan, Muhammad Siddiq, and Karen Tongson for discussing various aspects of the project with me and for sharing their enriching views.

    At UCLA I joined a vibrant community of scholars whose critical work continues to give me the best incentive for challenging and improving my own. A group of scholars working at the intersections of Orientalism, colonialism, minority discourses, and comparative criticism—Ali Behdad, Stathis Gourgouris, Sondra Hale, Rachel Lee, Françoise Lionnet, Saree Makdisi, Kathleen McHugh, David Myers, Gabriel Piterberg, Todd Presner, Shu-Mei Shin, and Dominic Thomas—has provided me with a sense of intellectual community that I cherish deeply. I feel particularly lucky to have had Aamir Mufti as my unofficial mentor during the last few years. He has been an unfailing source of encouragement and intellectual stimulation, and his work has provided me with a model of rigorous critical engagement I can only hope to approximate. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at the department of comparative literature for their continual support and for providing me with a nurturing collegial environment.

    Over the years I benefited from the help of many dear friends and colleagues who have read, commented, argued, listened, discussed, advised, and shaped my thinking. This book could have not been written without this collaborative endeavor. Special thanks to David Attaya and Shelly Bachman for believing in me and in this project at times I most needed reassurance; to Judith Halberstam for her astute reading of the introduction, conclusion, and for so much more; to Tamar Assal and Yonit Efron for the many hours they have each spent discussing the project with me; to Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki for her valuable help as my research assistant; to Ammiel Alcalay, Shai Ginsburg, Gayatri Gopinah, Naomi Kanyuk, Anna More, Anton Shammas, Sasson Somakh, Yaron Tsur, Daniel Tsur, Itamar Tsur, and my father Yosef Hochberg for enriching this project with their insightful suggestions; to Sami Shalom Chetrit for his provocative work, which has greatly influenced my own; and to my mother Ruth Ramot for her numerous and indispensable editorial recommendations. I am particularly grateful to Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, who has read several drafts of the entire manuscript and offered the most incisive readings. I could not have hoped for more constructive feedback.

    I also wish to thank Meron Benvinisti, Adel Ghanem, Amira Hass, Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, Nadim Rouhana, Adel Samara, Edward Said, Avi Shlaim, David Shasha, and Ella Shohat. Their writings on the question of Palestine and on Arab-Jewish relationships have accompanied me throughout the process of writing this book and have provided me with much inspiration and hope.

    To Hanne Winarsky and Emily Apter I owe enormous gratitude. They have both been committed to this project from the very beginning and have offered their support and guidance at every step along the way. I also thank Anita O’Brien for her diligent copy editing of the manuscript and extend my gratitude to the two anonymous readers assigned by the press for their thorough reports. They pushed me to clarify and refine my arguments and undoubtedly helped to make this a better book.

    Finally, my deepest indebtedness to my partner Keri J. Kanetsky for the inexhaustible time she spent readings drafts and offering her keen criticism and guidance. Her love and belief in me made all the difference.

    Sections of individual chapters have appeared previously in different versions. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint. An early version of chapter 2 appeared as Permanent Immigration: Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon, and the Impetus of Levantinism, Boundary 2, 31.2 (Summer 2004): 219-43. Chapter 3 appeared in a shorter form as "The Dispossession of Hebrew: Anton Shammas’s Arabesques and the Cultural Space of Language," in Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, edited by Ken Seigneurie (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2003), 51-66 (copyright Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag Wiebaden). Parts of chapter 4 appeared in "The ‘Problem of Immigration’ from a Child’s Point of View: The Poetics of Abjection in Albert Swissa’s Aqud and Farida Belghoul’s Georgette!" Comparative Literature 57.2 (Spring 2005): 158-77.

    In Spite

    of Partition

    INTRODUCTION

    Between Jew and Arab

    Probing the Borders of the Orient

    There was a time

    when l’d have said:

    I won’t defile myself

    with this contemptible Orient,

    I’ll relegate my ancestral

    home to oblivion [. . .]

    —Amira Hess, Keys to the Garden¹

    In a short story entitled Ummi fi Shughl [Arabic for My Mother Is at Work], the Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom follows her protagonist—a self-identified paranoiac—as she leaves her apartment to sit down on a nearby bench and reflect.² The protagonist’s stream of thoughts is suddenly interrupted when she feels a sharp sting on her leg. Terrified, she jumps and looks under the bench, expecting to find a spider or a scorpion. Instead, she discovers an old Arab woman who claims to be her mother. The two women quarrel for a while, the protagonist insisting that this is impossible (my mother would never lie underneath a bench!), the old woman repeating her claim: I am your mother. Finally the protagonist turns to the old woman and asks: so who are you really, some kind of a ghost? At this point the dialogue shifts from Hebrew to Arabic, the old woman persistently claiming that she is the narrator’s mother, and if not her mother then surely her sister, while the protagonist adamantly denies any such familial affiliations:

    —Ana Ummik. [I am your mother.]

    —Ummi? Ummi mush huma, ummi fi shurl. [My mother? My mom isn’t here, my mom is at work.]

    —Ana ukhtik. [I’m your sister.]

    —Inti mush ukhti, ukhti fi shughel. [You are not my sister, my sister is at work.]

    —Ana ummik. [I am your mother.]

    —Inti mush ummi, ummi fi shughel. [You are not my mother, my mom is at work.]³

    This dialogue, we are told, is repeated about twenty times, after which the old woman asks the protagonist to please take her home with her. When the latter refuses, the old woman grumpily mutters Yasater yarab [so help you God] and slides back down under the bench.

    Who or what is this ghostly figure—this old Arab woman who emerges from beneath the surface, proclaiming familial ties, between the Israeli-Jewish protagonist and herself? Who is she, who switches their language of conversation from Hebrew and Arabic? Who is she, if not the embodiment of a haunting repressed memory: the memory of the proximity, indeed familial ties, between Hebrew and Arabic, the Arab and the Jew? Castel-Bloom’s absurd representation, itself typical of her Kafkaesque poetic style, unleashes this repressed memory (which could be called the repressed memory of the Semite) by introducing it as an unexpected threat: a fleeting memory that might flash up at any given moment and bite. It is a memory that emerges from underneath momentarily, only to be immediately pushed back under the bench, sealed in the dark abyss of national amnesia.

    This book attends to this national amnesia and its haunting ghosts, namely, the Arab and the Jew, or more precisely, the inseparability of the two. We are all well familiar with the image of the Arab and Jew as two polarized identities. Often and regularly we hear about the two peoples’ centuries-old fight over the same strip of land or about their long-lasting sibling rivalry dating back to the legacy of their common father Abraham (Charney, 1988). But little is usually said about the historical, political, cultural, and, above all, libidinal ties that bind these identities together, even today, under the horrid circumstances in Israel/Palestine. This book seeks to draw attention to these forgotten ties. It argues that Jew and Arab, rather than representing two independent identities, are in fact inevitably attached, each necessarily configured through or in relation to the other. They are, to borrow Derrida’s term, always already traces of the other when only one of them is addressed.

    Historically speaking, my discussion is limited to modern times. I follow this logic of traces as formed under European colonialism and at a time when the so-called Jewish question was crystallized in Europe itself, to the more recent reality in Israel/Palestine, where we find that Jew is always prefigured in relation to Arab (Muslim, Palestinian, the Orient), just as Arab emerges, for better or worse, in relation to Jew (Israeli, Zionism). Exploring the meaning of this inseparability against the current polarization of the Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli societies, I suggest that the radical separation of the two people is itself attainable only on the basis of repression and active forgetting. While such forgetting has long been perpetuated by the West for the sake of promoting its own imperial, colonial, and economic benefits, it is today further promoted and secured by an ethno-national separatist politics of memory as manifested most evidently in the case of Zionism, and arguably also by the leading trends of Palestinian nationalism.⁴

    My focus, as stated earlier, is literature. If there are plentiful publications on the relationship between Jews and Arabs, or on the various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these are predominantly historical, political, or social. Little attention has been directed so far to literary representation and to the manner by which it not only reflects historical and sociopolitical realities but further competes with them, introducing alternative actualities, which might find expression only at the level of cultural imagination, but which, as such, are nevertheless part of our times.⁵ My interest, then, lies in exploring the manner by which Jews and Arabs imagine and write about the relationships between Jews and Arabs, or about the relationship between the signifiers Arab and Jew (as well as Palestinian and Israeli) in modern times, and most notably in the context of Zionism.⁶

    This is also the place to note that theology or religion, while certainly playing a growingly significant role in the construction of today’s political reality in the Middle East, is not the focus of this study. Indeed, the literary texts I engage, whether written by Jews, Muslims, or Christians, all locate the question of the relationship between Arab and Jew within a cultural space that is primarily secular. Religion in this context functions as a component of one’s cultural identity (along with, and in relation to, other components such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, and linguistic affiliation), but it does not amount to a privileged or a defined status, nor does it represent a divine order or a transcendental ideology. In other words, if the cultural space examined in this book is clearly secular, secularism itself must be understood not as the rejection of anything traditional or religious, but as a critical force through which familiar categories or names (Jew, Arab, Muslim, Israeli, etc.), used for mapping social belongings and classifying collective identities along national, ethnic, or religious borders, are liberated from their static positions and relocated in a cultural space articulated between and across such borders.⁷

    The bulk of this book, then, is dedicated to close readings of literary texts, for which this introductory chapter provides a shared political, cultural, and historical context. This context includes, most directly, the legacy of partition as associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a legacy that assumes and promotes a radical separation between the Israeli Jewish and Arab Palestinian communities—but it further expands to include the broader theoretical and historical debates concerning the possibility or impossibility of fully separating the Arab from the Jew, as reflected in the intertwined Eurocentric discourses of orientalism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, and colonialism.

    A Stubborn History of Intimacy

    [Both] Zionism and Palestinian nationalism have not amounted to the philosophical problem of the Other; of learning how to live with, as opposed to despite, the Other . . . [the Other] who is always part of us, not a remote alien.

    —Edward Said, What Can Separation Mean?

    The idea of partition has accompanied the Zionist-Palestinian conflict since its very early stages. It was first introduced by the British colonizers of Palestine in 1937 as Britain was losing its power in the colony, and it later gained the support of the United Nations in 1947.⁸ Finally, the Oslo peace negotiations revived this political legacy in promoting the two-state solution: the idea that the answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in a territorial division that would allow the establishment of two separate neighboring nations, Israel as a Jewish state for the Jews and Palestine as an Arab state for the Arabs. But if this legacy of partition points at the continual attempts to separate Jews and Arabs, it also reveals the persistent conditions of inseparability that turn such attempts repeatedly into failures. Thus, despite the elaborate system of checkpoints, the numerous fences, walls, and roads, all set to police human traffic and separate Arabs from Jews, and regardless of how much most Israelis and Palestinians may wish to exist apart, the demographic, territorial, and economic reality in Israel/Palestine is such that the two people are forced to share an inextricably linked life.

    That this linked life, which has so far been governed by extreme inequality, reflecting the power dynamics between Israelis as occupiers and Palestinians as occupied, upholds alternative, latent possibilities for envisioning social emancipation achieved across national and ethnic differences, is exemplified in Sahar Khalifah’s gripping novels Al-Tsubbar (1976) and Abbad al-Shams (1980).⁹ Both texts focus on the movement of young Palestinians from traditional working positions as farmers and peasants to new positions as daily workers in Israeli factories, following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. While Khalifah surely alludes to the harmful effects of this transition, revealing the manner by which it reinforces the fragmentation of the occupied Palestinian society, she also points at the liberating effects this transition carries in terms of breaking the privileged class’s patriarchal control over [the land] (Yazili 1996, 88-89). Indeed, by centering her narratives on the question of work in the inside (i.e., is it a form of national betrayal? a sheer act of individual opportunism? or, perhaps an act of transgression and defiance?), Khalifah draws attention to the limits of the Palestinian national narrative, which casts the conflict in terms of Israelis versus Palestinians. This representation, her novels show, fails to account for other, not less prominent, social injustices, which take place across national differences and territorial borders. Most specifically, Khalifah shows how, by rendering the question of the land in exclusively territorial national terms (does the land belong to Palestinians or Israelis?), the national discourse draws attention away from the oppressive and most concrete labor and property divisions between the rich and the poor, as well as between women and men—between, that is, those who own the land and those who work the land.¹⁰

    To be sure, Khalifah’s novels certainly emphasize the importance of the Palestinian fight against the oppressive Israeli occupation, but they also stress the fact that a meaningful social fight against injustice and oppression must take place against, rather than in compliance with, existing separatist ideologies. Both novels, then, replace simplistic notions of national liberation with extensive contemplations on the very meaning of liberation, entertaining, among the rest, the possibility of an Arab-Jewish cross-national collaborative fight against the military occupation ('Abbad al-Shams) as well as a shared Arab-Jewish proletarian fight against unjust working conditions (Al-Tsubbar).¹¹ Furthermore, Khalifah’s daring exploration of the revolutionary potential imbedded in the growing daily interactions between Jews and Arabs, oppressive as they currently are, takes place not only thematically but also linguistically. As other critics have noted, Khalifah’s language is a pioneering mix of classical Arabic and Palestinian vernacular, which is further enriched by her extensive use of Hebrew words and expressions (Muhammad al-Mashayik, Barbara Harlow, Muhammad Siddiq). But if her use of Hebrew has been described as a semiotic guerilla warfare (Harlow) and explained in terms of the need of the occupied to know all sides of the enemy in order to use this vital information whenever the need arises (al-Mashayik), such combative accounts, I suggest, overlook one of the most distinct characteristics of Khalifah’s bilingual expression: the fact that, for the most part, she limits her use of Hebrew to words that sound very much like their Arabic counterparts. In so doing, Khalifah accentuates the phonetic similarity between Hebrew and Arabic, calling attention to the familial (Semitic) relationship of the two languages, and further implying, not unlike Orly Castel-Bloom, that the two Semitic people might in fact be closer to each other than they realize, or wish to realize.

    I take this brief detour through Khalifah’s writings not to suggest that the growing economic relationships between Israel and the Palestinians, or the new territorial proximity between Jews and Arabs (especially since 1967), in themselves carry a promise of social or political transformation. For anybody familiar with the devastating living conditions of Palestinians in the occupied territories, it is evident that this is far from being the case. But the point I wish to emphasize, and which I believe Khalifah’s novels powerfully illustrate, is that these relatively new territorial and economic realities, while so far working in the service of

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