The search for identity in Israeli Arab fiction: Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas.(Critical Essay)

IN A RECENT (1996) INTERVIEW WITH HILIT YESHURUM, an Israeli journalist and translator, Mahmud Darwish, a leading Palestinian poet, discussed the indefinable borderlines between Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab identities. Despite the politically adversarial position of the two peoples, Darwish perceives the situation as an interactive process which brings them together in a problematic, yet inextricable relationship. "It is impossible," Darwish claims, "to ignore the place of the Israeli in my identity ... Israelis have changed the Palestinians and vice versa. The Israelis are not the same as they were when they came, and the Palestinians are not the same people either. Each dwells inside the other ... The other is a responsibility and a test ... Will a third emerge out of the two? This is the test." (1) As his political activities have demonstrated, (2) Darwish is far from being a supporter of the Zionist state; nonetheless, he maintains that the Zionist project has created a connection, perhaps even a bond, between the two peoples. He sees the interpenetration of the two identities as a potential for a "third"; that is, the possibility of creating a new modus vivendi which will include both Arabs and Jews.

The creation of the "third" is inextricably connected with the Hebrew language, which Arabs and Jews share. Darwish, who was born in Palestine, grew up as an Israeli Arab and emigrated from Israel in 1971, admits openly and lovingly his intimacy with the Hebrew language. "In this language," he says, "I spoke with the stranger, with the policeman, with the military governor, with the teacher, with the jailer, and with my lover. [Hebrew] does not signify for me the language of the occupier, because it was the language of love and friendship.... It opened for me the door to European literature.... It is the language of my childhood memories. When I read in Hebrew, I remember the land; Hebrew brings back the landscape." He read the Bible in Hebrew, and Hebrew poetry shaped his national feelings for the land. Darwish acknowledges the influence of Bialik, and especially his poetry of the land. "Both of us," he says, "yearn for the same place," and he says that he and Bialik give the same images to their longings.

Darwish historicizes the Hebrew language by using it to reveal his personal history. In Hebrew he remembers his first loves, friendships, the land, European culture, the Hebrew Bible, and the poetry of Bialik. The language of Israeli rule, Hebrew was catapulted into the world of the Palestinian Arab and transformed his sense of self. A dialectical reaction ensued--once the affinity with the language was established, the response transcended the Zionist nationalist signification of Hebrew. The intimacy with the language has empowered Darwish, the national Palestinian poet, to declare his identification with the national Hebrew poet in the name of the universality of poetry. This sense of closeness incurred a dramatic reinterpretation of Bialik from a Zionist poet into a poet of the Arab longings for Palestine.

Darwish's acknowledgment of the interpenetrating identities of Palestinians and Israelis, of his emotional affinity with Hebrew, of the ideological commonalities with Hebrew poetry, affirms not only the Palestinian presence in the Jewish state, but also the presence of the state. The Jewish state is, in his view, un fait accompli, which the Palestinian people must accept as an historical reality that can no longer be denied.

Darwish is certainly not the first Palestinian intellectual to recognize the need for a modus vivendi between Palestinians and the state. Edward Said affirmed the irrevocable historical reality of Israel much earlier, in a 1985 essay, "Ideology of Difference," where, despite his impassioned condemnation of the Israeli regime and of the support it gets from the West, he writes adamantly about the solution of "creative difference" and "different logics" (4); that is to say, the refiguration of differences must be forged out of both the recognition of the state and the criticism of its behavior. "I do not think," Said maintains, "that there is even a remote possibility that we Palestinians can return to the pristine undivided past. For us, the only hope is a community with Zionist and non-Zionist Jews on the land of historical Palestine.... We must reckon with the actual historical facts of Israel as a state and society with a continuity and integrity of its own." (5)

The perceptions of both Darwish and Said are grounded in the assumption that history evolves, changes, and confronts us with a reality that cannot be undone. Darwish stresses the inextricable psychological ties between the Israeli Arab and the Israeli Jew created in the shared history of the two peoples. Said points to the sovereignty of the State of Israel as an historical given that cannot be eliminated by either nostalgic fantasies about the past or unrealistic hopes for Israel's disappearance. The reaffirmation of Israeli Arab identity must therefore emerge from the consciousness of the historical and political reality and, at the same time, out of a regained sense of national pride. In other words, avoidance of mindless imitation of Israeli Jewish culture is of primary importance in the reality of hegemonic suppression and domination. As James Scott demonstrates, the rule of domination adheres to conformity. It creates a "public transcript," or a propagandist mode, which "[shapes] the appearance of unanimity among the ruling groups and the appearance of consent among subordinates." (6) The Zionist ideology has eroded the distinctness of the Israeli Arab culture; it has imposed its hegemonic culture eliciting an imitative adaptation to the mainstream.

Azmi Bishara, Israeli Arab professor of philosophy and a Knesset Member, calls the hegemonic co-optation of the Arab culture "Israelization." Israelization has, according to Bishara, distorted the Arab culture to fit the Israeli framework. The identity that we term "Israeli Arab," Bishara claims, is distorted too, because its two components--Israeli and Arab--do not indicate the "balance of the opposites, but rather subjugates one to the other."(7) Israeli Arabs, Bishara maintains, try to adapt to the hyphenated "Israeli-Arab" identity; that is, to imitate the role of the colonized and objectified Israeli Arab, which is a product of the Israeli media for the Israeli public. (8) They have adjusted to the image of an Israeli Arab that the Israeli Jew has created.