At the dawn of the history of modern Hebrew literature, two approaches to the Arab question are discernible. One sees in the Palestinian Arab[^1] a neighbor and possible friend; the other deems the conflict with him inevitable and the chances of coexistence very slim. Two authors illustrate these positions. Moshé Smilanski, curious about and admiring of the Bedouin way of life, mingled in his daily life with the Palestinian Arabs, with whom he forged bonds of understanding and friendship. Yossef Hayim Brenner, by contrast, of a pessimistic temperament, was extremely critical of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine and of the chances that the Zionist enterprise would succeed.
Moshé Smilanski (1874–1953)
A native of Ukraine who emigrated to Palestine in 1891, Moshé Smilanski held, as an heir to the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — that the writer must fulfill his role as educator and shaper of minds. He represented, on the other hand, only a minority in his attempt to improve relations between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish population, as well as in his hope of seeing a binational state created in Palestine.
In his short stories[^2], published between 1906 and 1934, Smilanski shows himself moved by the wretched living conditions of the sedentary Arab farmers, the fellahin, and shocked by the exploitation they suffered at the hands of the wealthy urban landowners and the Turkish authorities before 1918. The attitude of the author-narrator nonetheless remains, despite his empathy for the Arabs, that of a superior criticizing values deemed primitive.
Yossef Hayim Brenner (1881–1921)
Born in Ukraine in 1881 and arrived in Palestine in 1909, this pessimistic and lucid man would never manage to feel entirely at home in a land where the Arabs constituted a majority necessarily hostile to the arrival of foreigners on their territory. Brenner’s perception of the Arab question — defined, from his arrival in Palestine, as central and decisive — evolves appreciably between 1909, the year of his immigration, and his assassination during the bloody riots of 1921. Brenner, like Smilanski, draws a distinction between the Arab worker and the effendi, who owns the land. An encounter with a young Arab worker holds out the possibility of friendship and brotherhood. This encounter contrasts with the effendi, the same worker’s employer, who disdains to return his greeting.
The encounter with the Arabs in Brenner is thus not made up solely of fear, frustration, and defeat, but also of admiration and a desire for identification.
Set against the realist treatment of the question in the two works mentioned, a more allegorical dimension comes to light in Deuil et échec (Bereavement and Failure), first published in 1918. The protagonist, who suffers from psychic disturbances and who will end up taking his own life, is gripped by a nightmarish vision: an Arab family accuses him of having killed a child. This vision plainly effects a transfer of the nightmares of the Russian Jews onto the Palestinian scene, where the Arab takes the place of the muzhik accusing the Jews of ritual murder so as to decimate them in pogroms. A sense of guilt comes to light, together with an idealization of this little-known Arab.
However deep the gulf between Smilanski’s attitude toward his Arab companions and Brenner’s approach to a majority and unfamiliar people, the admiration and the desire for identification perceptible in the prose of these two authors disappear from the creation of the State in 1948 onward. Brenner doubted the chances of Zionism’s success, but not its legitimacy. Smilanski himself, who had fought for the creation of a binational state, abandoned the idea in the face of the imminent creation of a Jewish state.
The Creation of the State
The war of 1948 physically separates the Jews from the Palestinian Arabs and brings about a veritable demographic revolution. One notes, as a consequence, a tangible deterioration of the simple and picturesque depiction of the Arab way of life and mentality. While a sense of guilt is perceptible in the early writings of the authors of this generation, the war that awakens problems of conscience does not necessarily arouse the curiosity to know “the other side.”
Smilanski Yizhar (1906–2006)
Smilanski Yizhar, though close to the mainstream current of the Palmach generation, stands as an exception in raising fundamental questions with force and sincerity. An anti-hero image takes shape in his short stories, in opposition to the hero of his generation — positive, resourceful, and courageous. In Yizhar, the action often takes the form of a long interior monologue in the course of which the character frequently oscillates between supporting his group and criticizing its acts.
“The Prisoner” and “Khirbet Khizeh,” two short stories published in 1948, express the doubts of the Israeli soldiers charged with carrying out the expulsion of Arab villages and describe their reactions in the face of the realities of war.
In “The Prisoner,” the point of view is that of a disturbed Israeli soldier, and the Arab, without precise individual contours, appears only as an unfortunate prey. The capture takes place because “there is no question of coming back empty-handed[^3].” The Jewish protagonist must finally lead the prisoner to a camp where his fate will be decided. He could free him, but proves incapable of letting himself yield to his sense of justice.
“Khirbet Khizeh” caused a great stir upon its publication. Toward the end of the 1948 war, a company of young soldiers receives the order to expel Arabs from their village, Khirbet Khizeh, without physical violence — a task they accomplish despite their reluctance. The narrator becomes aware of the contradiction between his Jewishness and the expulsion of Arab villages. The narrator-protagonist dissociates himself from his comrades as the plot advances. A young intellectual raised in socialism, he finds himself confronted with a situation that demands an ethical decision. The Arabs, for their part, are seen collectively and from a distance. The figure of the Arab in these two stories is treated from a Jewish point of view. He is part of the original landscape into which he blends, whereas the Jew is ill-adapted to the natural environment.
Binyamin Tammuz (1919–1989)
Binyamin Tammuz’s short story “A Swimming Race,” published in 1951, recalls an episode from the protagonist’s childhood during the British Mandate. The mother, a nurse, is invited together with her son to the home of one of her patients, a very well-to-do elderly Arab woman, in her sumptuous family villa not far from Jaffa. The comfort of Oriental hospitality, which holds out a glimpse of a friendly Arab-Jewish relationship, fails to stifle the premonitions of the imminence of conflict. The hostess’s young relative, a student named Abdul Karim, scarcely conceals his resentment toward the Jewish guests and ends by proposing a swimming race to the narrator. The young Jew is swiftly beaten; humiliated, he then proposes an arithmetic contest, but neither of them excels at the subject. The denouement nonetheless shows how fiction conveys guilt. The young Jewish narrator has become an Israeli soldier, and his unit must storm the villa where he had stayed as a child and where Arabs have taken refuge. The property is captured, and among the resisters taken prisoner is Abdul Karim. The narrator, eager to take his revenge, invites him to the pool, but a stray bullet kills the young Arab before the contest can take place. The last image of Abdul Karim is, however, not that of a loser, as the narrator’s conclusion attests: “I was there, in the courtyard; we were there, all of us, the vanquished[^4].”
At the close of this first period of Israeli literature, the “Zionist consensus” is breached by most authors. A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and later David Grossman denounce — in their fiction as in their essays — what they regard as the antidemocratic excesses of Israeli policy. Like their elders, these authors stand as safeguards and as mirrors of the collective conscience.
The Sixties
The Arab question never ceases to haunt the Israeli Jewish authors, especially those who grew up with the young State of Israel. There is no longer any question of recreating the social and cultural milieu of the Arab population, which from now on will appear only to embody the Jewish author’s ethical and existential problem. Once again, the Arab character — who in this literature carries a symbolic and allegorical import — takes on a more collective than individual character. Until the nineteen-seventies, this character was often called simply “the Arab.” It later fills out, acquiring a psychological and human dimension and bearing a name. The author of the sixties is led to a representation of disturbed, even pathological states. The Arab, having become the Israeli nightmare, is represented not as a real individual but as a symbol of the existential terror that grips the Jewish protagonist and prevents him from living his life as he would have wished.
In some of the writers of the sixties one finds a measure of the romanticism of the authors of the early twentieth century, such as Moshé Smilanski, with the theme of impossible love between members of enemy families — here, between two peoples in conflict. This is the problematic of the first Hebrew novel written by an Israeli Arab in Hebrew: Be-or hadash (In a New Light, 1966) by Atallah Mansour, born in 1937. The author depicts the love between Yossi, a young Arab raised on a kibbutz, and Rebecca, a new immigrant. At first, no one knows Yossi’s origin. When the secret is uncovered, conflict erupts, yet the denouement is relatively optimistic. The kibbutz members decide to keep Yossi while urging the utmost discretion. The young Arab concludes that only his personal problem has been resolved, for, although he is accepted as an individual, his Arab origin is concealed.
Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” (1965) crystallizes the destructive fantasies of the fear of the Arab onto the image of the Bedouin in novelistic fiction. A group of Bedouins, driven from the South by drought, comes up toward the North with its herd and settles near a kibbutz. The kibbutz falls victim to thefts. The young people accuse the Bedouins and decide to organize a raid against the nomads. The story sets onstage, jointly, Geula, a young unmarried woman of the kibbutz who reconciles poorly the two facets of a personality at once disciplined and passionate. As she walks through the orchard in an attempt to calm her inner storm, an Arab shepherd appears with his flock. The young woman speaks to him, visibly attracted and at the same time disgusted. The boy keeps his distance and, frightened, withdraws. Geula accuses the young man of an imaginary rape. She transforms her erotic fervor into vengeance but, in reality, relieves her tensions by taking her own life.
The reprisal raid begins. The narrator oscillates between two poles: although at odds with his comrades, he takes part in the reprisals. The nomads are far removed from the romantic aspect attributed to their novelistic predecessors. Their behavior is instinctive, animal, and it seems impossible to grasp their true nature. Apparently weak and inferior, they are at bottom superior and strong and represent a threat to the kibbutz. The personal level, incontestably the most important, sets a Jewish woman face to face with an impulsive and bestial young Bedouin — qualities that repel Geula as much as they attract her.
A.B. Yehoshua’s short stories establish a connection between the frustrations born of the inability to communicate and the seductiveness of a destructive act. This is the central theme of the short story “Facing the Forests” (1963). The nameless protagonist, a student nearing thirty, is bored with an interminable research project on the history of the Crusades and dazes himself in a superficial city life. A few good friends find him a job as a forest watchman. In the forest where he takes up his post, he finds only a mute Arab and his daughter. The forest has been planted on the ruins of the Arab village where the man and his little girl once lived. The student concentrates all his attention on the forest so as to raise the alarm at the slightest flame. Constantly on the alert, he anticipates the catastrophe in his imagination with an ever more feverish desire to see it break out. The Arab, who shares the same obsession, hides cans of gasoline at various points in the forest, and the young watchman, who catches him in the act, does not stop him. On the contrary, he himself attempts, under the old man’s eyes, to light a fire. Only, to their great disappointment, it cannot be made to catch. From then on a tacit bond unites them. They communicate by gestures, the Arab having had his tongue cut out and the Jew not speaking Arabic. The tension reaches a degree of oppressive and destructive madness that must find its culmination. It is the Arab who brings the situation to a head by setting fire to the four corners of the forest. “Facing the Forests” begins with the destruction of this forest and the reappearance of the Arab village. Like other heroes of the sixties, the forest watchman seems to arrive at the conclusion that the Israeli can no longer lay claim to moral right, and that the inevitable outcome can be nothing but destruction and despair.
The symbolic correlation established in A.B. Yehoshua between personality disorders and public problems is found with the same force in Amos Oz’s novel My Michael (1968). There the general myth is transposed into the psychology of a young woman, psychically disturbed and richly imaginative: Hannah Gonen. The main action unfolds in Jerusalem in the nineteen-fifties. Hannah, who feels imprisoned in the routine of bourgeois life, is married to Michael, a man of excellent nature, pragmatic and devoted. So many qualities that only reinforce the isolation of the dreamy young woman, who escapes into her inner kingdom of fantasies fed by childhood memories, children’s literature, and buried desires — a kingdom of which she is the magnificent sovereign and where she abandons herself to imaginary lovers. Two central and recurring figures of this fantasy world are Halil and Aziz, two Arab twins, the little Hannah’s playmates during the British Mandate. She imagines them become terrorists, slipping into the darkness to rape her — something she awaits in a mixture of fear and desire. My Michael strongly reflects the psychological malaise created by a situation of occupation, even though the political aspects of the question are not clearly evoked.
The Seventies
The Yom Kippur War (October 1973) brings, in the nineteen-seventies, a return to more realistic Arab characters while they yet remain bearers of a symbolic dimension. The figure of the Arab protagonist becomes more complex and more varied than in the past. It acquires a psychological dimension, an individuality, a name, and above all is given a voice. These Arab protagonists of the 1980s move within a less oppressive universe where the mixing of populations, without being egalitarian for all that, allows individuals to meet one another.
“The Orchard,” by Binyamin Tammuz (1972), departs from the guiding line evoked above. The characters of this short story, mythic in foundation, illustrate to the extreme the relation of identity and otherness that characterizes the relational structure of the Jew and the Arab in Hebrew literature. The biblical myth of the two “enemy brothers” is embodied by two half-brothers, Ovadiah and Daniel, who represent Arab identity for the first and Jewish identity for the second. Ovadiah’s origins — the son of a Muslim servant and of a Russian Jewish father of good family — are akin to those of Ishmael. And when his father marries a Jewish woman of his own rank and a son, Daniel, is born, Ovadiah, twenty years old, flees to Israel and gets himself hired under the name Abdallah by the Jewish owner of the orchard, Mehmet Effendi. The two brothers are reunited; Daniel becomes the master while Abdallah (and the narrator) continue to tend the orchard. A third character intervenes to seal a tripartite relationship: Luna, Mehmet Effendi’s adopted daughter. Luna’s origins remain very obscure. This immaterial being — without history, without age (she keeps the same appearance all her life), without speech (she is mute), halfway between Eve and Lilith — symbolizes the possession of the land. The marriage of Daniel and Luna does not put an end to the intimate relations that the latter maintained with Ovadiah before her brother’s arrival. So that when a son is born, the father’s identity is uncertain, and the only denominator concerning him is “Luna’s son.” The relation to the land constitutes the principal quest of this story’s protagonists, and the possession of the land passes through the possession of the woman, Luna. The narrator’s character is likewise inscribed within this relational construction. The destruction of his orchard having ruined all hope of possession, he contents himself with another’s land, of which he is only the keeper. The integration of the Oedipal myth into the theme of the story of the two enemy brothers helps reinforce the allegorical and timeless character of the short story. “Luna’s son” kills the potential father, Ovadiah, and secures posterity at the very moment when the legitimate father, Daniel, deprived of his double, can no longer approach his wife. The destruction of the orchard, as the fulfillment of the protagonist’s desire, marks the end of a utopia. As in “Facing the Forests,” the protagonist seems to cast doubt on the existence of any domain that would be founded upon destruction.
A.B. Yehoshua’s The Lover (1977) unfolds mainly in Haifa. The narrator’s voice is distributed among the novel’s six protagonists, each chapter representing the point of view of one of the characters. The Israeli family is represented here by a decent garage owner, his wife, a high-school teacher, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, a schoolgirl. The husband brings into the household the man who will become his wife’s lover, a young expatriate Israeli returned to collect the inheritance of his grandmother, who is slow to die. When the Yom Kippur War breaks out in 1973, this man deserts and disappears. The garage owner will put all his energy into finding the lost lover. He spends his nights at it in the company of the young Arab, Naïm, a worker in his garage. A mutual attraction draws Naïm and Dafny, the owner’s daughter, together. In the end, the wife’s lover is found in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the daughter’s young lover, Naïm, is brought back by the adolescent’s father to his village in Galilee. Naïm presents all the contradictory aspects of his condition. His brother turns out to be a member of a Palestinian terrorist organization, while he himself is deeply attached to his Jewish employer and to Hebrew culture. He speaks perfect Hebrew and quotes Bialik, the national poet, in the original.
Unlike Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, Sami Michael, who published Refuge in 1977, had always lived in an Arab or Arab-Jewish milieu. Born in Baghdad in 1926, he became a member of the Communist Party in Haifa. Refuge, whose plot unfolds chiefly in Haifa within a communist milieu, begins on the day before the outbreak of the 1973 war. Murdoch, an Oriental Jew who suffered in Iraq on account of his communist opinions, asks Shula, his wife, to invite the Arab poet Fat’hi and the mixed couple — Fouad, an Israeli Arab, and his Jewish wife Shoshana — to dinner on the day of Yom Kippur. Fat’hi, for his part, goes to Jenin to the home of a PLO-sympathizing couple who are sheltering a wounded Arab. In these scenes and dialogues the reader learns a great deal about the relations between the Arabs of Israel (those who remained after 1948) and the Palestinian Arabs of the territories occupied in 1967, as well as about the complex relations between Arabs and Israeli Jews. Refuge breaks entirely with the treatment of the Israeli-Arab theme. The Arab is no longer a poor, nearly mute fellah (as in S. Yizhar), or the cause of the Jewish nightmare (as in Amos Oz), or an immature being (as in A.B. Yehoshua). Here the Arab intellectuals, caught in a tragic impasse, are presented as complete individuals expressing a diversity of wishes, the right to deliberate freely upon their accomplishments and even to decide on their way of acting. At the center of the novel stand an Arab and a Jewish woman on an equal footing. The character of Fat’hi is perhaps the first Arab character in Hebrew literature to merit the qualifier of “round character[^5].”
The Eighties
The individualization of the Arab character begun in the seventies intensifies. On the thematic plane, the problem of Israel’s occupation of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza begins to emerge in literature with David Grossman’s first novel, The Smile of the Lamb[^6]. On the narrative plane, the speech that the Arab protagonists shared with their Jewish counterparts in a polyphonic narration is taken over entirely by an Arab narrator in Yoram Kaniuk’s Confessions of a Good Arab and Shimon Ballas’s The Locked Room.
Like The Lover, David Grossman’s The Smile of the Lamb denounces a stereotyped vision that would consist in continuing to ignore individuals. The novel brings together Jews and Arabs in the West Bank occupied by Israel. Hilmi, an old Arab — solitary, whimsical, and of boundless imagination — lives withdrawn in a cave above the Arab village of Andal. He feeds on stories, half-real, half-fictive, and on the soil of which he puts a spoonful into his soup each morning, saying: “When I have finished eating all my soil, I shall be able to die in peace.”[^7] Uri, the Israeli Jew to whom the title “The Smile of the Lamb” refers, does not understand the meaning of the occupation. “We are an enlightened and moral people, full of ideals,” he says, not without irony, “so I don’t understand what has been happening here for five years[^8].” David Grossman’s fiction plunges into a reality cruder than that of his predecessors. The situation is certainly different between Naïm, the Israeli Arab of The Lover, and Hilmi, the Palestinian of the territories occupied by Israel. That is why The Smile of the Lamb is, in all its developments, of an extreme pessimism. “The smile of the lamb” becomes “the smile of the wolf,” and the two annihilated protagonists give way to the unshakeable military machine.
Yoram Kaniuk (born 1930) attests to an identification with his character by signing the book Confessions of a Good Arab with a pseudonym, Yossef Sheharah, which is none other than the Arab name of the novel’s protagonist — a protagonist who defines himself from the outset as a piece of testimony. The character-narrator, a writer by profession, has exiled himself, more or less voluntarily, to Paris, where he writes his memoirs. The whole construction of Yossef’s character is placed under the sign of duality. Born of a Jewish mother, Hanna, and an Arab father, Azuri, he is the product of two opposed and openly antagonistic histories. His desperate efforts to construct an identity and to be accepted without reservation either as an Israeli Jew or as a militant Palestinian Arab serve only to annihilate all hope of unity. The impossibility of being together in a harmonious relationship, like the impossibility of not being together, is illustrated by the Yossef-Dina relationship — a passionate relationship that constantly oscillates between estrangement and rapprochement. The character of the Arab in this novel runs up against a failure of definition beyond the failure of integration. The extremely pessimistic conclusion suggests that the Arab who has become “the Jew of the Jews[^9]” has no place in the land of his fathers, whatever the choices he might make.
Anton Shammas, the most talented of the Hebrew authors of Arab origin, is a Christian born in 1950 in the village of Fassuta in Galilee. The novel Arabesques, published in 1986, follows two guiding threads. One retraces the history of a Christian Arab family in the village of Fassuta in Galilee. The other bears on the relation between the narrator and his double, at once friend and enemy. The narrator is a writer who writes about another writer, an Israeli Jew, Yehoshua Bar-On, himself in the process of writing a novel whose protagonist is an Arab. Once again the Arab of Israel is defined and defines himself in relation to the Jew. On the narrative plane, the construction of the Arab character within the fiction falls to the Jewish narrator. The historical and familial portion of the narrative is akin to the Oriental tale, with a teeming abundance of stories that intertwine, separate, and find one another again in a continuous breath.
The Intifada Period
From an ideological standpoint, the Palestinian uprising of the Intifada, or Revolt of the Stones (1987), very appreciably modified the image of the Palestinian, both among the Arabs and among the Israeli Jews. The feeling of inferiority and apparent resignation among the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip gave way to a pride on their part and to an admiration on the part of their brothers in Israel. Among Israeli Jewish intellectuals too, the Palestinian revolt opened the way to a dialogue. The Palestinians became partners, individuals with whom it is possible to discuss, to negotiate, to wage war, but also to envisage peace.
Letters of Sun, Letters of Moon, by Itamar Levy (1991), a true “novel of the Intifada,” is the fruit of an innovative approach. The character of the Jew is exclusively confined to the role of the soldier. His sporadic appearances serve only to illustrate the oppressed position of the Arab characters, while his menacing implantation leaves little free space. The chronicle of a village unfolds over several generations, starting from the narrator’s familial microcosm and branching out toward the various histories of the villagers. The novel is thus organized in the order of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, which punctuate each chapter and which the narrator, a devout Muslim, tries to learn and to identify in the sacred texts. His unshakeable faith in the omnipotence of the Scriptures confers upon them the virtue of answering all things. The novel’s lexical field lies in the domain of war and occupation: curfew, soldiers, enemy, camp. The permanent curfew puts all of life in a state of siege. A state of living death sets in.
In conclusion to this survey, we shall cite two authors: an Arab, Sayed Kashua, and a Jew, Benny Barbash.
Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in a village of Galilee that became Israeli in 1948. An Arab and an Israeli citizen, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently lives in the United States. His first novel, Dancing Arabs, published in 2003, was followed in 2006 by Let It Be Morning, then in 2010 by Second Person Singular. These narratives give a voice to the Israeli Arabs ignored by all, both inside and out. In Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua delivers an unsparing vision of Arab society, shut up in its traditions, today outdated and obsolete. Nor does he spare Israeli society, which would tend all too readily to regard the Arabs through the lens of the terrorist threat. In Second Person Singular, Sayed Kashua plays on the register of the double: the Arab and the Jew, two seemingly antinomic words, while he himself is constantly torn between his loyalty to the State of Israel and his fidelity to the Palestinian people — all of it handled through a corrosive humor, between cutting irony and self-mockery.
Less well known in France than Amos Oz, Benny Barbash is also one of the founders of the “Peace Now” movement. Little Big Bang, a novel both funny and caustic, lies midway between the short story and the political fable. Or how a family man who starts a diet is to become the stumbling block of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Take, then, the father of Assaf — the narrator, barely thirteen — who, finding himself too fat, sets about testing every possible diet until the most famous of dieticians advises him… the olive-based diet. Nine days after nearly choking on a pit, an olive tree, minuscule, is discovered growing in his ear. After many attempts at treatment, the father goes into the Palestinian territories to consult a cultivator who advises him nothing less than to learn to live with this “stubborn tree” and to get to know it. He will have no choice in any case, since the olive tree ends up taking root. A profound analysis of contemporary Israeli society, Little Big Bang is also a fantastic family fresco, unveiling the still-raw tensions and pains that haunt this post-Shoah generation, torn between past and present.
On the diachronic plane, the evolution of the Arab character as the representative of a national identity and of a fleshed-out, complex universe took flight in the 1980s. The Palestinian uprising, or First Intifada, modified the image of the Arab from 1987 onward, and the expression of this formation translated, in literature, into a reversal of perspective. The focalization centered on “the other side” opens up another dimension of the Arab character. It is no longer a matter of illustrating, or even justifying, the import of an ideological message, but of describing, as broadly as possible, the universe of the parties concerned — and perhaps even of the party forgotten in recent years. For in the most recent works, the emergence of an Arab character situated within the complete frame of his environment occurs at the expense of the Jewish character. Here again the two parties are drawn inseparably into a reversal of perspective.
Bibliography
Barbash Benny, Little Big Bang, Paris, Zulma, 2011 (translation: Dominique Rotermund). Brenner Yossef Hayim, Deuil et échec, Tel Aviv, Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uhad – Dvir, 1960. Grossman David, Le sourire de l’agneau, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995 (trans.: Gisèle Sapiro). Kaniuk Yoram (Sherarah Yossef), Confessions d’un bon Arabe, Paris, Stock, 1994 (translation from the English: Pierre Wauters). Kashua Sayed, Les Arabes dansent aussi, Paris, l’Olivier, (2002) 2015 (translation: Katherine Werschowski) Et il y eut un matin, Paris, L’Olivier, 2006 (trans.: Sylvie Cohen and Edna Degon). Deuxième personne, Paris, L’Olivier, 2012 (translation: Jean-Luc Allouche). Levy Itamar, Lettres de soleil, lettres de lune, Arles, Actes Sud, 1997 (translation: Laurent Schuman). Oz Amos, “Nomades et vipère,” in Les Terres du chacal, Paris, Stock, 1967 (translation: Jacques Pinto). Mon Michaël, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1967 (translation: Rina Viers). Saquer-Sabin Françoise, Le personnage de l’Arabe palestinien dans la littérature hébraïque au XXe siècle, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2002. Shammas Anton, Arabesques, Arles, Actes Sud, 1988 (trans.: Guy Seniak). Smilanski Moshé, Les Enfants du désert, Tel Aviv, Dvir, 1961. Tammuz Binyamin, “Un concours de natation,” in Anthologie de la prose israélienne, Paris, Albin-Michel, 1980. “Le verger,” Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 1996 (trans.: Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech). Yehoshua A.B., “Face aux forêts,” in Trois jours et un enfant, Paris, Denoël, 1974 (translation: Claire Malroux). L’amant, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1979 (translation: Jacques Pinto). Yizhar Smilanski, “Le prisonnier,” in Anthologie de nouvelles israéliennes contemporaines, Paris, Gallimard, 1998 (translation: Laurent Schuman). “Hirbet Hiz’ah,” in Convoi de minuit, Arles, Actes Sud, 2000 (translation: Laurent Schuman)
NOTES: [^1]: The adjective “Palestinian,” which designates the inhabitants of Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel, must not be understood in the political sense it acquired with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Cairo in January 1964. It is from 1967 onward that the acceptation of the term “Palestinian” as the assertion of an Arab nationalism takes on its full scope. [^2]: Smilanski Moshé, Bney “arav” / Les Enfants du désert, Tel-Aviv, Dvir, 1961 [^3]: S. Yizhar, “The Prisoner,” p. 112. [^4]: Tammuz Binyamin, “A Swimming Race,” p. 49. [^5]: Cf. the distinction drawn in 1926 by the English novelist and critic E.M. Forster between “round and flat characters.” The “round” character presents a total and complex universe within whose volume a stratified history develops, with often contradictory aspects. The flat character can be schematized as a surface bounded by a single line, which does not necessarily prevent it from playing a decisive role. [^6]: GROSSMAN David, Le sourire de l’agneau, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995 (trans.: Gisèle Sapiro). [^7]: Ibid. p. 68. [^8]: Ibid. p. 252. [^9]: KANIUK Yoram, Confessions d’un bon Arabe, p. 24.