Paratexts: Thresholds to Palestinian Identity (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Other Version of the Story: National Identity in the Modern Palestinian Novel
Athens Journal of Philology, 2016
This survey article explores the parameters of the Palestinian national identity as represented in the fictional world of a number of Palestinian narratives written in Arabic and other languages over the past hundred years. More specifically, the article traces the dramatic transition of identity formation from personal discomfiture with the breakdown of self-interested enterprises to mass awareness of the existential threat posed by the Zionist Movement Project 1 against the national aspiration of the Palestinian people in Palestine as their only homeland. The threat in question was the consequence of the militant immigrant Jewish settlers who infiltrated into Palestine in successive waves of European Jewish immigrants in the wake of Sykes-Picot Agreement 2 and Balfour Declaration. 3 Ever since the coming out of the first Arab Palestinian novel, al-Wareth, 4 the issue of identity has been steadily gaining a central place in the Palestinian narrative art, irrespective of the stance and angle of vision from which the story is told. As a form of art of fiction, the Palestinian novel says something about the loss or distortion of the Palestinian national identity through a deliberate, programmed erosion of individual and collective memories, including history and popular culture. This purposeful erosion has been consistently the target of the single-handed historical narrative provided by the official annals of Israel 5 as an immigrant settlers' colonial project replacing the state of Palestine on the world map. The Palestinian narratives under study bring out into the open the long-denied version of the truth by unfolding the hidden narrative account of the Palestinian national identity for the fullness of history.
2012
This article examines Palestinian identity transformation in Israel during the years between 1967 and 1987. Fifteen Palestinian novels and autobiographies were published in Israel during this period. My article will focus on a group of five from among them that I call counteraction novels. Counteraction novels show the failure of the Zionist modernist paradigm—according to which modernization and integration of Palestinians in Israel are complementary processes—by reflecting a Palestinian distinction between modernism and Zionism. On the one hand, the novels reflect that Palestinians in Israel are grappling with issues posed to them by modernization. On the other hand, counteraction novels present a uniform rejection of Zionism’s erasure and alienation of Palestinians in Israel. I also argue that counteraction novels do not portray a “positive” Palestinian identity; they do not voice what Palestinian identity is.
This Is Our Home: Everyday Resistance of the Palestinians in Israel 1948-66
2020
The aim of this chapter is to determine and examine what constituted everyday resistance for those Palestinians who lived in Israel,1 and who experienced life under Israeli military rule, from 1948 to 1966. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the outcome of the war changed the power relations between Israel and the Palestinians and had an immediate and direct impact on the Palestinian people: Palestinians refer to these events as "the year of the Al Nakba" or "the Catastrophe". The majority of Palestinians either were forced out of their homes or fled as a result of the war and became refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and neighbouring Arab countries (Pappé 2006, 86-123). Those who remained were reduced to a minority within their homeland, cut off from the rest of their fellow nationals. It is estimated that in 1948 between 80,000 and 160,000 Palestinians remained, representing somewhere in the region of 10 percent of the original population. As a result of Al Nakba, Palestinians faced the destruction of their political, economic, and social structures (Ghanem and Mustafa 2009, 107; Bauml 2007), and this defeated population is largely absent from the Israeli state's official history: Israel's founding myth has been that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land (Pappé 2014). Where the Palestinian citizens of Israel did appear in the history of Israel, they were cast in the passive role of victims, and, at the same time that they were being excluded from Israeli narratives, Palestinians in Israel were also being excluded from the history of the Palestinian national resistance movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (Darweish 2006; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2011). Scholarly research on the military period has inadvertently reinforced their erasure by focusing on Israeli mechanisms of control and oppression (Jiryis 1976; Zureik 1979; Lustick 1980; Cohen 2010; Sa'di 2014). After Al Nakba, Palestinian areas were divided into three main districts, each directly administered by a military governor. Harsh restrictions were imposed on the lives of the Arab minority, and these restrictions drew upon the Emergency Regulation Laws inherited from the British Mandate of 1945. Palestinians' movements were restricted, and so people required a permit from the military governor to leave their village, whether it was to work, cultivate their land, visit family, obtain medical treatment, study, or travel for any other purpose outside the village boundary (Lustick 1980; Bauml 2007; Sa'di 2014). This research thus presents a new perspective on the reality faced by Palestinians in Israel after 1948, one which emphasises the agency of this community and documents its history of survival and resistance. While their new reality was characterised by the asymmetry of power between Israel and its Arab minority, and by marginalisation, they were able in their own way to resist the structural imbalance imposed on them. To maintain the fragmentation of and control over the Palestinian minority, the Israeli state reinforced the Palestinians' economic dependence on the Jewish sector. The majority of Arab land was confiscated, water sources were controlled, and Palestinians were excluded from economic development plans. Having been detached from their land, they were positioned as an unskilled labour force for the Israeli economy. Arab villages became the source of cheap labour and served as dormitories for Arab workers (Kretzmer 1990; Khalidi 1988). Meanwhile, the family, which was the primary social economic unit of Palestinian society, was deeply shattered and became vulnerable. Mari (1978, 18) depicts Palestinians in this situation as "emotionally wounded, socially rural, politically lost, economically poverty stricken and nationally hurt. They suddenly became a minority ruled by a powerful, sophisticated majority against whom they fought to retain their country and land". The heads of the extended families (mukhtar) became key contacts for people who wanted to obtain permits from
PALESTINIAN ARABS IN ISRAEL: A FIFTY YEAR JOURNEY
Indigenous Palestinians living in Israel form twenty percent of the Israeli population. Their ordeal under the Israeli occupation is usually overlooked when considering the global Palestinian problem. They have lived under Israeli martial law until 1966, have been treated as second class citizens and suffered continuous humiliation and discrimination by governments in Israel. The recent developments in the Middle East politics have made them rethink their relation with the state. In this paper I trace back the various stages the Palestinians passed through and the recent shift in their strategies towards the state.
Palestine As Exile: Notes on the Dialectic of Sameness and Difference
2003
The paper aims to trace the evolvement of the Israeli citizenship, and the civic discourse, by focusing on the relation of the Jewish state with its Palestinian citizen. As such it reads this development by focusing on the dynamics of the rhetoric of sameness and difference, citizenship and identity, the individual and the collective, the past and the future, the particular and the universal. Read in this way it could viewed as an exercise in exploring the limits of the liberal rights discourse in general. The point of departure of the paper is the Zionist concept of the "negation of exile" as a constitutive element in Jewish national identity and the impact of this concept on the formation of the concept of Israeli citizenship. The paper claims that due to several factors, the concept of the "negation of exile" among them, the Israeli citizenship was born crippled and deformed, and within the early years after the establishment of the state, the concept of Israeli citizenship was rather almost meaningless. The paper moves to trace some major political and economical transformations within the Israeli society between the late 1960's and the 1980's. These transformations lead at the same time to two different kinds of discourses: One was the emergence of civic discourse and civil rights and a gradual separation of civil society from the state, the other was the development of religious national discourse. While these discourses has been always part of the debates within Zionism, this time the debate is located within the Israeli state itself and as such bringing the tensions together within a unity. The paper will rather focus on the civic discourse and will try to extrapolate the categories and the concepts that lie in the basis of this discourse, and try to find out their potential effect on the Palestinian citizens of Israel. To do that the paper will draw the attention to some of the particularities of the status of the Palestinians in Israel, and how do these fit within the emerging model of citizenship that was in the process of evolvement during the 1990's. The question will be how can the Palestinians in Israel locate themselves within such discourse and whether such a discourse can "capture" their historical case.
Liron Mor’s review in Journal of Palestine Studies
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023
What is Palestinian literature? And how does one define “Palestinian,” exactly? These are the fundamental questions that implicitly guide two new and exciting studies on Palestinian literature—Manar H. Makhoul’s Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948-2010 and Maurice Ebileeni’s Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World. Both authors intentionally seek out an internal prism on Palestinian literature and identity, while also aiming to express local particularities overlooked by previous scholarship. They thus join current efforts in Palestine studies to recenter Palestinian cultures and his- tories instead of exploring them only in relation to Zionism.
Forced Departures and Fragmented Realities in Palestinian Memoirs
2017
The Arabic word nakba means “catastrophe”. The Palestinians use this word to refer to the events that took place in Palestine before, during and after 1948. These events terminated both in the establishment of the state of Israel and the loss of Palestine. In the decades after 1948, the narratives of identity, exile and dispossession become the self-representation of survival. Palestinian memoir-writing, an amalgam of the personal and the political, well represents the ideas of self-representation, exile, displacement and collective memory which I seek to explore in a contemporary Palestinian memoir: Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002). This paper attempts to argue through a study of the memoir that there exists a shared national identity and collective memory within Palestine since al-nakba. The project includes the study of the history of Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the significance of the genre of the memoir. Although a memoir is by definition a per...
The Israeli Palestinians: An Arab Minority in the Jewish State (Book Review)
2005
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