Introduction to In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the limits of Separatist Imagination. (original) (raw)
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The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, 2019
In this essay, Ella Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethno-nationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both “the Arab” and “the Jew.” Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth-- one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab), Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of “the Orient,” and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split? Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization, and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethno-nationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial “translation” of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. “On Orientalist Genealogies” traces such representational ruptures back to the 19th century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as “the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew.” To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam, and the un/veiled female had long been projected onto Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region, but with the emergence of imperial “minorities” discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy-- as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting “L’Exécution de la Juive.” Rather than a document of Muslim anti-Semitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a “split-within-the split,” highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within “the Orient.” Yet, the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.
＂Are You an Arab or a Jew？＂ （Sami Shalom Chetrit） the Jewish-Arabic Position in Hebrew Literature
2015
This article focuses on the return to Arab culture in contemporary Mizrachi literature. The paternalistic practices employed by the Ashkenazi authorities towards immigrants from Arab countries delegitimized the Arab culture and its language. This rejection by the hegemonic culture stemmed not only from a self-perception associating itself with the Western world, but also from the perception of Arabism as an enemy. Thus, although the hegemonic culture accepted Jews of Arab countries because of their Judaism, they were excluded due to their Arab roots. In contemporary Mizrachi literature, there is an increasing demand to reclaim and return Arab culture to the Israeli cultural arena, such as in the poetry of Sami Shalom Chetrit, Almog Behar, and Shira Ohayon. This movement towards the Arab sphere is conducted on several levels: A. as a counter-reaction to the oppression of all things Mizrachi; B. activities to present a more complete cultural gamut; C. a political call for reconciliation.
2010
THE STATUS OF THE ARAB in Hebrew fiction is an interesting test case for a cultural and cognitive maturation process. To be explored here is the extent to which Hebrew literature recognizes the Arab's independence and otherness: to what extent does it allow him to have a separate identity, which is not subservient to the Zionist one and to its accepted scheme of values? I shall examine the ability of Hebrew literature to produce a heterogeneous scheme of values and to live in a self-conscious world, which not only acknowledges the existence of the Arab as an independent entity, but also searches for a language that would represent him.
The Literary Representation of the Jew in Postmodern Arabic Fiction (by Saddik M. Gohar)
For decades, the historical and political ramifications of the Palestinian / Israeli dispute not only created hostility between the Arabs and the Jews but also undermined the possibility of initiating a mutual dialogue between the two peoples. This paper aims to re-historicize the literary representation of the Jew in postmodern Arabic / Palestinian fiction dealing with the Palestinian question to illuminate controversial issues integral to both sides of the conflict. The paper argues that Palestinian authors particularly the great Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, provided counter-narratives deploying positive Jewish images in his literary works -in the post 1948 era-challenging orthodox and conservative Arabic discourse paving the way for a new era of sympathetic Jewish literary images in Arabic literature. In Returning to Haifa: Palestine's Children, the writer not only incorporates Palestinian suffering and displacementas in traditional Arabic literature -but also engages the Jewish history of diaspora and genocide. In other words, Kanafani in Returning to Haifa: Palestine's Children attempts to underline human issues of common interest for the two partners in the conflict foreshadowing the political agenda of his literary works.
Breaking the Silence Good evening everyone! Masa' el-kher! Ismi Ella, bas ismi el-asli Habiba. [My name is Ella but my original name is Habiba]. Hiyya Mira, bas isma el-asli Rima. [Her name is Mira, but her original name is Rima.] Wa-hiyya Tikva, bas isma el-asli Amal. [She is Tikva, but her original name is Amal]. For those in the audience who do not speak Arabic, I began by introducing our names, followed by our original Arabic names of Habiba, Rima, and Amal. Our Hebrew names were registered on our identity cards by our parents. They did not register our Arabic names. In my case, I was named Habiba after my mother's grandmother, yet my mother did not put down this name on my identity card. After her bitter experience in Israel because of her Arab name Aziza-she knew that in a society where our names were associated with "the Arab enemy," anything related to the Middle East was considered a lifelong stigma. In a society where an Arab name triggered shame and failure, it was preferable to give a sabra-sounding Hebrew name. Thus, our identity crisis as Mizrahi women begins already with our very names. The core of the problem has to do with a country that sees itself as Western while denying its location in the Middle East, one with a majority population-Mizrahim and Palestinians-originating from the region. Although the matter of naming is only one small component of our oppression, it carries symbolic importance. Having been "stamped" with our sabra Hebrew names, we learned that it was illegitimate for us to maintain our culture, that we must erase our Middle Eastern identity in order to give birth to a sabra, i.e. Ashkenazi-Israeli identity. In fact, our mothers, whose names were changed by immigration clerks without so much as a second thought, An opening speech delivered at the plenary session of the th Annual Women's Conference, Givat Haviva, Israel, June-, (alongside speeches by Mira Eliezer and Tikva Levi-all under the same rubric: "Breaking the Silence: My Oppression as a Mizrahi Woman"), sections of which were published in Hebrew, "Le-Hafer et ha-Shtikot," HILA News, Issue (July,). The English translation included here, slightly edited, is taken from the publication of the speech, "Breaking the Silence," in a Special Section, "Mizrahi Oppression and Struggle," in News from Within (Alternative Information Center), Vol. , no. , August .