Liron Mor’s review in Journal of Palestine Studies

Journal of Palestine Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpal20 Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World; Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948-2010 Maurice Ebileeni. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2022. 240 pages. $75.00 hardcover, $29.95 paper, $29.95 e-book; Manar H. Makhoul. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 248 pages. $125.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper, $27.95 e-book. Liron Mor To cite this article: Liron Mor (2023): Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World; Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948-2010, Journal of Palestine Studies, DOI: 10.1080/0377919X.2022.2156759 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2156759 Published online: 02 Mar 2023. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpal20 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES RECENT BOOKS Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World, Maurice Ebileeni. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2022. 240 pages. $75.00 hardcover, $29.95 paper, $29.95 e-book. Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948-2010, Manar H. Makhoul. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 248 pages. $125.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper, $27.95 e-book. Reviewed by Liron Mor 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 histories instead of exploring them only in relation to Zionism. To seek answers to these monumental questions, Makhoul and Ebileeni largely turn to different archives. Makhoul focuses on literature by Palestinian citizens in Israel (his preferred term, with the usual caveats), clustering them into subgroups according to historical stages and thematic concerns. While Ebileeni considers Palestinian literature as world literature, exploring literary works written in languages other than Arabic, both “inside” and “outside” Palestine. Their projects thus trek in opposite directions—inward, toward greater localization, and outward, toward a globalized view. The authors also approach their archives in nearly diametrically opposed manners—Makhoul makes an expansive use of his archive, systematizing findings based on seventy-five Palestinian novels published in Israel between 1948 and 2010, while Ebileeni zeros in on a set of useful case studies through which he exposes transnational intertextual connections. Methodologically, while Makhoul’s monograph is a work of intellectual history that incorporates sociological insights, Ebileeni’s fits squarely within literary studies employing close readings and utilizing concepts from postcolonial studies and literary theory (such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of minor literature and its reworking by David Lloyd and Chana Kronfeld). © 2023 Institute for Palestine Studies 2 RECENT BOOKS These different methodological orientations might be explained, in part, by the two authors’ distinct disciplinary formations. Makhoul, a lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University, received his PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Cambridge and his master’s degree in contemporary Middle Eastern studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His approach, shaped by interdisciplinary area studies programs, considers literature through both a historical and sociological lens. Ebileeni, a senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa, holds a PhD in English literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This training is reflected in Ebileeni’s previous monograph, Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense (New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), while his second book project positions him as a literary scholar working in the broader fields of comparative literature and world literature. Indeed, Ebileeni’s Being There, Being Here is an ambitious attempt to redefine Palestinian literature on a global scale by pushing beyond a narrow national framework. Given the Zionist displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and in the years leading up to it, and following over seven decades of diasporic existence, contemporary Palestinian writing is produced in different languages and in various geographic locales. Recognizing that Palestinian literature far exceeds the Arabic cultural context, Ebileeni seeks to formulate a polylingual framework for considering this multifaceted literature. When literary works are no longer defined as Palestinian based on their language or place of origin, nor based on national themes or the author’s identity, what might be the criteria for including them in the same (deterritorialized) canon? The author offers an innovative answer: these works are tied together by nothing other than their diverse expressions of the ongoing Palestinian displacement and its cultural implications. Displacement is thus posited as the cause not only of the fragmentation and heterogeneity of Palestinian literary contexts, both “inside” and “outside” Palestine, but also of the common threads that run through them. The book puts the various manifestations and developments of these threads in conversation with one another, thus exploring different displacement narratives and challenging the notion of a singular Palestinian identity. Examining Palestinian literary works in English, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, and Spanish, this study is comparative through and through. Indeed, the sheer number of linguistic settings explored is remarkable. Ebileeni articulates his polylingual analytical framework and asserts the bilateral relationship between the local and transnational axes of Palestinian literature in the first chapter, which also serves as a broad theoretical backdrop for his arguments. The author claims that similar experiences of displacement, together with capitalist globalization processes and the intensification of worldwide networks, produce an intertextuality that crosses linguistic and geographic borders. At the same time, he also showcases the cultural heterogeneity between Palestinian literary works written in Hebrew and Danish by Anton Shammas, Sayed Kashua, Yahya Hassan, Ahmad Mahmoud, and Abdel Aziz Mahmoud. The second chapter, by contrast, focuses exclusively on Anglophone novels—a rapidly growing branch of Palestinian literature—to study the cross-generational implications of Palestinian displacement in the United States. In analyzing two novels by Susan Abulhawa and Susan Muaddi Darraj, Ebileeni explores the different ways in which American Palestinians envision their diasporic futures. He also stresses the Orientalist legacy with which this branch contends—that is, the imperial legacy of the English language, which shaped not only the contemporary perception of Arabs and Muslims in the US but also Zionism itself. Along the way, the author makes an important observation on the academic misconception of the contemporary Anglophone reader: while scholars often perceive this reader as unitary—hegemonic, elitist, white—Ebileeni insists that readership today is much more diverse. JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES 3 Each of the following three chapters zeros in on a particular trope that cuts across Palestinian literary production in different locales—passing (chapter 3), the sexualization of the female body (chapter 4), and return (chapter 5). Because the trope of “passing as Jewish”—that is being fully adopted into a Jewish family and identity—is at once recurrent in Palestinian fiction and utterly exceptional in reality, I found chapter 3 particularly intriguing. Through Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (English, 2010) and Sayed Kashua’s Guf sheni yaḥid (Second Person Singular, Hebrew, 2010)—and with the requisite references to Ghassan Kanafani’s ʿAʾid ila Hayfa (Returning to Haifa, Arabic, 1969)—Ebileeni reveals how historic displacement refracts authors’ perceptions of self and other, the adversarial yet interrelated existence of the two, and the limits and anxieties of national identification. But why and how did such an implausible scenario become an expedient trope for three differently positioned Palestinian authors? The chapter’s focus on the weighty roles these narratives accord to Palestinian and (Ashkenazi) Jewish mothers initiates a possible answer to this question. Ebileeni also explores Palestinian women’s confrontation with the seemingly mutually exclusive challenges of national liberation and gender equality. Chapter 4 investigates the sexualization of the female body in Randa Jarrar’s novel A Map of Home (US, 2008) and in Maysaloun Hamoud’s film Bar bahar (In Between, Israel, 2017) to show how both “challenge the masculine tone of the national script,” which “continues to express a state of constant urgency, prioritizing the call for national liberation at the expense of marginalizing other discourses of liberation, such as specific feminist discourses” (114, 105). The author concludes that in unsettling conventional gender roles, Jarrar and Hamoud also avoid the trap of Western stereotypes of Arab conservativism and the oppressed Muslim woman. Lastly, after examining the history of the concept of return, so key to the Palestinian context, chapter 5 surveys homecoming narratives by Palestinian writers from Western countries (Fawaz Turki, Mourid Barghouti, and Lina Meruane), who visited Palestine in the lead up to, or right after, the second intifada. Such texts and their “poetics of return” reveal the discrepancy between diaspora Palestinians’ ideological commitment to return and their experiences upon its realization in individual pilgrimages during which they find the concrete Palestine no longer capable of cathecting their distinct exilic identities. The book thus concludes that “rather than document the ontological existence of a single Palestine, we should acknowledge the emergence of several epistemic Palestines” (172), an insight that underlies its admirable drive to diversify and globalize. In this context, however, the author’s reluctance to engage with debates in and about world literature is surprising, since recent rearticulations of world literature as a mode of comparison focused on south-south relations and on transnational migratory movements— which thus decenters canons and hegemons—could have truly benefitted this project. No less ambitious is Makhoul’s Palestinian Citizens in Israel, as its definitional title suggests. By exploring a vast number of novels written by Palestinians “of the inside,” the author traces the historical transformations of Palestinian identity and national discourse in Israel between 1948 and 2010. This intellectual history project approaches literature as a sociohistorical document, employing discourse analysis to extract important insights about Palestinian society and politics from literary texts. What is urgently needed for articulating Palestinian identity in Israel, Makhoul claims, is an internal Palestinian perspective. He explains that previous sociological scholarship has considered ‘48 Palestinians solely through an external lens, because its frameworks—be they modernization theory, settler colonialism, or minority-majority relations—centered Israel and its actions. Since Palestinian novels are written by Palestinians and focus more on historical changes within Palestinian society, literature seems to offer a particularly apt archive. Makhoul demonstrates, however, that existing studies of Palestinian literature are also limited, since 4 RECENT BOOKS they attempt to encompass Palestinian literature in its entirety, thus failing to account for local variation, or restrict their investigation to its aesthetic qualities, thus neglecting expressions of Palestinian identity and nationalism. To push beyond these various limitations, Makhoul’s study foregrounds an internal perspective by relying on literature and zeros in on the history of Palestinian identity within a circumscribed geography—that of 1948-borders Israel. The book is divided into three long chapters that correspond to the three key periods the author identifies in the history of ‘48 Palestinians—modernization (1948-1967), postmodernization (1967-1987), and alienation and collectivization (1987-2010). Novels in each of these periods are subdivided into historical stages or thematic clusters. While his research draws on a much larger corpus, Makhoul usually limits his discussion to two or three examples for each subgroup of novels to demonstrate its unique historical characteristics. The period of modernization, presented in chapter 1, roughly aligns with the years of the Israeli military rule (1948-1967). In the first stage of this period, as Palestinians began to adapt to life under Israeli control, novels expressed the explicitly national Palestinian discourse that preceded 1948. They also recorded life under military rule and the recent events of the Nakba. Demonstrating these literary tendencies in two novels by Tawfiq Mu‘ammar, Makhoul further points out the cautious style such novels use to respond to Israeli colonization and the anti-discrimination discourse they utilize, betraying implicit integrationist hopes. In the second stage, novelists began to openly valorize modernization, associated with integration and coexistence in Israel. Analyzing two such modernization novels, by Atallah Mansour and Mahmud Kana‘na, the author shows how they set aside the idea of a national state and downplay Zionist violence and exclusion to advance modernization. The third stage is critical of the second, acknowledging that, for Palestinians, modernization often spells the loss of national identity. Makhoul explores this reassessment of modernization and of its threats of erasure in a different novel by Mansour, which rejects, in Hebrew, the coexistence paradigm. Throughout this chapter, Makhoul seems to accept the definition of modernization put forward by Israeli modernization theory, according to which Palestinians are lagging behind on the civilizational axis and should be modernized through integration. His criticism of this framework, when it does arise, follows the lead of Israeli sociological scholarship or the Palestinian literary texts themselves. At no point, however, does Makhoul pause to interrogate this category and its coloniality, readily accepting moreover the periodization it suggests—a periodization that splices Palestinian time along the break lines drawn by Zionist colonization. Postmodernization, explored in chapter 2, characterizes the period between the 1967 war and the first intifada (1987). During this time, “counteraction novels” (69) registered the effects of modernization on Palestinian society by contrasting “before” and “after” pictures of Palestinian lives. Reading novels by Kamal Salama and Abd al-Rahman Hijazi, Makhoul demonstrates how, while some novels laud modernization, others criticize it for precipitating processes of social disintegration. Though their stances on modernization varies, these novelists’ responses to Zionist cultural erasure is uniform. They criticize Israel through “counter-erasure” (92)—purging plots of Israeli subjects and of Hebrew toponyms. By contrast, other novels in this period were “re-enchantment novels” (97), forsaking realist narration in favor of fragmented plots and fantastical elements. Exploring novels by Salim Khuri, Emile Habiby, and Samih al-Qasim, Makhoul argues that their postmodern style—a response to modernizing disenchantment and rationalization—is best suited for conveying the contradictory identities of Palestinians in Israel and the paradoxes of Zionist modernization. These novels represent a historical transformation, as they are explicitly, even if passively, political: they indict Israel for missing the opportunity for coexistence and undertake the work of “un-erasure” through documentation and commemoration (120). These two aspects of re-enchantment novels—their JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES 5 non-realistic postmodern style and their labor of historical recording—appear to be in tension with one another. It would have been interesting to see how the author might reconcile, or explore, this fruitful tension. A less clearly defined period, a time of greater alienation and increasing collectivization (1987-2010), is surveyed in chapter 3. During this time, according to Makhoul, ‘48 Palestinian writers reevaluated their political stance in light of their exclusion from both the conversations in Oslo and the solution they proposed—a Palestinian state, however limited, to exist alongside Israel. Some novels in this period, categorized as “nostalgic-folkloric novels” (141), function as “collective autobiographies” (144), recording accounts of the 1948 war while infusing them with thick, ethnographic descriptions of the social fabric, cultures, and habits of pre-1948 Palestine. Discussing novels by Hanna Ibrahim and Suhil Kiwan, Makhoul shows how they bring about a “folklorification of the Nakba” (146) and partake in reunifying the fragmented identities of Palestinians in Israel. “Intifada novels” (164) form a second group and are also characterized by collective, ethnographic, and folkloric narratives. However, while the first group of novels traverses time to link up with a Palestinian past, the second—exemplified by the novels of Muhammad Watad, Radi Shhada, and Jiryis Tannus—extends identity across space to connect with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Supporting the active resistance of Palestinians “outside” and calling for Palestinian unity across borders, these novels reflect a more radical shift in Palestinian discourse in Israel, from a struggle against “ethnic” discrimination to a commitment to national determination. If novels in these two groups confront their alienation by reaching out to other times or places, then in “novels of perplexity” (180), which constitute a third group, alienation is unresolved as plots remain trapped in the present Israeli reality. In analyzing perplexity novels by Riyad Baydas, Sayed Kashua, and Nabil Uda, Makhoul stresses their manifestation of a sense of double failure—the inability to either integrate or maintain a coherent identity. The throughlines extracted from the literature are skillfully supported by sociological and historical evidence. Indeed, Makhoul’s book is an incredible achievement. For this very reason, it is disappointing that women writers are conspicuously absent from its pages. The author explains this absence as stemming partly from his focus on the genre of the novel, claiming that female novelists constitute a minority. And yet, quite a few Palestinian women in Israel have written masterful novels (Makhoul himself names Fatma Dhyab, Asya Shibli, Raja Bakriyya, and Adania Shibli in his introduction); none, however, are discussed here. Both these studies are meticulous, timely, and innovative. I trust that these outstanding books will soon become vital resources for scholars and students alike. Some might be tempted to criticize Makhoul’s book for its “macro” analysis of Palestinian literature; certainly, cases exist that do not neatly conform to the author’s structural categories. Others might be tempted to criticize Ebileeni’s book for its “micro” analysis; the case studies explored sometimes appear too few to establish transnational arguments. I find, however, that both methodologies are necessary for Palestinian literary studies and that they are, in fact, complimentary. Indeed, thanks to their polar trajectories, Makhoul and Ebileeni’s books complement one another perfectly. Between them, they redraw the very coordinates of the field. Liron Mor is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Israel-Palestine (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2156759