The Idea of Israel Read Online Free PDF Page A

been building since the 1970s. The literary monthly Iton 77 began to publish such poems regularly in the 1980s, and even though one is free to doubt the broader impact of a journal read by a limited audience, the translations had the potential to disperse the one-dimensional and negative perception of ‘Arab culture’ and to some extent weaken the desire that Israel be a European cultural bastion. Unfortunately, the demise of the post-Zionist era killed these various possiblities at the budding stage.
    On the other hand, in the realm of literature, mainstream publishing houses showed a growing interest in translations of famous writers from the Arab world, especially Palestinian and Egyptian novelists. Palestinian stories that carried a political message were generally not bought or distributed widely. On the other hand, the Hebrew translation of a novel by the Palestinian Israeli novelist Emile Habibi that reconstructed the evil days of the military regime imposed on the Palestinians in Israel until 1966 introduced the Jewish public to a period and to crimes by the state of which they would otherwise have known nothing. His early works were translated by fairly esoteric publishing houses, but he later became a household name, included on the lists of leading publishers, and in 1992 he was awarded the Israel Prize.
    When mainstream interest in Habibi and in novelists throughout the Arab world petered out in the late 1990s, there was a noble but ultimately failed attempt to continue this important work. Usually the publishers that took on the task were one-man – or, in the case of the most prolific among them, Andalus, one-woman – enterprises. In the opening decade of the present century, Andalus specialised in translations from Arabic to Hebrew. The works were sensitively chosen by the owner, Yael Lerer, who was willing Israeli readers to a variety of Palestinian and Arab works, including works focused on how the West and Israel are perceived by the Arab world and the Palestinians. She thus enabled Israeli readers to become more deeply acquainted with the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (who had earlier been translated by a mainstream publishing house) and to be introduced to more avant-garde writers such as the Sudanese Tayeb Salih. One important landmark in this respect was the Hebrew translation of the epic Bab al-Shams by Elias Khoury, the powerful saga of the Nakba and its consequences.
    As for works originally written in Hebrew, so far only a handful have provided anything approaching a new view of Palestinian or Israeli society. Such writers were located on the margins and certainly were not part of the national canon. Shimon Ballas, for example, was quite well known in Iraq, where he had grown up as a communist, but was either neglected by mainstream critics in Israel or denigrated as having produced a primitive form of literature. Needless to say, publishing houses followed suit; Ballas’s works, which criticised Zionist or Western Orientalism as well as the willingness of Arabs in general to internalise Orientalism, were rejected as unprofitable or as having inadequate cultural value. In his book Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Fiction , published in the 1990s, Yerach Gover commented that Ballas, by presenting himself as an Arab Jew, offered a counter-narrative, a self-declared identity as an Arab Jew who was bound to be perceived by genuine or cynical upholders of Zionism in Israel as someone who betrayed his nation.
    Albert Swissa, who was born in Casablanca in the late 1950s, emigrated late to Israel – 1963. 6 His most famous novel, Bound ( Aqud in Hebrew), tells the story of the trials and tribulations of Ayush, a Moroccan boy in 1970s Israel. The tale, and the many articles Swissa wrote, presented a softer Arab Jewish counter-narrative, which is probably why he won a prestigious literary prize in 1991. But he never published another book and left off writing to manage a cafe in