LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

hannah amit-kochaviofficial Zionism saw Palestine as the once historical, now revived homeland ofthe Jewish people exclusively allocated by the biblical God to the sons ofAbraham’s younger son Isaac. This view completely excluded the Arabs, sons ofAbraham’s older son Ishmael, whose presence as natives of the land was eitherignored by the Jews, romantically idealised or described as an imminent physicaland psychological threat to them. Later separation between the two communitiesas the result of wars and the mass evacuation of most Palestinian Arabsfrom their homeland in 1948 turned the Arabs as a whole, for most Israelis, intoremote enemies. Numerous studies in such fields as history (Gorny 1985; Morris1991), sociology (Horrowitz and Lisak 1986), psychology (Lieblich 1982),history of literature (Shaqed 1977, 1983a, 1983b, 1988, 1993), art (Zalmonaand Manor-Friedman 1998), the theatre (Orian 1996) and cinema (Shohat 1991)amply support this sad picture.Arab nationalism, in turn, totally rejected the Jewish (later, Israeli) presenceas foreign and alien in the Middle East. Only in recent years, most notably sincethe Oslo Agreement in 1993, have both sides begun to realise that mutualrecognition and consequent peace making may contribute to the respectivewell-being and prosperity of both. This harsh political background raises anumber of grave questions – why, then, would Israeli Jewish culture consider thetranslation of Arabic literature, representing an enemy nation’s life andaspirations, at all, and how would it receive the translated works? Why shouldthat culture, dedicated to its own nation building and its own grave problems ofever-changing national identity, spend effort, time and money on recognising,perhaps promoting, the nationality of its gravest enemies through the translationof their literature?The answer to these questions is extremely complex and seemingly selfcontradictory.In fact, the very same political forces that have made translationsof Arabic literature into Hebrew scant and marginal (so far thirty-three novels,thirty-three plays and fifty-seven anthologies out of over seven thousand translatedtitles) have simultaneously worked in the opposite direction. It was thosefew institutions and individuals that thought that Israeli Jewish nationalismmust and can include the Arab presence to some extent that strove to translateArabic literature as a depiction of the unrecognised and unfamiliar neighbourand out of their ardent wish for peace and coexistence.Translations from Arabic into Hebrew were by and large not felt by therecipient Hebrew culture to fulfil a ‘real’ need, unlike texts from other modernliteratures such as those from Russian and American cultures that have served itas models for imitation (Even Zohar 1990). We may therefore say that Hebrewculture had to be lured into accepting translations from Arabic. This partiallyaccounts for the first preliminary norm of choosing Arabic texts of high literaryquality by writers occupying prestigious positions in the source literature.— 102 —www.taq.ir