LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

israeli jewish nation buildingfrom Arabic to an extent unequalled in reviews of translations from any otherlanguage, due to the special nature of the political background and Jewish-Arabcontacts elaborated earlier. Since the vast majority of the critics were keen ongetting to know Arabic literature and culture despite their professed ignoranceof it, and as most of the reviews were published by newspapers and magazinesthat favoured peace and mutual understanding, most of those reviews thatdemonstrated a political overtone were positive rather than negative withregard to the political aspects of the translated texts.Israeli Jewish critics often expressed extreme sensitivity to the depiction ofIsrael and Jews by Arabic literature, consequently exaggerating the importanceof that element in the works under discussion. This was equally true of thenegative depiction of Israeli and Jewish figures (like the unfavourable descriptionof a fat Jewish woman in the novel I will Live by the Lebanese writer LaylahBa’albaki where that character is only mentioned in passing) and of its positiveopposite. The most prominent positive example is the expression of a favourableview of Israelis in Palestinian writer Sahar Khaleefah’s novel The Sunflower.This happens on two different occasions – first a Palestinian woman journalistexpresses her wish to meet and talk with Israeli Jewish intellectuals, then asuggestion of Arab-Jewish cooperation in publishing a journal is made at aJerusalem editorial board meeting in the same novel. What reviews of thatnovel completely ignored was its end, where Sa’adiyyah, a Palestinian woman ofNablus whose long dreamed of house was demolished by Israeli soldiers,encourages her young son to throw stones at them by way of protest.An even more obvious example of Israeli Jewish self-centredness is thereaction of Israeli critics to literary works that depict the plight and suffering ofthe Palestinians by assimilating and comparing it to the suffering of the Jews.Reactions to Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptimist in Hebrew and to its performance onthe stage by Muhammad Bakri are a case in point. Thus theatre critic HavahNovak wrote after watching the Hebrew version:Paradoxical as this may seem, both the play and its characters reminded me ofSholem Aleichem [Jewish writer]’s characters, those pessoptimists who accept theirfate with one eye crying and the other laughing, those who must survive anycatastrophe since a worse one may soon follow. It is precisely this parallelism thatmade watching this play an extremely heavy and ambivalent experience for me.After referring to the political dilemma of the double right of Palestinians andJews, she concluded by saying that ‘The last word will be said by history. Meanwhilewe’ll try to go on living with our conscience and truth as well as we can.Watching this play may prove helpful’ (Davar, 12 December 1986).Israeli paranoia vis-à-vis the Arabs (another typical Israeli emotional reaction)is openly reflected in a review by Shimon Zandbank, professor of comparativeliterature at the Hebrew University and acclaimed translator of the Hebrew— 107 —www.taq.ir