LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exilereligious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights andpolitical status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’4. After the failure of the Palestinian-Israeli summit at Camp David in July 2000,another antithesis term entered the Palestinian political lexicon: success-failure.Thus, for example, Elias Khoury calls his first first weekly column for al-Quds al-Arabi after the summit (August 2000. Vol. 12, Issue 3491, p. 20) ‘The Success ofFailure’ (Najah al-Fashal). Another variant which occurs in the article is ‘successfulfailure’ (al-fashal al-najih).5. In Hajjaj’s fiction, the fantasy mediates the irony. On ‘fantasy-theme’ criticism andthe connection of irony and fantasy, see Foss and Littlejohn.6. The mystique of ‘martyrdom’ cannot be overestimated. It can turn up at unexpectedand in unexpected places. Thus in answer to a question about her career, thePalestinian singer Abeer Sansour says in an interview: ‘Don’t forget that I am aPalestinian young woman and the Palestinian woman is distinguished from otherArab women and women in all parts of the world, for she has proved herself in allareas – political, cultural, and social. She is the mother of martyrs, the sister ofheroes, the wife of [political] prisoners … She is the only woman in the world whowalks in the funeral procession of her martyr while trilling out ululations of joy(tamshi fi janazat shahidiha w-hiya tuzaghrid). (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 29/30 July 2000,Issue 3489, p. 12).7. Booth also addresses the question of the intentional fallacy in a long footnote on p.156.8. For a more thorough analysis of the concept of phatic communion from asociolinguistic perspective, see Muhawi 1999.9. Actually, there is in American usage which is an exact equivalent for abu al-nahs,the Yiddish word schlimazel, defined in the Unabridged Edition of the Random HouseDictionary as ‘an inept bungling person who suffers from unremitting bad luck’. So,perhaps our proverb may be put thus: ‘Once a schlimazel, always a schlimazel.’10. It should be noted that in their clearly argued article concerning theories ofcitizenship and their possible application to Israeli society, Shafir and Peled dealonly with the question of citizenship but do not touch on the thorny issue of identity.Thus it is possible for them to discuss the stratification of Israeli citizens into variousstrata, without touching on the inherent contradiction between Israel being anethno-religious democracy (that is, a Jewish state) and Palestinian Arab identitywithin that framework.— 47 —www.taq.ir