Miscegenation and the Literary Imagination in Israel-Palestine
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PRIVATE AFFECTIONS: MISCEGENATION AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE Hella Bloom Cohen, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2014 APPROVED: Masood Ashraf Raja, Major Professor Deborah Needleman Armintor, Committee Member Nicole D. Smith, Committee Member Laila Amine, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Cohen, Hella Bloom, Private Affections: Miscegenation and the Literary Imagination in Israel-Palestine. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2014, 188 pp., references, 133 titles. This study politicizes the mixed relationship in Israeli-Palestinian literature. I examine Arab-Jewish and interethnic Jewish intimacy in works by Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, canonical Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, select anthologized Anglophone and translated Palestinian and Israeli poetry, and Israeli feminist writer Orly Castel-Bloom. I also examine the material cultural discourses issuing from Israel’s textile industry, in which Arabs and Jews interact. Drawing from the methodology of twentieth-century Brazilian miscegenation theorist Gilberto Freyre, I argue that mixed intimacies in the Israeli-Palestinian imaginary represent a desire to restructure a hegemonic public sphere in the same way Freyre’s Brazilian mestizo was meant to rhetorically undermine what he deemed a Western cult of uniformity. This project constitutes a threefold contribution. I offer one of the few postcolonial perspectives on Israeli literature, as it remains underrepresented in the field in comparison to its Palestinian counterparts. I also present the first sustained critique of the hetero relationship and the figure of the hybrid in Israeli-Palestinian literature, especially as I focus on its representation for political options rather than its aesthetic intrigue. Finally, I reexamine and apply Gilberto Freyre in a way that excavates him from critical interment and advocates for his global relevance. Copyright 2014 by Hella Bloom Cohen ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For his unending encouragement and encyclopedic mentorship, I thank my director, Dr. Masood Ashraf Raja. For her constant guidance and heartfelt support, I thank my first doctoral advisor and current committee member, Dr. Needleman Armintor. I also extend my deepest thanks to my committee members, Dr. Nicole D. Smith and Dr. Laila Amine, for their intellectual inspiration and rigorous examination of my work. This project would not have come to fruition without them, nor without the generous work-shopping support of my writing group members and fellow graduate cohorts, Dr. Amanda Kellogg and soon-to-be-doctor Lindsay Moore. An additional thanks is due to my wonderful and sundry family—the Wolberses, Blooms, Denglers, Sosins, Cohens and Burnses. And how can I say enough to thank Michael Patrick Cohen? In a word, thank you, Mikey, for the love and logic. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii 1. INTRODUCTION: PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI LITERATURE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: AN UNEASY RELATIONSHIP ......................................................................1 2. ENEMIES, LOVERS, SLAVES: READING FREYRE IN THE HOLY LAND .....................22 3. ENEMIES, LOVERS, STRANGERS: DARWISH’S ‘RITA’ ..................................................60 4. ENEMIES, LOVERS, WIVES: INTERNAL MISCEGENATION IN A. B. YEHOSHUA’S A LATE DIVORCE ................................................................................................................93 5. ENEMIES, LOVERS, OCCUPIERS: POETICS OF FABRIC UNDER OCCUPATION .....126 6. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................168 APPENDIX: BEAUTIFUL ISRAELI WOMEN SOLDIERS ....................................................174 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................176 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI LITERATURE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: AN UNEASY RELATIONSHIP This project constitutes a postcolonial approach to Israel-Palestine, which immediately situates it in a piquant genealogy. Postcolonial critics writing about Israel-Palestine agree that Edward Said’s 1979 work The Question of Palestine is a—if not the—foundational discussion on Israeli imperialism. Since its one-year antecedent, Orientalism, was to effectively generate the field of postcolonial studies itself, as a sister text The Question of Palestine and the arguments therein are indissoluble from postcolonial studies, marking an inaugural moment in its genealogy. The question on everyone’s mind then is, how did Orientalism become relatively palatable and so widely disseminated across the disciplinary divides while its sister text remains underplayed at best and institutionally taboo at worst? Rebecca L. Stein observes that it is only within the last few years that a climate has opened up allowing American laypeople as well as academics to debate publicly the coloniality of Zionism without injunction or incurring the charge of anti-Semitism (317). Certain world events have enabled more open discussion, ushering in the importance of Said’s strikingly prophetic book, which anticipates its own interment. These events include the 1993 Oslo Accords, which brought international legitimacy to the Palestinian cause (318) despite its being seen as a failure in many circles for the weak showing made by the exiled leaders of the PLO; the 2001 World Conference against Racism brought anticolonial rhetoric into the sphere of public discourse on Zionism (318); the mounting civilian deaths accompanying Israel’s series of attacks on Beirut, the West Bank and the Gaza strip between 1967 and 2009 intensified public scrutiny such that the label “occupation” began 1 being replaced with “war crimes” (318),1 and the word “apartheid” has even made its rounds; and finally, most recently, Israel’s illegal settlement program in the Occupied Territories has 1 In 1982, Israel attacked Muslim West Beirut with U.S.-facilitated daily air strikes, killing and wounding thousands of civilians, with hundreds of thousands more starved and terrorized within a city placed on lockdown. Prime Minister Menachim Begin admitted to the siege being one of Israel’s offensive wars of “choice” (Neff 73), the others being the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Israel played a strategic ally to Western powers in controlling oil in the region and limiting Arab nationalism, and the Six-Day War of 1967, during which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights (“Milestones”). After the Six-Day War, Israel was accused of calculatedly firing on densest areas of civilians in the Suez (Walz 15), and the 1967 borders that drastically reduced Palestinian land have basically remained unchanged to this day. 1967 also initiated the “land-for-peace” foundations of subsequent peace negotiations (“Milestones”), which have consistently stopped short of a Palestinian advantage, especially with ongoing Israeli settlements in these areas. Since 1967, Israel has managed to skirt international pressures to withdraw aggression. For example, the United Nations Security Council voted 14-0 that Israel stop the siege of 1982, and when Israel refused they issued another unanimous vote to censure Israel. Having abstained in the first vote, the U.S., under the Reagan administration, vetoed a council resolution to condemn Israel in order to shield its ally from international oversight (Neff 73). At the close of 2008, Israel conducted a military offensive, called Operation Cast Lead, in the Gaza Strip that lasted three weeks. Over 2,360 air strikes, several ground assaults, 1,300 Palestinian deaths and 5,000 wounded Palestinians later, an international Human Rights Council (HRC) and its UN Fact Finding Mission (a.k.a. the Goldstone Report) found Israel and Hamas guilty of war crimes (Sterio 229). Despite the commonplace that the early millennium saw significant aggression on account of both sides and that Israel’s occasional strikes represented acts of defense to the increasingly incited Palestinians, a study in the American Economic Review found that, based on the timing and number of Palestinian versus Israeli casualties during the Second Intifada between 2000-2007, “the Israelis react in a significant and predictable way to Palestinian violence against them, but no evidence [exists] that the Palestinians react to Israeli violence,” and further, “this stands in contrast to the popular notion that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a "tit-for-tat" cycle of violence” (Jaeger and Paserman 1598). See Neff, Donald. “Middle East History: It Happened In August; Begin's Admission in 1982 That Israel Started Three of Its 2 provided a vivid basis for comparing Israel’s policies to settler colonialism.2 These events, among others, have made it possible for the academy to return to the Said of 1979. One postcolonial critic who has mounted a radical critique of Israel throughout the years is Barbara Harlow, the foremother of the genre “resistance literature.” Focusing in a large part on Palestinian writing and its relationship to Central American and South African colonialism, her 1987 book bears the title of the genre. But the radical