6. The Promised Land

“The promised land” looks at the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century in its commitment to create a Jewish state that could not only normalize diaspora Jewish life but also establish a national literature. It meditates on the work of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nakhman Bialik, Sh. Y. Agnon, and Amos Oz as canonical voices in Israeli literature. It is worth reflecting on Palestinian literature written in Hebrew, as in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, and ask the question: ought it to be considered part of Jewish literature? Israeli literature, despite argument to the contrary, is another facet of modern Jewish literature in the diaspora.

صورة فلسطين في الثقافة الصينية المعاصرة / The Image of Palestine in the Mirror of Contemporary Chinese Culture

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China’s official position on the Palestine issue has always been clear and consistent, but in the mirror of contemporary Chinese culture, the image of Palestine is still shrouded in some ambiguity. This study attempts to paint this picture and monitor its development stage by studying the following aspects. In the Chinese translation of Palestinian literature, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish are the two most important Palestinian cultural figures in China. In the writings of Chinese writers and Chinese academic researchers, the Palestinian issue and the image of Palestine assume prominent position. Finally, the study has drawn some conclusions and recommendations to improve the image of Palestine in Chinese culture to support the just cause of Palestine, and to strengthen China-Palestinian relations in particular and China-Arab relations in general.

Country of Words: Palestinian Literature in the Digital Age of the Refugee

The article reflects on how to embrace the unconventional, fragmented, scattered, transnational, exilic, and refugee elements of Palestinian Literature. Placing the refugees at the heart of the story of Palestinian literature raises serious questions about the compatibility of the national framework as the primary mode of analysis. The article explores the anatomy of Palestinian literature, including the wide array of sources, literary detective work, and expanded methodological toolbox needed to gather its fragments, and illustrates the potential of the digital sphere—drawing on the world of Digital Humanities—to house, express and visualize the data-fragments of Palestinian literature.

Raja Shehadeh’s “Cartography of Refusal”: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.

Water Wars: Infrastructures of Violence in Sayed Kashua’s Let it be Morning

This chapter examines representations of Israel’s destruction and disconnection of Palestinian water infrastructure in Palestinian literature, focusing on Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning (2004). It situates this phenomenon in the context of wider scholarship on urbicide, water infrastructure and citizenship, biopolitics, and humanitarianism. The destruction and disconnection of Palestinian water supplies by the Israel Defense Forces is identified as an act of ‘slow violence’ and a factor in ‘racial Palestinization’.

Crossing the River: Home and Exile at the River Jordan

This chapter identifies the River Jordan as a major feature of Israeli and Palestinian environmental imaginaries. It argues that the Jordan’s role as a water resource and a contested border gives it crucial material and symbolic functions in imagining the past, present and future of the Israeli and Palestinian nations. The first half examines the meanings of the Jordan to early twentieth-century Zionist ‘pioneers’, including its role in cultivating a sense of home and belonging. The second half identifies representation of the Jordan as dried-up or polluted as a strategy used in recent Palestinian literature to depict Palestinian exile. Texts examined include Moshe Smilansky’s short story ‘Hawaja Nazar’ (1910), Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ (2008) and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997).

Hydrofictions

Hydrofictions identifies water as a new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It argues for the necessity of recognising water’s importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, covering topics including representations of the River Jordan; the history of Zionist and Israeli swamp drainage; the emergence of Israeli and Palestinian environmentalisms; the role of the Mediterranean in Israeli identity; and the hydropolitics of war and occupation. In doing so, it shows that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. This book offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it. It is vital reading for students and scholars in Middle East Studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and anyone invested in the future of the world’s water.