Israel/Palestine

In Israel/Palestine: Border Representations in Literature and Film (2020), Drew Paul makes of borders, checkpoints, and the West Bank separation wall a point of departure for an innovative and insightful reading of a Palestinian, post-Oslo politics of “transgression” (2). Building upon Zeina Halabi’s articulation of the “‘evasive notion of the Palestinian ordinary’” (12), the book argues that while Palestinian and Israeli literatures have long concerned themselves with borders, the proliferation of borders of the late Oslo period has spawned novel efforts by contemporary authors and auteurs to actively “fray” what Paul terms the “illusion of the border” (36) [italics added] through subversive cultural production including elements of fantasy, pastiche, genre reconfiguration, and the absurd. Divided into an introduction and two constituent parts, the book walks a fine line between acknowledging (but not normalizing) the border, and thinking beyond as a new form of the political. Notably, the book’s focus is not as equally split between “Israel” and “Palestine” as the title may suggest, which Paul convincingly ascribes to a state of affairs in which the regulatory regime of borders weighs more heavily upon Palestinian bodies (32). In other words, aside from relatively brief references to Amos Oz and David Grossman, “Israel” in this study emerges primarily in relation. It emerges in relation to Palestinian lives rendered visible and imbued with agency on their own terms, and in relation to the enforcement of and investment in the borders, however “elastic” (10), required for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. “Palestine,” on the other hand, sandwiched between “Israel” and “border,” emerges in Paul’s title as a guest seated at the wrong table, for it is Palestine’s capacity to imagine and be imagined beyond Israel and beyond border representation that constitutes the animating concern of Paul’s text.The introduction sets the stage by historicizing Israeli restrictions on Palestinian space. Central to Paul’s analysis is the expansion of internal borders within the West Bank since 1994, namely, within the 60% under Israeli control (“Area C”). This expansion, as Paul notes, includes not only the border wall, but also 98 Israeli military checkpoints as of 2017, checkpoints that have become “quotidian spaces where economic, political, personal, and cultural interactions of all types occur” (3). Clarifying the comparative framework, he notes that in Palestinian works, the significance of borders has shifted over time from a “site of (re)commitment to a politics of liberation” (15), toward sites of ambivalence, ambiguity, and universal suffering. Conversely, the desire in texts by Israeli Jews for “strong, protective borders” (16) reflects the “national and colonial imperatives of Zionist settlement and early statehood” (17), whereas a desire to challenge or remove borders, per Paul, has typically signified a critique of normative Zionism.In Part I, “Expanding Borders,” Paul crafts a baseline of Israeli and Palestinian border writing against which to later contrast the formal innovations of the post-Oslo moment. Analyzing texts removed from the post-Oslo regime of borders, whether temporally or physically, Paul argues that the border has been where utopian platforms, desires, and ideologies “falter” (70). In this vein, Chapter 2, entitled “Return to the Border: Commitment, Utopia and the Inescapable Green Line,” contrasts Ghassan Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa” with Sami Michael’s Hebrew-language sequel, Doves in Trafalgar. Paul argues that both texts subscribe to “idealised visions of victory, peace, a better future” (52), manifested as resistance and co-existence, respectively. Yet both ideologies, per Paul, fade in viability as borders proliferate. It is here that the study offers one of its most haunting close readings: in the original Arabic, Kanafani’s phrase “Suddenly the past came, sharp (ḥāddan) like a knife,” the word “sharp” is derived from the word for border (ḥadd), thus evoking Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of the border as that which grates and bleeds (59, 21). Elegant and searing, this analysis serves to gracefully enlarge the focus upon Kanafani’s text, of wide interest to scholars of Hebrew literature on account of its empathic depiction of Holocaust survivors, toward an articulation of Palestinian loss. Chapter 3, entitled “Sayed Kashua, The Palestinian Hebrew Novel and the Failure of Coexistence,” argues that Kashua’s critique of coexistence responds to and deflates Michael’s utopian vision in Doves. Paul argues here that Kashua’s two protagonists in Second Person Singular “abide by the logic of the border and its encoding of ethnic difference [. . .] in search of an elusive coexistence,” a coexistence that ultimately perpetuates their marginalization (101–102). Thus, by establishing the border as both a structural reinforcement of the political status quo, and as a seemingly insurmountable impediment, empirically speaking, to the project of liberation, Part I opens the door for Paul’s innovative focus on border contestation in the post-Oslo Occupied Territories in Part II.Entitled “Deceptive Borders,” Part II interrogates metafictional and metadocumentary techniques that endeavor to represent life in the Occupied Territories in the context of the post-1994 proliferation of borders and the concomitant withering of revolutionary hopes. Significantly, the literary and filmic texts under consideration simultaneously represent, and question representation, challenging the border’s seeming insurmountability, and recasting its performance of power as illusion and vulnerability. Chapter 4, entitled “Border Crossings and Stray Narratives of Return,” argues that Rabaʿi al-Madhoun’s The Lady From Tel Aviv (2009) reconfigures the well-established Palestinian realist genre of the “return narrative” (114), as a surreal, “stray narrative” over which the author loses control (111). In so doing, Paul suggests, the text employs metafictional techniques, including a novel-within-a-novel, complete with a parodic second title-page. In so doing, the text “stages the disintegration of the decisive and cohesive return narrative” (129). Chapter 5, entitled “Does the Camera Lie? Or, How to Document the Wall,” compares two films of the emerging “wall documentary” genre, Simone Bitton’s “Mur” (2004), and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s “5 Broken Cameras” (2011). These films, Paul argues, employ a “self-aware mode” (140) in order to grapple with a paradoxical core dilemma of “documenting a space they wish to tear down” (139). Mur calls attention to the act of filmmaking by incorporating onlookers’ interruptions, and “imbues skepticism” (146) through striking overlays, whereas 5 Broken Cameras crafts a “broken” (148) narrative through camera-to-camera segmentation and thematizing the destruction of the five cameras in tandem with the construction of the wall. Chapter 6, entitled “The Illusion of the One-War Mirror: Filming the Checkpoint in Divine Intervention” considers Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film as a work of the absurd that recasts the checkpoint as a “charade” (168). Specifically, Paul emphasizes that through its “improvised and sometimes playful manner,” (160) the film imagines the checkpoint as “unstable and constructed” (ibid.), thus raising the possibility of its removal. Overall, Paul reads the film as a work of “fantasy” (183), whereby the formal dissonance of multiple filmic modes, including the surreal, the documentary, the action film, and humorous dissonance, renders the border regime fragile and absurd, in turn recasting the border itself as a site of escape.Paul’s study represents a noteworthy achievement that will be of interest to scholars and students of Palestinian literature, Palestinian film, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and theoretical approaches to space and place. The work represents an intriguing and welcome contribution to two overlapping bodies of scholarship. The first, including first books by Rachel Feldhay-Brenner, Lital Levy, and Gil Hochberg, amplifies Palestinian voices via myriad Israeli/Palestinian comparative frameworks (also) invested in the study of Israeli society, as such, in its many intersectional complexities. The second, including the work of scholars such as Anna Ball, Bashir Abu-Manneh, and more recent writing by Hochberg, comprises postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Palestinian cultural production. Although these bodies of scholarship are indeed complementary, Paul’s selections of film and text, in both Hebrew and Arabic, from both Israel and the Occupied Territories, in conversation with ideologies of both coexistence and resistance, comprises a novel contribution that expands the horizons of what is typically paired in a single scholarly book on Israel/Palestine.In this vein, one of the text’s most intriguing aspects may be its comparative treatment of these aforementioned ideologies, of coexistence and resistance. Although Paul suggests in Part I that both ideologies fail at the border, it is noteworthy that only the latter reconstitutes itself in Part II of the text. This is in itself significant because it underscores a recurrent if unstated tenet of Paul’s comparative framework: that the ideological divide between coexistence (manifested in Paul’s analysis as border representation and crossing), and resistance (articulated as border questioning and fraying), may itself comprise a boundary. Can it, too, be “frayed”? This is one area where the author might have reflected more deeply upon the comparative implications of his analyses. However, it is a minor and understandable gap. Overall, given the extent of the study’s linguistic, generic, and ideological range, this book about borders is boundary-fraying in its own right and constitutes an exciting step forward in the comparative cultural study of Palestine and Israel

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