Palestinian and Israeli identities are not as disparate as many believe, professor Carol Bardenstein told a crowd of 60 students and faculty during her Monday-night lecture at the Rockefeller Center. Bardenstein, who spoke about Israeli and Palestinian literature, is currently the Brownstone visiting professor for Jewish studies.
Bardenstein said that both Israelis and Palestinians have tried to portray their enemies as "The Other" in the Middle East conflict.
Bardenstein said she was surprised to find in her research that there are "third zones" in Isreali and Palestinian literature where the two groups become blurred. This is especially true for many Arab- Jewish or Isreali-Arab characters whose identities do not neatly fit one of the two stereotypes, according Bardenstein.
The novella "Orchard," written by Benjamin Tammuz in 1972, provides one example of this blurring of the two racial identities, Bardenstein said. The narrator of the story is a Jewish immigrant living in pre-independence Israel. In the story he loses his land and is forced to work in an orchard alongside Arab farmhands. While working in the orchard, which functions as a "third zone," the man's skin begins to tan, and he finds that he might appear both as a Jew and a Muslim.
In another story, "Hill of Evil Counsel" by Amos Oz, a Jewish man tells a young boy that it is his duty to rape two Arab women to create a new "thoroughbred" race. According to Bardenstein, the man believed that the Arab race was an earlier and more natural version of the Jewish ethnicity and that the new Jewish man had to become more "native" to survive.
"From this conceptual framework is the conviction that Palestinians were Jews forcibly converted to Islam," Bardenstein said. "They are versions of former selves. This notion of previously being the other is much common than might first meet the eye."
According to Bardenstein, in the early days of Jewish settlement, many Jewish people shared this belief. She said some would dress up as Bedouins and eat Arabic food, while others would even speak Arabic.
"It was quite in the vogue to emulate Arabs as a model of how to be natural and native in the land," Bardenstein said. "Part of the transformation of the old Jew in exile into the new Jew natural in the land."
Bardenstein said these Jewish people never gave up their Jewish heritage and remained committed to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel.
"The ideology remained in place," Bardenstein said. "The Jews did not change their literal categories.
Third zones in literature and cinema have grown since Israel was first founded, Bardenstein said. She said one example of this is Palestinian actors portraying Jewish people in Isreali cinema, and vice versa. Another emerging third zone is Isreal's hip hop culture, where both Jewish and Arab rappers share the same stage, according to Bardenstein.
She expressed hope that these literary third zones would provide a framework for a lasting peace between adherents of the two traditions.
Bardenstein is an associate professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan.
