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The prime-time television comedy Arab Labor, created by Israeli-Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, allows viewers to reconceptualize Israeli collective memory, rendering it more inclusive for non-Jewish citizens of the state. A close visual and textual analysis of one particularly bold episode, titled “Memorial Day” (Zikaron), reveals that the episode aims to bridge an existing gap between two formative narratives: the celebratory Jewish War of Independence and the Nakba, the Palestinian disaster of 1948. This daring cultural suggestion, indeed an antidiscourse, identifies productive intersections between these competing narratives. Moreover, by employing humor, irony, and the genre of the sitcom, the creators of the series mask a volatile criticism of prevailing social conventions and norms in contemporary Israeli society. The creative resolutions to the various crises the storyline raises—resolutions that on many occasions transgress social boundaries—create a meaningful space for identity negotiation and cultural intervention in the Israeli sociopolitical arena.

This paper highlights what seems to the author an insufficiently examined way of relating one writer to another: a writer’s decision to textually align him- or herself with another author. Intertextuality is usually not thought of as connecting two people or two authors, but rather two texts. This paper does the former by looking at how Sayed Kashua, an Israeli Arab author and journalist, uses the image of Philip Roth in his newspaper columns. First, Kashua establishes Roth’s status as an author who was maligned by his community and presented an inspiration for Kashua, who has himself been accused of self-hatred. Second, Kashua presents Roth as a merciless satirist, especially of Jewish life, and thus presents himself as a much milder, forgiving writer. Third, Kashua stresses that Roth is Jewish but not Israeli, while Kashua is Israeli but not Jewish. Roth’s position is only partially familiar and related to the Jewish Israeli public. Kashua stresses this position to foreground the way he too, as an Israeli Arab, is only half-familiar to this same audience.

This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Both Susan Abulhawa's and Sayed Kashua's present Arab characters who, under unusual circumstances, impersonate or literally acquire the identity of the Israeli-Jewish other. In the fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, Abulhawa and Kashua, respectively, construe characters whose existence blurs the borderline between various versions of today's Palestinian Arab and mainstream projections of its Israeli-Jewish counterpart. These characters represent, as the article demonstrates, the authors' attempts to work out the implications of the idea that — as a result of the historical events of Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba — the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both Israeli and Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its counterpart.

Politics became highly divisive, as the right wing pitted itself against the left, with nationalistic messianism swiftly making inroads into the body politic, and ultra Orthodox political parties gaining intoxicating levels of power and influence such as they had never before attained. The invasive presence of the political Situation in individuals' lives and personal experiences in this land deters Israeli writers from dealing with it. [...] Consider Yoav Blum, whose bestselling The Coincidence Makers (2011) has been optioned for film adaptation abroad, or Sayed Kashua's 'Let it be Morning' (2005), which was adapted in 2021, and caused some controversy at its Cannes Film Festival debut when its Arab cast refused to appear on stage with its Israeli director because the movie had been presented as an Israeli product. When it comes to the home-grown stuff, the Hebrew book-buying public has expressed a lingering distaste for material reminiscent of what Lavie Tidhar, in his Central Station stories (2016), calls the great interplanetary 'Up and Out', that is to say, ultrahard science fiction.

The proliferation of doppelgängers and other doubles in Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular (2010) and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) suggests that the demands and expectations of national identity threaten the subjectivity of those who try to resist it. In both novels, paranoia and the abject unsettle the boundaries of subjectivity and contribute to the disequilibrium of the mind and the fragmentation of the body. Damaged bodies signify the disintegrating selves of characters who try in vain to overcome the limitations imposed on them by ideological paradigms of identity itself; paranoia is the psychological expression of the seemingly stable “I.” Paranoia and abjection—simultaneously the reason for and the consequence of the doublings and splits in these novels—indicate identity's encroachment on subjectivity. As such, these novels, though divergent in some aspects of their confrontation with identity, invoke similar phenomena to mount a scathing critique of nationalist logic.

This article examines the first novel by the translingual writer Sayed Kashua who, unlike most Palestinian writers in Israel, publishes exclusively in Hebrew. We will highlight through the exploration of Dancing Arabs, an unknown Palestinian writing in Hebrew, a novel which narrates multiple and complex identities in Hebrew while borrowing the subject of belonging and minority identity from the Arab-Palestinian novel. If it is impossible for S. Kashua to write in literary Arabic, it is, however, impossible for him not to write in Hebrew and not to narrate identities. As a minor author, S. Kashua tried with his first literary attempt, to shape a Palestinian character centred in a logic of mimicry: he draws nothing, he creates nothing. He reproduces the Jewish-Israeli man as his resemblance.

A Borrowed Identity, a film about a Palestinian living among Israeli Jews, draws on incidents from two novels by Sayed Kashua: Dancing Arabs, which is also the translation of the film's Hebrew title, and Second Person Singular. As Kashua told an interviewer in The Forward last September, he wrote the script years ago, and then it went through so many directors. Eran Riklis, whose award-winning films include \"The Syrian Bride\" and \"The Lemon Tree,\" is the Israeli director who finally turned Kashua's screenplay into a superb film. Like Kashua himself, the protagonist, Eyad, is from Tira, a Palestinian city inside the Green Line. Eyad is a bright student and, like Kashua, wins a place at a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem.

Most research on contemporary Israel acknowledges the dramatic changes that Israel went through in the late eighties. The narrative is by now familiar and shares a great deal with other countries going through similar changes.1 Since the 1980s Israel has been on an increasingly quick and thorough track of economic and cultural privatization. This manifests itself in the weakening of state influence in economic and cultural fields, and has visible influence on all spheres of society.

Most research and surveys that deal with the complex identity of the Arabs in Israel refer to the Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli components in their identity. Kashua adds the Jewish-Zionist component to the discussion and explores its dominance in shaping the identities of the Arabs in Israel. I use the term Jewish-Arab as a mirror image of the Arab-Jew in order to analyze the conflicted identity of Kashu's Arab characters. The use of the identity of Arab-Jew by the third generation of Mizrahi writers functions as a challenge to the hegemony of Zionist discourse. Kashua's Herzl Disappears at Midnight (2005) and Second Person Singular (2008) create a realization of the term Jewish-Arab and take the situation of the conflicted identity to an extreme and provocative end, in order to emphasize the dead-end situation of Arabs in Israel.

Keren talks about the feelings of many Palestinian Arabs who, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, found themselves within its boundaries. Having become Israeli citizens, they were always torn between their national identity as Palestinians and their identity as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. Many national groups live as minorities within sovereign states, but the situation here has been particularly hard because of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and because Israel, while granting its citizens political rights, defines itself as a Jewish state, thus excluding non-Jews from the narrative developed as part of the nation-building process. That narrative views the Jews' settlement of the land of Israel since the late nineteenth century as a return to Zion and a restoration of Jewish independence, while the Palestinian narrative views Zionism as a colonial movement and Israeli independence, achieved after a war in which 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, as a Nakba (catastrophe). Among other things, Keren discusses that discourse in an attempt to highlight a creative attempt by novelist Sayed Kashua to breach its boundaries.