DAVID TWERSKY
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ing and/or incapable of making peace with Israel. He also wrote,
"It
is enough for Arab intelligence agencies to read our newspapers,
poems , books, and satires ; it is enough for them to watch our plays
and films .. . in order to conclude" that they can take advantage of
the inner divisions in Israeli society by "starting another war in order
to gain 'momentum'."
Another battle along the front has been waged all year by
Yehoshua and Anton Shammas. Shammas is a Christian Arab from
the Israeli village of Fasuta near the Lebanese border, who published
a major novel this year -
Arabesques
- in Hebrew. It is the first major
Hebrew novel written by a non-Jew.
In a televised meeting on Arab-Jewish relations, Yehoshua at–
tacked Shammas for failing to stand up to the Arab rejectionists with
anything approaching the strength of purpose with which Yehoshua
and other Jewish doves have stood up to the Jewish right. In an inter–
view in
Politika,
the monthly journal of the left-opposition Ratz party,
Yehoshua enumerated his problems with the new left generally, and
with Shammas specifically . The left, according to Yehoshua, ignores
statements , "like that of Shammas , when he argued for changing the
flag and the national anthem...." Answering Shammas's proposal
of the creation of a new Israeli culture and national identity not based
on Jewish/Arab categories, Yehoshua said: "This is a Jewish state,
just as Spain is a Spanish state . . . . [Shammas] opposed the creation
of the State ofIsrael. . .. After a Palestinian state is established, Israeli
Arabs will begin demanding within Israel a secular multi-national,
multi-religious state like the United States... .
If
[Shammas] wants
[his] full identity, if [he] wants to live in a state with a full Palestinian
personality , with an original Palestinian culture, [he should] move
one hundred meters eastward to the Palestinian state which will arise
alongside the State of Israel."
Two issues later, Shammas launched a counterattack. "I don't
want the creation of a Palestinian state," he explained, "but of the
state of Palestine, a state whose citizens will belong to the Palestinian
nation. " And he dismissed Yehoshua's vision of Israel as a Jewish
majority state as a primitive "desire to establish a state with his J ew–
ish Terror organization brothers"; that is, as a preference for fascist
Jews as against progressive Palestinians like himself.
The challenge that Shammas poses to the national consensus is
different from - but combines with - the challenge from the left. Is–
raeli Arabs have developed a unique identity as Arabs, Palestinians
and Israelis, and there is nowhere else in the Middle East where they
