"Postcards in the Morning": Palestinians Writing in Hebrew (Report‪)‬

For Dick who too "hallucinates in no-man 's land" The article deals with a small number of bilingual Palestinian authors and poets writing and publishing in Hebrew, in addition to their Arabic writing. The phenomenon-generally limited to writers belonging to the Druze and Christian minorities-took on some significance only in the 1980s, when Anton Shamm5s, who is a Christian (b. 1950), and Na im Arayidi, a Druze (b. 1948), began to make a name for themselves in Hebrew. Both of them went through the formal Israeli educational system purposely set up to produce an "Arab Israeli" intelligentsia which would be willing and able to identify with the Jewish-Zionist state. Nevertheless, Palestinian, bilingual writers have protested against the ethno-cultural norm that identifies each Hebrew author as a Jew. They focus on "un-Jewing" Hebrew, that is, "deterritorialization," and the simultaneous "reterritorialization" of the language. However, that there are Palestinians who write in Hebrew and have found a limited Jewish-Israeli audience does in no way mean that the Jewish-national borders that demarcate the literary canon of modern Hebrew have somehow slackened. That would require a change in cultural norms of Hebrew literature, which is to say, the creation of a new culture, common to both Jews and Arabs.