272 · Carmela
Saranga and Rachel Sharaby
Yehoshua is a political writer, and his worldview crystallizes in his
books into a clear and concrete outlook, with the borderless Israeli zone
at its center. Disputing and neurotic figures move within this zone in a
continuous journey. Some are accompanied by an escort who is also a
driver, a messenger—a demon who leads them into a parallel land, a
parallel space, and an existence that has a grotesque and distorted decor.
He connects the individual’s neurotic existence with that of the people
and applies the principle of “life on the brink” and “on the brink of catas-
trophe” in his stories.
8
In Yehoshua’s work the space is found at the cen-
ter of the Israeli’s awareness. He enters and leaves the space as someone
possessed. His wanderings exaggerate his disturbed mental condition
and his rejection of the idea of being a child of the land and its master.
Gurevits and Eran also point to the Israeli’s reluctance to be totally in-
volved in the land.
9
In their opinion, the Israeli existence does not connect
the Israeli with his country. On the one hand, the place is the country and
everywhere else is “the other place,” and on the other hand, the place,
in the thoughts and beliefs of the Jewish people, is outside of the place
and is not identical with the land. The Israeli place is depicted as a site
of ambivalence, of belonging and alienation, of being close and distant,
of lowering and raising, of freedom and commitment, of realization and
abstraction.
In his essay “Exile
as Neurotic Solution,” Yehoshua claims:
With us, the elementary and primary relation between a people
and its homeland is not natural. We were melted as a people in
exile, and exile as our melting pot has penetrated into the cells of
our existence. The special relations that were formed between the
people and God begin in the desert, in a no-man’s land, in the in-
termediary zone between the exile and Israel. We will see how the
people always return and search for this no-man’s land throughout
its history, and especially when it wants to find an answer or seeks
spiritual renewal.
10
According to Yehoshua, the Jew carries two essences within him: one of
leaving Israel and one of coming to Israel and settling there. The nation
revives in the desert, which is a place of death, but is also sterile and
pure. However, the renewal of the people in its land is dependent on a
conquest that has a spiritual meaning. According to Yehoshua, the desert
Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Israeli Space in Yehoshua’s Literary Works · 273
experience exists in the soul of the people, and they are therefore afraid
to enter the land. This fear of the space, which must be protected and
conquered, does not enable them to maintain a moral existence, because
another people exist in this space.
However, in his essay “Between Right and Right” Yehoshua claims
that the full moral right to conquer part of Israel or any other country by
force is not a historic right but the right of the troubled existence.
11
The
ongoing conflict between the Muslims and the Jews in Israel has created
a feeling of suffocation, creating claustrophobia that motivates the heroes
of his works in space.
12
Yehoshua’s heroes refer to different regions of Israel with an attitude
of closeness, intimacy, and longing on the one hand, and rejection, fear,
and even disgust on the other hand. However, the heroes of his works
are also drawn to the fear and disgust that invade the forbidden places,
yearning to “know them.” His heroes must know the place, as expressed
by the hero in
The Liberated Bride who adamantly claims that his job is to
know.
13
The places that serve as a background for Yehoshua’s stories are part
of the mother archetypes—the earth. According to his worldview, the
mother is given by the father—God—to
the people,
and the son must be
very careful of its honor and sanctity. This situation heightened the fear
of the land because it turned from mother to wife (the father’s wife), and
therefore any careless contact without the father’s permission turns into
incest.
14
This attitude toward the zone pulls the heroes to journeys that include
elements of incest, such as in
The Liberated Bride, where incestuous rela-
tions between a father and his daughter take place in a guest house in Je-
rusalem, and the Arab watchman is aware of this and protects the second
daughter from her father. This incest is a symbol of the desecration of the
land.
In his stories, Yehoshua presents figures that deviate from the accepted
Zionist norms: the student in
Facing the Forests, who sets fire to a forest, or
Gabriel, who defects from the Israeli Defense Forces, and the daughter of
the car mechanic who finds love in the arms of an Arab car mechanic in
The Lover. These are neurotic and detached figures, who move in a jour-
ney “in air”
15
over archetypical spaces, where the entire space cultivates
a different code of existence.
274 · Carmela Saranga and Rachel Sharaby
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