Sayed Kashua and the Palestinian Perspective
Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian writer known to be one of the primary voices for Palestinians in Israel. Kashua was born to Palestinian Muslim-Arab parents and considers himself a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel. Despite his first language being Arab, Kashua wrote exclusively in Hebrew because he felt that Palestinians were highly underrepresented in Israeli books and education, despite the fact that Palestinians make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population. As is evident by his attempts to inform the Israelis around him about these people they share a land with through his writings, Kashua was passionate about generating representation and equality for all people in Israel.
Israel is a Jewish state, and as a non-Jew, Kashua shares a lot about the complexities and struggles that come with identifying as a Palestinian among the many Jewish Israelis. This can be seen among many of his works, including Without Parents, which was written by Kashua in 2012. In this account, a young Arab girl who attended school with many Israelis was assigned a roots project. Her father was angered by this assignment as it felt like “a battle for ownership of the land,” as his daughter attended a school in which the majority of students were Jewish, even including the son of Bibi, the prime minister of Israel at the time (Kashua, page 3).
An Israeli historian named Omer Bartov studied the image of Jews in cinema and from this, he generated four main figures of the Jew that he says “illustrate the ways in which Jews were perceived by others” (Mendelson-Maoz, page 113). Bartov’s first category and the category most often employed by Kashua to represent Israeli Arabs is that of being a perpetrator. Often the Arabs in Israel are viewed as threatening by the Jews, and to avoid the judgment and fear of others, many Arabs have had to "become an expert at assuming false identities,” meaning they do everything in their power to just blend into their community (Mendelson-Maoz, page 114).
This can also be seen in Without Parents, as the father of the young girl is clearly very afraid of revealing the Palestinian Arab identity of their family and instead chooses to tell his daughter to say her roots are from the Canaanites to not initiate negative feelings from any of her classmates. Despite sharing a land with the Israelis, the Arabs have learned over time that to remain in the land even somewhat peacefully, they must not be too loud or open about their roots and identities, and Kashua is just one writer that has shared the less-known side of this complex issue.
Citations:
Mendelson-Maoz, Adia, and Liat Steir-Livny. "The Jewish Works of Sayed Kashua Subversive or Subordinate?." Israel Studies Review 26.1 (2011): 107-129.
Kashua, Sayed. Without Parents. 2012.
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Nice post about the Kashua readings. I might slightly disagree, however, with two things: 1) Your title suggests that Kashua presents "the" Palestinian perspective. Of course, I would agree that he certainly presents "a" Palestinian perspective and that in the process he also identifies several other Palestinian perspectives. 2) In "Without Parents" Kashua is actually making a Palestinian claim—common in recent years—that their ancestors are the Canaanites, which would predate the Israelites (with whom modern Israelis claim ancestry). In other words, linking their roots with the Canaanites highlights their Palestinian identity rather than hides it.
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