Analysing the Arab-Israeli identity crisis in the author Sayed Kashua’s Dancing Arabs and Let It Be Morning

Abstract

"Israeli Arab”, how humiliating is this name no matter how many will try to soften it. And frankly, it makes no difference if we call ourselves instead "Palestinian citizens of Israel" or even "the Palestinian minority”…Whatever specific name is used, the underlining message remains the same: "Israeli Arab" - an oxymoron. - Sayed Kashua, (So Humiliating Is This Name) As an Arab-Israeli, author Sayed Kashua asks the important questions: whether the indigenous Arabs of Israel are permitted to consider Israel as their home. The author shades light into the subaltern lives of the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli citizens in the ethnocratic Israel, where one’s national and ethnic identity collide. The contemporary Hebrew writer narrates the sociopolitical situation of the community along with its social segregation and hierarchy, the duality of identity, and the politics of language and narratives. Kashua comments as well as criticises the state of Israel, Arab world and Arab mentality and annihilates the established stereotypes in a profoundly personal but anecdote manner. This thesis investigates Kashua’s book Dancing Arab and Let It Be Morning from the lenses of historical past, to study and analyse the unfamiliar stories of the Arab minority in Israel affected by the endless Palestinian-Israel conflict in the light of literary and critical theory. Rowshan 6 Epigraph No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (bell hooks, ‘Marginality as a site of resistance’, 1990: 241–3)