Love Story Stirs Up Divisions in Israel
JERUSALEM — Dorit Rabinyan’s prize-winning 2014 novel, based on her real romance, was selling very well despite, and maybe because of, the lovers: an Israeli woman and a Palestinian artist who meet in the frost of a New York winter not long after the September 11 attacks.
Then Ms. Rabinyan, a well-known writer here since her 20s, became a national cause. In late 2015, the Israeli Education Ministry announced it would pull the book, whose tentative English title at the time was “Borderlife,” from its approved list for high school teaching. The move came amid a larger debate about the right-wing government’s crackdown on opponents, from rights groups to disillusioned soldiers. “I had a woman spit on me!” she recalled.
Her book sales then doubled. Her book showed that the Israeli left may be comatose, but it is not quite dead.
“All the Rivers,” the new English title of the book, was published this month in the United States, and Ms. Rabinyan, 44, seemed a little nervous. She wanted Americans to read the book for what she said it is — a story of a specific love and its boundaries — and not because of the freespeech controversy here or the backdrop of a conflict that will not heal.
The book’s main character, Liat, a dutiful young Israeli translator, falls for Hilmi, a Palestinian painter. Liat must decide how far to take a love she knows her family and friends will disapprove of, seeing her as a traitor to her upbringing, her Jewishness.
The book opens with Liat, who, like Ms. Rabinyan, is of Iranian Jewish descent, being questioned by terror investigators. To them, Liat looked Middle Eastern, not necessarily Jewish. Soon after, she meets Hilmi. He is from Hebron and Ramallah, the Palestinians’ de facto capital; she is from Tel Aviv, its own bubble of sea and secularism in Israel.
Hilmi tells her three things about himself, all of which end up mattering: He can’t drive. He has never shot a gun. He can’t swim, partly because the West Bank, unlike Israel, does not have the sea Liat loves so much. ( The book is dedicated to Ms. Rabinyan’s former lover, the artist Hassan Hourani, who drowned in 2003.)
The romance intensifies quickly, though Liat is concerned from beginning to end, less about him, but that her relationship goes against all she was taught.
“Cut this off quickly,” Liat tells herself after their first night together. “And never see him again.”
Needless to say, she does.
Ms. Rabinyan found success at an early age. Her first novel, “Persian Brides,” based on two days of her Iranian grandmother’s memories, brought her acclaim at 22. Her second novel, “Strand of a Thousand Pearls,” also did well.
She worked on a third novel, which she shelved after six years. It took six more years to write “All the Rivers.”
Though love stories between Israelis and Palestinians are not uncommon, this one drew the ire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government. Popular among younger readers, the book was recommended as high school reading, then suddenly and publicly pulled for possibly encouraging intermarriage.
Intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews are seen “as a threat on the separate identities,” said Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry official, in December 2015.
The backlash came quickly, at a time when many of the nation’s leading, if leftist, literary idols were under attack for being not sufficiently dedicated to the Israeli cause.
The ministry backed off slightly, allowing some teachers to use the novel in classrooms. What Ms. Rabinyan found disturbed her: It was the students, amid the nation’s palpable drift to the right, who did not want to read the book.
“Nowadays kids in Israel and in Palestine are so swept up with this wave of nationalism,” she said. “The kids themselves rejected the book.”
But Ms. Rabinyan said she would not give up hope for a peace deal.
“I refuse to let go of my instinct of being in contact with others’ pain,” she said. “This is turning your back. I refuse.”