Complicated path of an Israeli-Palestinian love story
JERUSALEM— Dorit Rabinyan’s love story 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 Sept. 11 attacks. It was based on her real romance that she turned into a prizewinning novel in 2014.
Then 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. “She said, ‘You are even lower than the soil on the soldiers’ shoes!’ ”
Her book sales then doubled. People bought multiple copies and posted photos of themselves holding the book in bookstores. 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, has just been published in the United States by Random House, and 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 free speech controversy here or the backdrop of a conflict that will not heal, now 50 years since Israel took control of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
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.
Still, the book is tightly woven around the conflict. “This is what we call ‘the situation.’ ” she said. “It’s like the climate. Another season of the year, a fifth one.”
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.
The couple find that their similarities and differences are very complicated. Liat, a high-minded, educated woman of the left, sees the only solution as two states, fair but in the end separate. Hilmi thinks there is no dividing the two people on the same land. (This argument, of course, has only intensified.)
The book is too finely drawn for easy symbolism, but at one point Liat sums up what nearly all Israelis have thought, knowingly or not, of their Palestinian neighbours — sometimes not so much antagonism as the wish it simply was not an endlessly prodding problem.
“Only 10 minutes,” she scolds. “Just disappear from my life for 10 minutes.”
Though love stories between Israelis and Palestinians are not uncommon, this one drew the ire of Israeli 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, and certainly the available option of institutionalizing them by marriage and starting a family — even if that does not happen in the story — between Jews and non-Jews, are seen by large portions of society as a threat on the separate identities,” Dalia Fenig, an education ministry official, told the Israeli news site Ynet in December 2015.
The backlash came quickly, at a time when many of the nation’s leading, if leftist, literary idols — including Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman — were under attack by a right-wing group for being “moles in culture,” not sufficiently dedicated to the Israeli cause.
The ministry backed off slightly, allowing some teachers to use the novel in classrooms.