“Treachery and Translation: The Allegiances of the Hebrew Language and Jewish Identity in Emile Habibi’s Palestine and al-Tahir Wattar’s Algeria,” Poetics Today, forthcoming.
In fraught settler-colonial contexts, cultural and linguistic encounters across ethnic, religious, and political battle-lines can often be construed as betrayals of the nationalist struggle. To the Arabs of Palestine after 1967 and Algeria after independence in 1962, the Hebrew language (and the Jewish communities it represented) increasingly became a source of suspicion through its association with French and Israeli colonial power. In this article, I analyze two Arabic novels published in 1974—Emile Habibyi’s The Pessoptimist and al-Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake—whose contents, contexts, and afterlives contend with themes of treachery and fidelity, both linguistic and political. The Arab protagonists of both novels are lifelong traitors who collaborated with the French or Zionist occupiers, and their relationships to the Hebrew language and Jewish identity are mediated by proximity to occupation. Likewise, the authors, Habiby and Wattar, were preoccupied with betrayal their entire careers—either being accused of it themselves, or accusing it of others—because of the struggle over language and political power in the settler-colony. By analyzing treachery in the lives and literatures of these authors, I show how Jewish identity becomes a “third variable” in a binary settler-colonial struggle, rendering various forms of translation, solidarity, and hybridity across Arab and Jewish publics untenable.