JERUSALEM, May 6 — 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 September 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 list of approval 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, was published last week 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, and must decide how far to take a love she knows her family and friends will disapprove and will even see her as a traitor to her upbringing, her Jewishness.
“She takes him out of the multitude and acknowledges his humanity, her humanity,” Rabinyan said. “He’s not the Palestinian people. He’s one person.”
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 book opens with Liat, who, like 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 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 Rabinyan’s former lover, artist Hassan Hourani, who drowned in 2003. She wrote a poignant farewell to him a year later in The Guardian.)
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. “Decide with a heavy but determined heart that it’s better this way, better for both of us. And never see him again.”
Needless to say, she does.
“In New York, they became more like each other, same land, same experiences,” Rabinyan said of her characters. “They went into this bubble.”
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 caught 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, and certainly the available option of institutionalising 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 Ynet a leading Israeli news site, in December 2015.
The backlash came quickly, at a time when many of the nation’s leading, if leftist, literary idols — including Amos Oz, AB 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. What 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, which had generally been popular.
“Nowadays kids in Israel and in Palestine are so swept up with this wave of nationalism, exploitative of their instincts,” she said. “The kids themselves rejected the book. They said: ‘It’s a lefty book. I don’t want to read it.'”
Prospects for peace look as bleak as ever, though President Donald Trump has, to some surprise, been pushing early in his administration for what he called the “ultimate deal.” He met on Wednesday with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, in the White House.
Rabinyan said she would not give up hope, no matter how remote a deal might seem now (which, spoiler alert, are about as remote as the chances were that Liat could ever give in to Hilmi completely).
“I refuse to let go of my instinct of being in contact with others’ pain,” she said. “This is turning your back. I refuse.” — The New York Times
