Adversary as protagonist: Palestinian Fiction by Mahmoud Shukair, Hanna Ibrahim and Ibtisam Azem mediated through the perspective of Jewish Israeli characters

This study examines three Palestinian works, Hanna Ibrahim’s short story “Infiltrators,” (1954), Mahmoud Shukair’s short story “Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cat” (2004) and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2014). Remarkably, each features a Jewish Israeli as a central character in the story; more intriguing, in each, the story is mediated through the perspective of that character – focalized by him or her. I address the significances generated by using focalization as a rhetorical strategy, particularly fraught because the perspective is that of a character from the other side of a national conflict. My analyses address whether the narrator reinforces the focalizer’s perceptions or undermines them, and how the technique of focalization unsettles established perceptions and offers critique of the system. I work through how conveying a story through the perception of a character on the opposite side of the conflict foregrounds and complicates structures of representation and power dynamics.