Another Black September? Palestinian writing after 9/11

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the dormant figure of the “Palestinian terrorist” was revived for American public discourse. The Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh responded critically to this development in her 2004 novel Rabi’ Harr [Hot Spring], a Bildungsroman about a “terrorist” whose turn to violence is motivated by the bleak conditions of life under occupation after the Oslo Accords and by the 2002 attacks on civilians in Jenin. Khalifeh’s novel suggests that the human rights narrative takes on a particular urgency in Palestinian writing after 9/11, as a means of countering the renewed currency of invidious stereotypes of Palestinians.