Two novelists, one an Israeli, the other a Palestinian, offer differing imaginative conceptions of the conflict. The Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua (1936- ) sets his novel The Lover (1977; trans., 1977) in the time of the Yom Kippur War. The novel is a dense and dreamlike account of Israeli life in the period, describing tensions between Arabs and Israelis, men and women, eastern-European Jews and Jews from Spain and North Africa. The narrators are Adam, a big, strong, impulsive, bearded auto-repair shop owner; his meek and anxious wife, Asya, whose narration consists solely of fantastic dreams; their talented, eloquent, and spirited 15-year-old daughter, Dafi; and an Arab Israeli boy of Dafi's age, Na'im, whom Adam employs in the shop. Later in the novel, this quartet of narrators is joined by Gabriel and Veducha. Gabriel, Asya's lover, is a 30-year-old Israeli orphan, back in Israel after 10 years in Paris. His grandmother, Veducha, is dying, and he wants to secure his inheritance, consisting of her house, formerly owned by an Arab, and her car, a blue 1947 Morris. The lives of these characters are beautifully, painfully, and meaningfully intertwined.

The book begins with Adam's narration: "And in the last war we lost a lover. We used to have a lover, and since the war he is gone. Just disappeared. He and his grandmother's old Morris." Note the use of the pronoun we.

Gabriel is introduced to the narrative when he arrives at Adam's shop, breathing heavily, as he pushes the Morris into the garage. The car won't start. Gabriel thinks it needs only a screw, while Adam can see that there are spider webs growing on the engine and that much must be done to repair it. When Gabriel returns to the shop to collect the car, he faints from hunger. He later explains that the car belongs to his grandmother, that she is in a coma, and that he is penniless until she either awakens or dies. Later, in a mysterious spasm of sympathy, Adam takes him home to live for a while. It is there that Asya and Gabriel become lovers.

In the household are Dafi, the daughter, and Na'im, the Arab boy. The boy works in Adam's shop, where all the mechanics are Arabs--one is a cousin who has recruited him for the job. There they listen to Arab music until aware of the presence of Israelis, when their radios go silent. At night they retreat from the city--dominated by Israelis--and return to their villages in the countryside. Na'im is taken up by Adam and in the course of things gets a key to his house. Mesmerized by the opportunity, he enters the house secretly, and encounters Dafi, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. When Gabriel's grandmother miraculously emerges from her coma, Adam arranges that Na'im live with her, as a convenience for him and for Veducha. Na'im is central to Yehoshua's fevered view of Arab-Israeli relations.

At length, Gabriel leaves to meet his obligation to do military service, taking the car with him. When the family does not hear from him, Adam begins a relentless day and night search in the religious areas of Jerusalem. He at last encounters Gabriel, disguised in the traditional clothing and facial hair of the religious sect he has joined to escape from his army unit in the region of the Suez Canal. Three oddly ecstatic, dancing sect members had been in the desert blessing the Jewish forces.

Gabriel then proceeds to narrate his adventures in the Yom Kippur War, scenes of hunger, boredom, fear, chaos, noise, and brutality from his own Israeli officers. The car had at first been appropriated by an officer, who drove them both deep into the Sinai Desert. As his military service dragged on, Gabriel was able, with the help of the three sect members, to steal it back and drive to their compound in Jerusalem.

Now fearful and weak, Gabriel leaves the sect and allows Adam to install him in a hotel room. Asya hurries to join them at the hotel. Adam "liberates" the Morris from the sect. Clearly, the car has a symbolic role: It's a blue 1947 Morris, made in Britain. Blue is the color of the Israeli flag, and 1947 is the year before Israel's independence (from British rule). That the car requires from Adam a mighty effort to bring it to life--as did the Jewish nation--and repeatedly undergoes various problems (described as "exhaustion," for example) is also suggestive.

While Asya, Adam, and Gabriel are at the hotel, Dafi and Na'im consummate their relationship with a fierce sexual encounter at Adam's house. After long sections of the book narrated alternately by Na'im and the old grandmother, Veducha dies, and Na'im summons Adam to her side.

After seeing the dead old lady, Adam has trouble starting the Morris: He says, "It's exhausted after the long journey," and "The car's going to fall apart under me and yet I can't bring myself to leave it. I've spent too much time searching for it up and down the land." Having found Gabriel, now unaccountably with Asya, and dispatched Na'im back to his village, Adam sees himself alone, "standing beside a dead old car from '47," and realizes, "there's nobody to save me."

In the end, the theme of the novel is that Israelis and Arabs are locked in mystery, locked together in unending and unbending relationship. They are like lovers. The pronoun we used in the first sentence denotes a collective loss suffered by all. They all, on both sides, have seen their lovers disappear.

In the end, for Adam, the "car battery is absolutely dead." No spark. No movement. He thinks of Na'im, telling himself that Na'im has "become a little lover in the course of a year." The headlights of the "car lose him [Na'im]"--as he moves off to return to his village--and "he disappears around a bend in the road."

The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, (1974; trans., 2001), a novel by Emile Habiby (1919-98) is entirely indebted to Voltaire's Candide. The novel makes a detailed and ironic comparison between itself and Candide and suggests a likeness between Candide and Saeed.

Saeed, Habiby's comic hero, tells of his life in Israel, in the form of a letter to an unidentified friend. The letter has been sent from outer space, where friendly extraterrestrial beings have taken Saeed after rescuing him. He had been perilously stranded atop a very sharp, pointy pillar, unable to move or dismount. Saeed in this state is a striking image of the Palestinian condition--on the single horn of a perilous dilemma. It has taken supernatural efforts to rescue him. From this perspective, Saeed tells of life between the poles of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian resistance: a life wavering between optimism and pessimism--hence the term pessoptimist.

Saeed's character is dense and paradoxical: He is tactless and gullible, shy and fearful, filled with the foolish courage of the innocent and optimistic, yet cowardly and underhanded and convinced that all is lost. Eager to please, personally and politically, he eventually joins and leads the Union of Palestinian Workers and then becomes a spy (unrewarded and unrecognized) in the Zionist secret service. In this role, he befriends his boss, Jacob, and comes under the thumb of Jacob's boss, "the big man," a sinister, cruel, and sometimes stupid overseer.

Self-deprecating and funny, he describes his born-again beginnings: During the fighting in 1948, Zionist forces "waylaid us and opened fire, shooting my father," but a stray donkey came into the line of fire and took a bullet for him. A member of a family sent to the refugee camps outside Israel, Saeed eventually sneaks across the border back into Israel.

Thus begins Habiby's story of a Palestinian catastrophe, propelled by Israeli aggression and reactionary Arab politics. The focus is on institutionalized cruelty, as when Saeed is imprisoned in Shatta jail and beaten to a pulp by guards, each with "thick, strong legs and a mouth wearing a smile worse than a frown. They all seem to have been formed in the same mold." At the same time, ironic criticism is leveled at the "Arabian princes" who make huge profits from the toil and sweat of the people, the same "drunken princes who roar in fury, accusing of treason those who demand implementation of the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council."

Saeed's son, Walaa, has become a rebel against Israeli oppression, a fighter (a fida'i). In the contents of the treasure chest Wallaa has found not just money, but arms, which are indeed treasures to a fighter. One of the most touching scenes in the novel is that of Walaa's last stand. He is hiding in a cellar with all his treasured weapons, and he tells his mother, who has come to persuade him to surrender, that he has always lived in a cellar. Then he dies, as Saeed watches from the seashore.

The final chapter finds Saeed back on the stake he sat on at the beginning. There is no one to help him. No friends come to his assistance--a telling comment on the Arab condition. Finally, he sees his "master," the man from outer space, whom he begs to save him; the master, however, replies, "When you can bear the misery of your reality no longer but will not pay the price necessary to change it, only then you come to me." Nevertheless, Saeed is borne aloft, over a jubilant group below expecting a cloud to pass so that the sun will shine.

In an epilogue, the recipient of the letters--that is, the text of the novel--visits a mental institution in search of Saeed. But Saeed is not there. The reader is therefore left to infer from Saeed's not-so-secret life (as the predicament of the Palestinians is also not so secret) the fate of Palestinians: to be deposited on the point of a high stake, an unresolvable dilemma. From there it is a short distance to the madness induced by Israeli oppression, and, finally, there is nowhere else to go but outer space--toward the possibility of a magical intervention and rescue.

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