In view of some intellectuals in the Islamic world the writings selected for translation from the Arabic serve to foster clichés of the distant and mysterious East. Samir Grees on why such mistrust is based on false perceptions.
Transformations in Palestinian Literature
Leo Tolstoy prefaced his
Anna Karenina with the following statement: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Palestinians today are unlucky enough to be counted among the world s leading families of multifarious misery, the Zionist project having transformed them, time and again, into refugees in far-flung places-and also into refugees on the land of Palestine in which they were born.
Some of them have had to live through the experience of exile and alienation, of refugee camps and endless waiting. Others have been obliged to live the lives of impossible citizenship, since the Arab who lives on the Land of Israel can never be the equal of an Israeli citizen. And, ever since the Oslo Agreement, and despite the media s ability to hold forth at length on the virtues of the Peace Process, the process itself has offered Palestinians only unprecedented varieties of misery. This evidently has been fu