Writing Israeli Settlements: When Literature is Politics

In June 2017, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories will have lasted half a century. Only months after the victory in the 1967 war, Israel established its settlement project, which is internationally deemed illegal and hence a contentious topic both global and local discussions. In recent years, the topic of the settlements has also made its way into contemporary fiction. While aspects as disparate as the history, politics, religion, or architecture of the settlements have been studied (cf. Gorenberg 2007, Zertal & Eldar 2005, Selengut 2015, Weizman 2007), their portrayal in literature has yet to receive scholarly attention.

In this talk, I will take on this critical oversight and redress the question of the literary imaginations of the settlement project in texts written by Jewish American writers, thus getting a comparable corpus. My selection includes Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), Risa Miller’s Welcome to Heavenly Heights (1995), Nathan Englander’s “Sister Hill” (2012), and Orit Arfa’s The Settler (2013). I argue that the political conflict over the land has not only found its way into cultural products, but that these texts are used to posit support or opposition to the ‘Greater Israel’ settlement project. I will position this talk at the intersection between contested political realities, the role of religion within contemporary Zionist, Israeli, and Jewish diaspora identities, and the fictional sphere of literature as a forum in which these questions can be negotiated.