The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 265phrases as “there is no peace without justice, and there is no mercy and
no pity before justice is rendered.”^29
Around the time of the change in the cultural horizons one could find
both attitudes—old and new—expressed by the same people. Thus in
1942 a close friend and colleague of al-Ḥusseini, the Jerusalemite Chris-
tian Palestinian writer and intellectual Khalīl al-Sakākīnī (1878–1953), a
fierce anti-Zionist Arab leader, was asked by an American journalist who
visited Jerusalem, “What is the solution to the conflict?” He replied, “It
will be solved in one of two ways: either our land will remain ours, or
it will be taken away from us by force,”^30 echoing almost precisely the
words of the young hotheaded chicken in the Memoirs. But al-Sakākīnī
was also against wars, and he advocated even in 1948, “Return your
swords to your shields and do not fight anyone; there is enough room on
earth for everyone,” even as he knew that no one would listen to him.^31
A move toward nationalism happened also in Hebrew literature of the
same era, though on a smaller scale. Thus at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century one could still find stories like Ḥemda Ben-Yehuda’s “Ḥavat
bney Rekhav” (Bney Rekhav’s Estate), published in 1903, in which a Bed-
ouin tribe is seen as a lost Jewish tribe and is eventually turned into the
ideal Zionists—a Hebrew-speaking avant-garde tribe of shepherds and
cultivators of the land.^32 But the stories of the 1950s already conformed
to the more familiar definition of nationalism.
That clash between the two types of ethos clearly marked the history
of the debate over Memoirs. While the novella was written in the old
style, expressing a message of tolerance and communality, the debate
took place already inside the new era, where a message of struggle had
the priority. In fact, one can see, when viewing the responses to the Mem-
oirs by Arab critics, an escalation in the phrasing of the criticism leveled at
the story as time passed. While the earlier criticism usually only politely
hinted at the problem, the more recent critiques were harsher in tone.
Thus al-Sayyid al-Dālī writes in 1943: “The reader might be surprised
to learn that Arab unity was discussed in these Memoirs by that hen in a
way as never before. Indeed, the reader’s level of surprise might increase
when he learns that the Palestine problem was also raised in these Mem-
oirs. Rather than overtly stating this—suffice it to just mention it here.”^33
But in 1981, Fārūq Wādī writes that “consciously or not, [al-Ḥusseini] cre-
ated a Palestinian hen that betrays Palestine.”^34 In this climate, the author