Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Israeli Space in Yehoshua’s Literary Works · 277house in Jerusalem, in whose cellar his son discovered incest between
his father-in-law and sister-in-law. When the son reveals this secret to his
wife, Galia, he is thrown out of the guest house.^25 In this novel, Jerusalem
is a city laden with symbols. The guest house is a microcosm of the Israeli
experience and Israeli space. It is the antithesis of the heavenly Paradise.
This Paradise contains contradictory aspects. On the one hand, there is
the need to know and as a consequence to pay the price and abandon
Paradise. On the other hand, there is the need to cope with yearning for
it and to accept the knowledge that Paradise cannot be achieved in Jeru-
salem in this time.^26
The Middle Eastern scholar who journeys to Jerusalem wants to free
himself of the yearning for Paradise by repeatedly entering it. He is ac-
companied on his journeys to and from Jerusalem by Rashad, his Arab
driver, who is described as a “driver or guide” and “the haunt of the
haunt” (Liberated Bride 553), and Fuad, the Arab watchman, who holds
the keys to the archives and is called the “future partner and guardian of
the secret” (548). Both lead him in a borderless space. They are experts at
breaching borders, and the wandering Israeli is reflected in their eyes as
a sick creature. As Fuad says: “You Jews are always coming and going. It
will make you sick in the end” (283).^27
Gurevits and Eran also describe a restless attitude toward local
space.^28 The Israeli always moves on the way to the place. He is never
found inside. His attitude toward Israel is characterized by restlessness
that stems from the absence of a complete identity between him and his
land. The native is always planted in place. He is born in it and is bound
to it. An overlapping exists between the place in its physical sense and
the place as a world of meanings, language, memory, and belief. How-
ever, Yehoshua’s Israeli has no such naturalness, but rather a feeling of
basic alienation, because of the disconnection between the Jewish and the
Israeli identity.
As indicated, Yehoshua places the demonic relations between Jews
and Arabs and the question of the bond and their common fate at the
center of his works. There is intimacy between the Jewish hero and the
Arab hero in the novel Facing the Forests. In The Lover and A Journey to the
End of the Millennium, Yehoshua presents the bond between the Jew and
the Arab as a closeness that sometimes exceeds the one between the Is-
raeli and the Jew from the Diaspora. Nonetheless, in The Liberated Bride he
emphasizes the need for separation between the two peoples that stems,