Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Israeli Space in Yehoshua’s Literary Works · 283This is the Ben-Gurion Airport, where the real sexuality of the Jews’ state
bustles: “Here, and here alone... was the erotic epicenter of the Jewish
state. The Jewish heart might throb in Jerusalem and the Jewish brain
might grow sharp or soft in Tel-Aviv, but the passionate focus of Israeli
life was here” (285).
The question of the demonic zone also arises in the novel The Mission of
the Human Resource Man (2004), but in another and surprising form. The
heroine is a foreign worker who was killed in a terrorist attack in Jeru-
salem. The Arab responsible for the explosion is not a focus in the work
but exists in the background in terms of the realization of the potential of
the demon in The Liberated Bride and of a situation that is the result of the
absence of borders. In this book Yehoshua claims, “I tried to return the
spiritual significance of Jerusalem by means of the foreign and beautiful
woman. Suddenly I noticed that Jerusalem became tattered in the Jewish-
Arab conflict and we as well as the Palestinians are completely losing its
global spiritual dimension.” The solution for Jerusalem is, in his opinion,
to upgrade it to some kind of spiritual level.^49 According to him, this
book expresses the passion of all of our sufferings.
In a demonological novel of the Middle Ages, Ma ̔ase Yerushalmi (A Je-
rusalem tale), a father warns his son not to go on voyages by sea. But the
son does not heed the father’s advice and runs into danger of death in the
land of the demons. Similarly, in The Mission of the Human Resource Man,
Yehoshua tells of a mother who wants to return her murdered daugh-
ter’s body to Jerusalem so that she will also have the right to cross the
borders into the land that is like a Paradise that will receive her, but it is
also a demonic zone in which her daughter was murdered. The wander-
ings into other spaces, such as Russia or Jerusalem, are to a great extent
wanderings into a parallel land. The heroine finds herself in an alienated
demonic zone and a dangerous land of demons, which causes her death.
However, the human resource man also finds himself in a delusional Rus-
sian space.
Conclusion
Yehoshua perceives space as the foundation of the world and as a start-
ing point for any orientation. According to this approach, the place is
the basis of the identity, where the individual connects to the world and
through the world to himself.^50 Two peoples, Jews and Arabs, live in the