Uneasy in Zion

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THE year after Egypt and Israel did battle in the 1973 war, and three long years before President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt embarked on his peacemaking journey to Jerusalem, a young and rebellious Egyptian woman from Cairo’s elite defied her parents, her husband and her political upbringing by traveling across the divide into the mysterious, forbidden land of the archenemy.

Drawn by the taboo and by a gnawing curiosity about the Jews who had been vilified in her schoolbooks, she intended to venture into Israel for six weeks.

She stayed almost three years, working her way deeply into the political, religious, ethnic and socioeconomic complexities of the Jewish state and producing, here, a portrait of Israel that is warm, gritty, compassionate, angry and caring.

But ultimately, her exploration became something more intimate, more delicate, more troubling for her than a mere discovery of the enemy’s human face: She confronted herself. It is that confrontation, the tension about who she is and where she belongs, that vibrates like a melancholy bell through Sana Hasan’s chronicle of her sojourn in Israel.

It lends her book a novelistic quality, making her the protagonist in an exposure of both Israel’s foibles and her own. And it imparts a powerful sense of motion to this diary, for she changes during those years. She learns, she grows, she comes to understand and to value in ways she had not before.

Finally, she acquires the curse of the humane; she transcends state frontiers, moves beyond nationality and religion and thereby loses the comfort of belonging. “Having crossed so many boundaries, having invented so many Promised Lands, I could no longer find my way back home,” she writes at the end.

“I would have to make peace with an identity that did not depend on being part of a group, or a country. I would return to Egypt many times, but the world I had come to be most familiar with was that of the outsider, the stranger, the exile.

And though I would continue to long for a tangible homeland, I realized that for me its site would henceforth be no more than a place of memory or imagination, occasionally recaptured, only to be lost again.” So the joy of tolerance sets her sadly adrift.

Like a scattered few in other societies at war — the few who search for their own truth — Sana Hasan does not fit anywhere in the neat grid of definitions provided by that human organization we loosely call civilization.

Here, at the conclusion, her title, “Enemy in the Promised Land,” becomes a surreal, ironic self-indictment, a statement not merely of politics but of the most painful personal drama. If this book were not any of that, if it were merely Ms. Hasan’s observations of Israel, it would be enough.

With a keen eye and a flair for storytelling, she presents the full cornucopia of Israeli life, participating in much of it and taking us into some realms rarely seen by most Israelis themselves. Indeed, she seems to have every experience possible in Israel. About the only thing that she doesn’t manage to do is to serve in the army.

She does have a love affair with a high-ranking army officer, however, which runs like a frayed thread through the book, even creating at moments a fear that she is being set up for blackmail. Finally it unravels inconclusively. Underlying her journey are the stereotypes of Jews, which she has been taught, and Israelis’ stereotypes of Arabs, which she encounters.

As she flies to Israel in July 1974, she remembers her sixth-grade grammar homework: “The words underlined in the following sentences are in the nominative. Indicate the reason for this: “The battle for the sake of Palestine is a duty. “The Arabs will drive the Jews out of Palestine.”

But then she finds herself the object of false images, first as she is guided around the country by a Labor Party veteran, Rivka Guber, who is “amazed . . . by the fact that I spoke English so well. Never, she confessed, would she have dreamed that she would one day meet a young woman from ‘Arabia’ who was as highly educated as herself.” Soon after her arrival in Israel, Ms.

Hasan — already well known from an article in The New York Times Magazine advocating peace — is picked up by the politicians, who treat her like a showy trinket to be twirled boastfully. She does most of them in with sharp vignettes, while recognizing that her expectations of them are based on “the grotesque caricatures in the Egyptian newspapers.”

Menachem Begin, “the devil incarnate in Arab mythology,” invites her to lunch in the Knesset dining room and praises the Egyptians “unctuously” as “a more civilized, gentler people than other Arabs.”

She debates him toughly on Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and he disgusts her by summoning an Israeli Arab from a nearby table to hold forth obsequiously on “the many gains that benevolent Jewish rule had brought the Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

But at his invitation, she attends a convention of his Herut Party in Hebron, on the West Bank, recording the fierce pro-Jewish rhetoric and songs.

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Cite this clipping

"Uneasy in Zion," The New York Times, 1 March 1987, p. 7. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1987-050. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1987-050