Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust,the Nakba and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

Mornings in Jenin and Holocaust memory

Susan Abulhawa, though an American citizen, is closely connected to life in Palestine and its mnemonic community which unites Palestinians in the diaspora and in the land. The Palestinian narrative of history depicted shows us that she is anchored within this community; her role as a diaspora Palestinian, and thus her participation in the American mnemonic community with its attention to Holocaust memory, could be one explanation for her narrative choice to include the topic. Abulhawa visited Jenin shortly after the 2002 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) incursion during the Second Intifada (Palestinian Uprising, 2000–2005) that left the refugee camp destroyed and led to allegations against the IDF of a massacre, though these are later dismissed. ¹⁴ The author describes seeing Jenin at that time as the trigger for writing the novel. Mornings in Jenin was first published in 2006, then entitled The Scar of David. The reissued version of 2010 is currently the most successful Palestinian diaspora novel; so far, it has been translated into 27 languages, and Filmworks Dubai has bought the film rights. Given the novel’s reach, it has received scholarly attention. Research has focused on issues of identity (Abu-Shomar, 2015; Al-Ma’amari et al., 2014; Ebileeni, 2017), trauma (Raslan, 2017) and postcolonial approaches to Palestinian literature (Al-Jahdali, 2014), but none of the scholarship to date has engaged with the question of Holocaust memory within the Palestinian novel.

Mornings in Jenin tells the story of four generations of the Abulhaja family. Their ancestral village is Ain Hawd, which, after the Nakba, became the Israeli artists’ colony Ein Hod. Described as a bucolic space in an idealized period of coexistence and interfaith friendships, everything changes in 1947/1948 with the British forces, Jews and Arabs fighting each other. What would become Israeli forces expel the villagers, including the family of Dalia and Hasan Abulhaja. In the chaos of these days, Moshe Avaram forcibly takes their baby, Ishmael, bringing him to his wife Jolanta, a Holocaust survivor whose survival left her unable to bear children. The boy they renamed David is marked with a scar on his cheek that later allows his Palestinian family to identify him. After the Nakba, the Abulhajas live in dire circumstances in the Jenin refugee camp, where Amal, the main protagonist, is born. Later, David, who has become an Arab-hating Jewish Israeli, serves in the then Occupied Palestinian Territories where he and his biological brother, Yousef, repeatedly come up against each other. During these encounters, the soldier abuses the Palestinian. Yousef later becomes a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fighter to exact retribution for his family’s losses and the torture suffered at the hands of David and other soldiers. At the end of the novel, set around 2000, David and Amal meet first in America and later in Israel/Palestine. Their children physically leave the conflict behind: American-Palestinian Sara and Jewish Israeli Jacob choose to share a flat in the United States in a narrative move that could be read as a metaphor for a future of coexistence of the ‘cousin nations’, too. Yet significantly this can (for now) only be imagined abroad, displaced from the site of conflict itself. The use of the biblical/koranic names is another image that highlights connections between the two peoples, along with Amal, the Arabic word for ‘hope’. ¹⁵

The Abulhaja family functions as a personalization of the Palestinian historical narrative. They experience all the key events of the interwoven history with Israel: The British Mandate period with the growth of Zionist settlement, the Nakba, the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and thus the family’s place of refuge, ¹⁶ the development of the Palestinian liberation movement with its terror attacks, the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila, ¹⁷ ending with the Second Intifada. The relationship between Holocaust and Nakba in Mornings in Jenin is also understood from a Palestinian perspective. The two are presented as a casual continuum: The European events were the trigger for large numbers of Jews coming to Palestine and the Zionist settlements, which ultimately lead to the Nakba. ¹⁸

Holocaust memory is brought into Mornings in Jenin in three different instances; these provide the structure for this article. First, in the figure of Ari Perlman, who, as a child, fled his native Germany and Nazi persecution along with his parents. In Jerusalem, he becomes Hasan Abulhaja’s closest friend before the Nakba forced them apart; Ari comes up again at the end of the novel. Second, in the scenario of Moshe and Jolanta and their stolen son, and third, in the depiction of another Israeli soldier of German descent whose behaviour after the 1967 war in the now occupied West Bank causes a nun helping the victims to call out his behaviour as not unlike that of other German-speaking soldiers, making an implicit reference to Nazi Germany.

Holocaust memory before the Nakba: Ari, the German-Jewish refugee and soon-to-be Palestinian refugee Hasan in Jerusalem

Only eight pages into Mornings in Jenin, Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis is made explicit when we are introduced to the close friendship between Hasan and Ari, a Jewish refugee physically marked by Hitler’s Germany: ‘He moved with a limp, the legacy of a broken leg and the Brown Shirt who had broken it’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 8–9). The boys became friends in 1937 in Jerusalem when the situation between Jews and Arabs is described as one of peaceful coexistence, offering a sugarcoated image of what was historically a time of high ethnic tension, especially during the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 (Wasserstein, 2002: 82–131). Despite their initial lack of a common language,

a friendship had been born in the shadow of Nazism in Europe and in the growing divide between Arab and Jew at home, and it had been consolidated in the innocence of their twelve years, the poetic solitude of books, and their disinterest in politics. (Abulhawa, 2010: 9)

The boys’ friendship is a bond much stronger than the outside forces potentially pushing them apart: even their families grow close as the mothers send traditional foods to each other when their sons visit.

Despite the growing violence between Zionist, Palestinian and British forces throughout the country, Hasan travels from Ain Hawd to Jerusalem to see Ari; their friendship is more important than distance or danger. Soon, a sense of foreboding is introduced into the narrative, when the 13-year-old Arab boy wants to stay with the Perlsteins to continue his studies with Ari. The refugees from Nazi Germany who support this plan know that only education counts when one has lost home and belongings. But Yehya, Hasan’s father, who lives according to the traditions of an agricultural village, overrides his son’s wish because he worries that education will take Hasan from the land. Later, in the refugee camp, Yehya repeatedly asks his son’s forgiveness, because his decision condemned Hasan to life as a labourer. The value of education for refugees brings the Jewish and Palestinian experience into dialogue: the Perlstein family lost all they had but made a new life through education and the Abulhajas are about to lose their home but will not be able to improve their situation without an education. Indeed, later in the novel, Hasan encourages his daughter Amal to get as educated as she can. Her gender plays no role, unlike in the more traditional society before the Nakba when her mother Dalia was married off to Hasan as a teenager, having received no schooling whatsoever.

Several years later, Hasan and Ari, now young men, have to contend with an all the more violent reality. The earlier depiction of a Jerusalem of interfaith coexistence makes the chasm between the two periods seem even more disturbing. Abulhawa (2010) portrays the Arabs in Palestine as becoming increasingly suspicious of Zionist intentions (p. 23) when Jewish immigration intensifies after the liberation of the concentration camps. ¹⁹ When asked how he feels about these developments, Ari, the Jewish refugee, draws on his familial experience of persecution from which his traumatized refugee parents continue to suffer. He sees the need for a haven for Holocaust survivors and knows that this will lead to change in the social and political makeup of Palestine, but he hopes that Arabs and Jews will live together in peace: ‘“You’re like a brother to me. I’d do anything for you and your family. But what happened in Europe . . .” Ari’s words faded into the awful images they’d both seen of the death camps’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 24). The reference to Europe is the crux of the story, as Hasan points out:

Exactly, Ari. What Europe did. Not the Arabs. Jews have always lived here. That’s why so many more are here now, isn’t it? While we believed they were simply seeking refuge, poor souls just want to live, they’ve been amassing weapons to drive us from our homes. (Abulhawa, 2010: 24)

From Hasan’s perspective, the growth in immigration and especially the increase in Jewish paramilitary forces, who in 1945 had joined to become the Jewish Resistance Movement, are threats. He fears that the land of his forefathers will be taken over even after what he depicts as centuries of coexistence. Hasan stands behind welcoming Jews as neighbours, especially those escaping persecution in Europe, but not the Zionist project of creating a state. He is conflicted between empathy and fear: he is afraid of the effects of the Holocaust’s aftermath on his people and yet ‘he understood Ari’s pain. He had read about the gas chambers, the camps, the horrors. And it was true: Mrs. Perlstein’s eyes looked as if life had packed up and left them long ago’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 24). It is in this internal conflict that Abulhawa brings her case to the fore: she highlights a solidarity between victims that goes beyond national narratives, loyalties and fears, making Hasan understanding Ari’s pain an illustrative example of Bashir and Goldberg’s ‘disruptive empathy’.

The friendship does not end in spite of the political situation pitting their peoples against each other. Expecting the worst, Hasan offers Ari refuge at his aunt’s house in the Old City in case Jerusalem comes under Arab control in a future battle. And while 1948 separates the friends forever – they now live in countries at war with each other – we learn at the end of Mornings in Jenin that Ari’s last memory of Hasan is that the Palestinian risked his life to smuggle the Perlstein family hidden on an oxcart to safety in what had become Israeli Jerusalem. Here, a final act of empathy and friendship is what remains from the Jerusalem depicted as a place of coexistence but now overlaid by violence and separation.

Holocaust memory during the Nakba: Ain Hawd, Ishmael/David and Jolanta, the barren survivor

After this pre-Nakba first mnemonic entanglement set tellingly in Jerusalem, where the novel makes both coexistence and violence seem possible, Abulhawa also interweaves the events of the Nakba with Holocaust memory. Using the village setting brings the fellaheen into focus, the farming villagers who, in the wake of the Palestinian exodus, have become a key symbol of Palestinian memory and identity, not only in their connection to the land, but also because they represent steadfastness, in Arabic sumud, a central element of Palestinian cultural resistance (Swedenburg, 1999). Simultaneously, this setting is a reminder of the topos of losing home and land (a theme introduced through Ari and his family), and the Israeli destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages during and after the Nakba (Davis, 2010: xvii).

The events of the Nakba happen in the shadow of the Holocaust, too, personified through Irgun ²⁰ fighter Moshe. When he first comes to Ain Hawd, we encounter a colonial man: his gaze traces Dalia, the beautiful Arab woman with her clinking ankle bracelet. But, as it turns out, he is not looking for sexual relations; instead, a combination of anti-Arab racism and love for his wife Jolanta, a concentration camp survivor, cause him to think ‘how unfair it was that this Arab peasant should have the gift of children while his poor Jolanta, who had suffered the horrors of genocide, could not bear a child. It made him weep inside’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 36). ²¹ Suffering is pervasive in this raw part of the novel; indeed, it creates a chain reaction from memory of suffering to current suffering, and back to memory. In this context, the vexed questions of vengeance and victim-turned-perpetrator come up. While introducing both into her narrative, Abulhawa does not exclusively apply them to one side thus presenting the potential for both as common human behaviours. Moreover, the portrayals of her protagonists are suffused with empathy, locating her writing on what Rothberg has identified as the solidarity end of the political affect axis in memory discourses (Rothberg, 2011: 525).

Unlike some of the other figures, the depiction of Jolanta is unquestioningly empathetic although her people aimed to create a state in the place Palestinians considered their own and despite the fact that her husband personally victimizes the Abulhajas:

Having lost every member of her family in death camps, Jolanta had sailed alone to Palestine at the end of the Second World War. She knew nothing of Palestine or Palestinians, following only the lure of Zionism and the lush promises of milk and honey. She wanted refuge. (Abulhawa, 2010: 36)

The young survivor is not interested in politics; she longs for safety in a place where she hopes to free herself from ‘memories of depravity and memories of hunger. She wanted to escape the howls of death in her dreams, the extinguished songs of her mother and her father, brother and sisters, the unending screams of dying Jews’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 36). In these memories, we see no tendency towards denial or minimizing Jewish suffering during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Jolanta’s posttraumatic distress is ongoing; finding a new homeland does not alleviate it. Indeed, the section reads as if Jolanta, though possibly naïve or merely hoping to forget in a place of safety, is not seen as actively implicated in Palestinian pain.

Moshe, however, is given a more complex story. He longs to help his traumatized wife to have a family – not only did she have to endure the camps, she was forced to be a prostitute, a fate that left her unable to conceive (Abulhawa, 2010: 36) – and is therefore willing to steal Dalia and Hasan’s baby Ishmael. He loves Jolanta dearly and hopes to lessen her pain by giving her the child she so longs for: ‘The injustice of it all solidified in him a resolve to take – by force if necessary – whatever was needed’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 37). Stealing a child, of course is a problematic storyline, especially in light of the medieval anti-Semitic canard of the Jewish stock figure who kidnaps children to use their blood in religious rituals. The contradiction between the disregard for the pain of the Palestinians and the care for his wife, however, shows that this scene is not merely a modern revival of an anti-Semitic trope.

Unsurprisingly for a man depicted as a Zionist fighter, Moshe believes that his people have a right to the land and – if need be – to even take it by force not least because of the Jewish tragedy in Europe. This belief creates an analogy between the child and the land, but at no point in the novel is this potential metaphor fleshed out. Possibly, this has to do with the Palestinian-child-becoming-Israeli storyline being an intertextual reference to Ghassan Kanafani’s (2010[1970]) Return to Haifa (A’id lla Hayfa). ²² The novella tells the story of a Palestinian couple, Said and Safiyya, who had to leave their child behind during the Nakba. Returning to Haifa in 1967, Said finds that their home has been taken over by a Holocaust survivor couple who raised the child as a Jewish Israeli. The boy, now a soldier, forces his biological father to leave because he had abandoned him. Said concludes that only a military solution is possible to the conflict which will pit his two sons, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, against each other. With this conclusion, Kanafani imagines a different resolution to Abulhawa, who in her rewriting has the siblings reconcile and their children making a life together, albeit abroad, while the conflict stays unresolved.

Ishmael/David discovers his familial roots much later in life; his parents kept his origin a secret. Abulhawa’s depiction of the Israeli family is sympathetic. We observe, for example, how a mother dotes on her son by cooking the foods of her European origins: ‘Jolanta was delighted to watch David eat the kreplach she had made. The kugel and blintze’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 94). We also learn that the Holocaust experience shapes Jolanta’s every thought:

She did not want her boy to join the army. But she had no choice, nor did her son. Israel was a tiny haven for Jews in a world that had built death camps for them in other places. Every Jew had a national and moral duty to serve. (Abulhawa, 2010: 94)

Such sentences, which force the reader to enter the thought processes of many of Israel’s citizens and Jews around the world who consider the country their haven, are only too understandable if projected into the mind of a Holocaust survivor. By showing these posttraumatic fears, Abulhawa once again disturbs a Palestinian narrative that looks mostly inwards due to the political situation of the occupation. Here again, the author creates a situation of disruptive empathy, as a national narrative that upholds continuing victimhood is challenged even in the face of the Israeli–Palestinian imbalance of power relations.

David grows up with the Holocaust as family memory, in a society in which, post Eichmann trial, the Holocaust features centrally in collective memory and identity. In keeping with the trend of Israeli and Jewish diaspora journeys to visit the lost homes in Europe (Gruber, 2002: 131–154), Abulhawa includes David’s memories of this ‘difficult trip’. He visits his mother’s hometown and the concentration camps of Poland: ‘“Other than the day she died, seeing the death camp where she lost everything was the saddest time of my life,” he said’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 276). Later, he takes his visiting sister Amal and niece to their ancestral village, now Israeli Ein Hod, a trip eerily reminiscent of his journey to Europe. The Israeli woman now living in the former Abulhaja house, however, ‘[r]ealizing that the strangers at the door were there on an errand of Palestinian nostalgia’, refuses them entry (Abulhawa, 2010: 318).

The Holocaust shapes young David’s understanding of the world and his every experience. We see this when he encounters the Palestinian prisoner who looks so much like him. Readers know that it is his brother Yousef, who recognizes Ishmael/David because of the scar on the soldier’s cheek. The Israeli lacks such knowledge, but their similarity has his mind racing with ‘too many wrong questions. Is it possible they captured a Jew by mistake? A Jew who is related to me? A Jew who came to Palestine without knowing his relatives had also survived?’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 100). At this point, the Nakba is not part of David’s cultural archive – collective memory and its role in the present are tied only to his mnemonic group, in other words, ‘survival’ can only refer to the Holocaust. Some months later, he is at a checkpoint when Yousef attempts to pass. During the previous encounter, another soldier had pointed out their similarity. David refuses to even contemplate what the Palestinian’s face could mean, but his body reacts:

Dread washed away the boredom. Jolanta’s butterfly wings fluttered in David’s belly; Moshe’s demon breathed down his neck. The secret he did not know, did not want to know, had followed him and he hesitated before getting out of the jeep. (Abulhawa, 2010: 105)

As his fear of the unknown mounts, he beats the man viciously. Here, once again, Abulhawa hints at questions of vengeance and victim-turned-perpetrator. These points, however, are not written out in a black and white manner, instead David, too, and even his violent outbursts, are drawn with empathy as his familial legacy is shown as a burden driving his actions in the present. After this beating, Yousef believes himself impotent causing him to leave the woman he loves not wanting to deprive her of children, possibly linking his story to that of Moshe, Jolanta and David. But he chooses another way that does not include children; having given up hope, he becomes a fighter for the Palestinian cause, which in the 1960s meant joining the PLO headquartered in Jordan.

In the end, David learns to live with the unavoidable truth of his brother’s face; the repressed past of the Nakba emerges. The guilt over the stolen child bore heavily on both his parents but dealing with it took a long time. Jolanta

had always found excuses where guilt arose, but the truth always returned, daring her to face it. Now she could and wanted to set the record straight. To embrace the woman who had given birth to her David and find reconciliation in the truth. (Abulhawa, 2010: 256–257)

Her guilt becomes an urgent plea for reconciliation through love for a child, but Dalia, the Palestinian mother, cannot partake in this: her traumatic losses threw her into a depression that killed her. The novel has no happy end of reconciliation for these suffering mothers of the same son. Moshe drinks to stifle his guilt, which as it turns out, concerns not only the theft of the baby but also his acts in 1947/1948:

He had wanted wholeness: a homeland, a wife, a family. He had fought to save the Jewish people. But at his heels now were the awful evictions, the killings, the rapes. Moshe could not face all those faces, their voices. (Abulhawa, 2010: 99)

Ultimately, he confesses to his son more than just David’s origins:

He had unveiled the secrets of the Irgun, the atrocities they had committed to run Palestinians out of their homes. ‘Mercy was a luxury we could not afford’, Moshe said. He had described the faces that haunted him. ‘Too many, my son’. (Abulhawa, 2010: 277)

Moshe’s confession portrays him as haunted and riddled by guilt, and he does not justify his actions, even if they were committed for his wife, his future family and his people’s national cause. Here, memory of guilt joins the narrative and ultimately brings David into Nakba memory from the other side, while we, as readers, are once again forced to accept that there are no simple narratives that can cater only to one side’s ‘truth’. But Abulhawa also writes within the Palestinian mnemonic community: while the Israeli side is humanized in Moshe and Jolanta by way of their struggles with their conscience, the discussion of Moshe’s memories is more problematic as the portrayal of the events of 1947/1948 lacks historiographical nuance. To name but one example, Abulhawa avoids the fact that both Arab and Jewish fighters committed atrocities.

Nonetheless, in the scenes that reference Holocaust memory, what we find is an ongoing attempt to come to terms with acknowledging suffering also on the other side. When Amal and David finally meet almost 50 years after the family was ripped apart, Abulhawa once more personalizes disruptive empathy. For the Palestinian woman, learning that an Israeli soldier stole her brother to ease his wife’s Holocaust-induced suffering has a reconciliatory effect. Putting the story together helps Amal to come to terms with her history. But more than that, David’s – and implicitly his parents’ – acknowledgement of Israeli wrongdoings allows for openness and change. Both siblings, but especially David, the son of Palestine and Israel, understand the duality of the narrative of 1948 and the humanity of both sides. He tells his sister: ‘“I know the things my father did make him a terrorist, to you and others,” David said. “He did some evil things, but he was not evil. He was good to me. He was my father, Amal”’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 278). This comment, when considered within the broader framework of a novel set at the intersection of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the respective narratives of the common past, and the two histories of suffering and committing violence which are so intertwined and yet contested, reads like a direct call for empathy, empathy that goes beyond just caring for one’s own. As a reaction, another narrative element is added when Amal makes a veiled reference to their brother Yousef, the man David beat, as the assumed perpetrator of a large-scale terror attack on the Beirut US Embassy in 1983. Abulhawa thus once again challenges pre-drawn lines of interpreting past and present. Here, we are asked to rethink terrorist/freedom fighter labels, admit the dark sides of national struggles and to allow for the discomfort of not just multiple but contradictory narratives even within one mnemonic community.

Finally, their mothers are an important topic of conversation for the separated siblings:

David spoke of Jolanta with palpable devotion. In my mind, she was everything I had wanted Mama to be – loving, attentive, and affectionate. She had been a young girl of seventeen, frightened and weak, when Allied soldiers had liberated her camp. Her entire family had been murdered during the holocaust of World War Two. (Abulhawa, 2010: 273)

Once again, the text is an exercise in empathy, even though trauma and depression had incapacitated her mother Dalia, Amal ascribes no guilt to Jolanta who suffered so much. However, in the term ‘holocaust of World War Two’ and the non-capitalized form of the term, the genocide of European Jewry becomes one incident of mass killing among others throughout human history, thus challenging the singularity of the Holocaust. While, for the most part, the scholarship has moved beyond the singularity paradigm, ²³ in the context of Israel/Palestine, some will read this section as a marker of competitive memory. Ultimately, though, Amal focuses again on the Palestinian version of history, but she does so acknowledging once more the suffering of victims of both the Holocaust and the Nakba:

The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s. (Abulhawa, 2010: 273)

Here, Abulhawa reinforces her reading of the Holocaust as one case of a genocide among many when referring to the ‘Jewish holocaust’. Aside of that, she also offers a specific interpretation of historical cause and effect. In the novel and the associated Palestinian reading of history, this is the crux of the matter: the two events are intertwined, and even if Zionists only wanted to provide a haven for refugees and Holocaust survivors, it still led to the Nakba. However, for Amal, while acknowledging the forces of hatred and violence in Nazi Germany, what she interprets as Israeli guilt is much more palpable and real, aside from what was done to Jews in Europe.

1967, Jenin Refugee Camp: Israeli soldiers in the West Bank

In a scene set during the 1967 war in the newly occupied West Bank, Mornings in Jenin draws a third intersection between Palestinian and Jewish memory of cultural trauma. This intersection is the most taxing of the mnemonic entanglements because it could be understood as an equation between Holocaust and Nakba. Part of the challenge is that the reference to the Holocaust is short and not fully worked through.

Amal and her friend Huda, now in their early teens, survive the fighting in Jenin in a hole in the ground of their kitchen, but baby cousin Aisha dies in their care – the girls had nothing to feed her. As they come out of their hideout days later, the refugee camp is under IDF rule. A nun, who has come with UN forces to help, finds the girls and takes them to a hospital tent, but an Israeli soldier guarding it forbids them entry. Not intimidated, the woman asks whether this is because the reporters inside would see the state the girls are in after their survival in hiding. The soldier, festering with anger, threatens to shoot the nun who then challenges him:

‘Do it. You are no different from Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War’. She narrowed her eyes around her recognition of his accent and spoke to him in a language they both knew. His eyes expanded with surprise, then he responded in the same language and finally nodded his head with permission for us to proceed. (Abulhawa, 2010: 73)

This scene holds several complicated issues; the first is that the nun, Sister Marianne, who, in the light of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, could well be read as aiming to diminish Jewish suffering but her engagement is not written as a form of reparation. Indeed, she seems to be on a mission of human rights, supporting Palestinian victims in 1967 just like she helped Jewish victims after the liberation of the concentration camps. Second, drawing her as a German – or German-speaker – though is also thorny given how few Germans helped Jews during the Nazi period. The explicit comparison of those in power, Nazis and Israelis, further fuels the problem. In fact, the comment could be read as a ‘Israelis/Jews are the new Nazis’ comparison which equates Nazi fascism with the Israeli occupation. This analogy is problematic on many counts, foremost the historical one. When called out, however, the Israeli soldier, unlike the Nazis, is depicted as choosing humane action over following orders. The introduction of German seems to remind him of his former victim status – collective or individual. Whatever the trigger is, humanity and empathy win and the soldier lets the girls in to be treated. Thus, Abulhawa provides a new twist to the troublesome comparison that mingles the occupation with fascism.

2002 – Hope of coexistence in Jerusalem

Towards the end of Mornings in Jenin, the intersection between Holocaust and Nakba memory is established a final time as the narrative returns to Jerusalem. For Amal, seeing the city, the orphanage where she spent part of her youth and ‘to find Ari Perlstein’s office’ (Abulhawa, 2010: 282) are the first goals on her 2002 return to Israel/Palestine, a trip that also takes her to what is now Ein Hod and to Jenin, the place where she is to die. The friendship between the Abulhajas and the Perlsteins – the human carriers of the memory of both Holocaust and Nakba – is reestablished, reinforcing the importance of the mnemonic entanglement even by way of the novel’s structure.

Jerusalem, introduced as a haven of coexistence back in the 1930s, and the presence of her father’s best friend, Israeli Ari, enable Amal to face a painful truth: Her oldest brother, Yousef, the man tortured by David and other soldiers, is the main suspect in a bombing that killed 63 people. Here, we encounter another victim-turned-perpetrator in the name of a national struggle. The memory of suffering combined with a sense of guilt about atrocities committed in the name of one’s community creates a bond between Amal and Ari:

the ‘self-hating Jew’, as he was called by his countrymen; ‘my friend’ as Baba had called him – understood. And he pulled a blanket of compassion over my words. He drove the truck bomb into the U.S. embassy in 1983. To shield my words, to shield me and Yousef’s memory from the chill of the fact of these words. I saw it in his face. Our eyes met and interlaced, until two heavy tears fell like anchors, their weight yanking me to my seat as they disappeared on the red Jerusalem floor. (Abulhawa, 2010: 287)

Even if just for a short moment, Abulhawa recreates a Jerusalem of connections rather than divisions. Even the language used here, specifically ‘compassion’ and ‘anchors’ enhances the sense of understanding, open arms and reminders of joint belonging. Reviving an image created early in the novel, even after decades of conflict and violence, these Israelis and Palestinians manage to connect by way of lived ‘disruptive empathy’.

In a last narrative move, those who see the Others’ pain are brought together one final time. Ari says the Muslim prayer for the dead at Amal’s funeral after an Israeli soldier shot her in Jenin. Before the Nakba, disregarding religious lines, her grandfather Yehya had taught it to

the boy whose childhood and even whose right leg had been damaged beyond repair by Nazi bigotry. The limping boy with an only friend, taken to an Arab village to breathe fresh air, unpolluted by the awful memories of his parents, forever damaged by concentration camps no matter how much they tried to pick up the pieces of their lives. Ari, the hunted boy, suffocated and cramping in a taboon, while Arabs sought Jews, any Jew, to exact vengeance after 1948. Ari, the young man who watched his parents fade like ghosts into the mortal anguish of their memories, leaving him with relics of their lives, an eighteen-pearled brooch and shelves of books. (Abulhawa, 2010: 287)

Here, while engaging with the political situation and offering an imaginative, reconciliatory solution of sorts, Abulhawa does not whitewash anyone’s crimes whether they are German, Arab or Israeli. Instead, by acknowledging so much human suffering, she is once again calling on her readers’ empathy, an empathy that cannot but unsettle one-sided narratives.

Epilogue

In a recent article in The Guardian, Simon Baron-Cohen (2019) argued that empathy is the prerequisite for breaking the Israeli/Palestinian cycle of violence and counter-violence; indeed, he calls empathy ‘the vital first step in conflicts where both sides have dehumanized each other’. Abulhawa does not engage with Israelis’ pain caused by the conflict, but given the current power imbalance, this is no great surprise. Or, to put it in the words of a Palestinian friend, quoted by Baron-Cohen (2019), ‘It’s hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun’. However, the novelist does empathize with the suffering caused by the Holocaust although the denial or diminishing of the other side’s cultural trauma is a common element of the dehumanization rampant in Israel/Palestine. Here, Mornings in Jenin steps into the fray of both Palestinian and Israeli narratives as it draws its Israeli protagonists’ Holocaust trauma with empathy even as it is written within the national historical narrative. In her opening statement to the Boston Book Festival 2010, Abulhawa said, ‘To me, literature is a place where we can all meet to rediscover our common humanity’. ²⁴ Mornings in Jenin is exactly this: empathy for Jewish suffering of the Holocaust as well as Palestinian suffering of the Nakba and the occupation challenges readers to reconsider entrenched singular narratives. As the above reading shows, there are problematic elements in some of her Holocaust memory scenes, and yet, we encounter narrative choices fuelled by her empathic recognition of Israel’s cultural trauma. To refer to Bashir and Goldberg’s concept of ‘disruptive empathy’, seeing the pain of people supposed to be considered enemies means challenging antagonistic one-sided positions and hegemonic narratives underlying the conflict.

The reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine is increasingly contentious though: respective delegitimization is on the increase as is the physical separation between the two peoples. Both factors limit the growth of empathy. Aleida Assman (2015) maintains that memory, while certainly ‘a force for refuelling hatred and violence and thus maintaining and hardening divisions’ (p. 211), also has ‘transformative power that can help to improve hitherto divisive social and political relationships’ (p. 199). Abulhawa’s novel shows us that here, where memory is a force for change, literature can play a role. In imagining the lives and pain of the other side, Mornings in Jenin reveals worlds beyond the lived realities, both in the story created and in the mind of the reader. In her inclusion of Holocaust memory in the Palestinian historical novel, she engages in ‘disruptive empathy’: Empathy for the suffering of the Holocaust as well as that of the Nakba forces the reader to reconsider entrenched singular narratives. In their reading of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun through the lens of disruptive empathy, Goldberg and Bashir suggest that affect contributes to binational ethics and politics. Abulhawa’s primary objective is a rewriting of Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the West against a better-known (mainstream Israeli) narrative. But she does not do so at the cost of ignoring, minimizing or denying the continuing trauma of the Holocaust for Israelis, indeed, her empathetic reading is disruptive to the insistence on often-contradictory narratives because she presents a new framework for the ‘two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering’ (Said 2007: 208), a framework in which all memories of cultural traumas matter. For Edward Said, this stance is the basis of coexistence.

In the epilogue to Multidirectional Memory entitled ‘Multidirectional Memory in an Age of Occupations’, Michael Rothberg (2009) advances the theoretization of his influential concept by contemplating the meaning of Holocaust memory in contested situations, particularly Israel/Palestine. He posits that ‘understanding political conflict entails understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of the public sphere. The only way forward is through their entanglement’ (p. 313), encouraging us to think through the complicated web of violent actors/victims while bearing in mind the ethical implications of the ongoing occupation. Abulhawa does precisely this and takes it a step further as she confronts the entanglement of cultural trauma, victimhood and victimization linked to the Holocaust even as she tells a story of Palestine. By incorporating Holocaust memory into her novel, the literary text becomes the stage where, even within the unresolved political situation, overcoming stereotyping perceptions of the Other allows for their humanization. Mornings in Jenin exemplifies not only how cultural texts provide a space to explore new mnemonic links which are being drawn up against contested and reified national narratives but also the political role they play by performing a narrative that acknowledges the cultural trauma of the other side.