“The Land is Mine”: Elias Khoury Writes Back to Leon Uris^†

† “The land is mine” is the title of Book 2 in Leon Uris’s Exodus (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 197.

Abstract

This essay explores the architecture of erasure, physical and discursive, in literary representations of Palestine. Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (1998; trans. 2005) is read contrapuntally with Leon Uris’s The Haj (1984), with particular focus on the politics and poetics of settler narrative and counter-narrative. The study argues the case of Palestine problematizes the settler colonial paradigm as theorized by Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. Hence, the focus, here, on a Jewish American novel instead of Israeli narratives serves to suggest that the Zionist settler enterprise is inseparable from US imperialism, and therefore challenges conceptualizations of a purely settler phenomenon in Palestine.

• Khoury
• Elias
• Palestine
• postcolonialism
• settler colonialism
• Uris
• Leon

Notes

† “The land is mine” is the title of Book 2 in Leon Uris’s Exodus (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 197.

1 For further discussion of settler colonial forms as distinguishable from colonial ones, see Banivanua-Marr and Edmonds (2010); Bateman and Pilkington (2011); and Veracini (2013). In 2011, in response to the rising interest in this field, a new scholarly journal entitled Settler Colonial Studies emerged from Australia, a canonical settler locale, as a vehicle for the work of scholars who share this concern.

2 Masalha has explored transfer as typical of Zionist historical practice before and after 1948. For more information on Masalha’s exploration of transfer, see Masalha (1992, 1999, 2012).

3 Said (2000b) argues the Palestinian narrative of dispossession has faced western attempts to revoke permission to narrate the Palestinian experience.

4 Patrick Wolfe has identified the conquest of labor as an historical precondition to the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. See Wolfe (2012) in special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.

5 In 2011 a symposium entitled “Translating Palestine,” held at the American University in Cairo, gathered Khoury, Humphrey Davies (the translator who rendered his novel into English), and Yousry Nasrallah, the Egyptian filmmaker who produced the cinematic version in 2004.