The epigram “traduttore traditore” links translation to treachery: to translate is to betray the original. In linguistically-fraught colonial contexts, however, translation, and the movement of texts across ethnic, religious, and political battle-lines, can also be construed as the betrayal of one’s allegiances and communities. Periphery-periphery translation after the epistemic violence of colonialism becomes especially charged: to the indigenous Arab in Palestine after 1967 and Algeria after independence in 1962, Hebrew and Jewish identity become sources of confusion and potential treachery, and the textual movements or "passages" of Arabic and Hebrew transform into latent threats. In this article, I analyze two Arabic novels published in 1974—Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and al-Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake—whose contents, contexts, and translational afterlives contend with themes of betrayal and fidelity, both linguistic and political, and movement across such rigid binaries. The Arab characters of both novels descend from a long line of political traitors who sided with the French or the Zionists, yet who continue to displace betrayal onto Jews to cope with their own family legacies. Jewish identity becomes a "third variable" in a binary settler-colonial struggle that cannot fully be categorized, and captures the history of successful colonial suppression of hybridized anti-colonial solidarity.