ABSTRACT Under the Forest of Text: 1948 De-populated and Largely Destroyed Palestinian Villages More than 418 Palestinian villages were depopulated and largely destroyed by Zionist/Israeli forces in the aftermath of the issuance of the 1947 UN Partition of the country and the 1948 war. The sites of quite a few were made invisible by covering them with forests. This paper, however, focuses on the textual erasure, partial or complete, of these villages from Israeli texts. I examine strategies of covering, of covering up, of making forget, including absenting, truncation, and misleading selectivity of villages' histories in these texts. And if we think of re-naming also (many sites were re-named) as an act of erasure, of replacement of what will be the target of displacement, then could we conclude that the Zionist movement had even begun rendering the Palestinian landscape at large invisible before the war? I compare the entries of selected villages in Encyclopedia Judaica, especially volume 9, and All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and De-populated by Israeli n 1948 (edited by Walid Khalidi). But for two peoples who are haunted by what lurks beneath the surface of things, I also examine the villages' "present absence," especially in the short story of Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, "Facing the Forest," and the poem "The Eraser," in the collection Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008.

Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir (2008), has been almost universally hailed as a brilliant and visionary anti-war film. Winning scores of international prizes, this "haunted autobiography" is largely understood as a harrowing exhumation of repressed traumatic memory. In my close, contextual analysis, I demonstrate that Folman's "tormented psychoanalytic journey" of remembering the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre--offers a skillful simulacrum of penitence. Instead of foregrounding a condemnation of aggression, the film systematically denies Palestinian subjectivity and contributes to their erasure. Rather than rejecting Israeli discursive patterns, the film reproduces hegemonic discourse, humanizing youthful Israeli soldiers, while paradoxically legitimizing violence against the Other. Rather than daring and revelatory, the experimental use of CGI and Flash animation in Waltz with Bashir can be seen as contributing to a further veiling of Israeli complicity. In these ways, I read the systematic avoidance in the film as eerily analogous to the "indirect responsibility' of the Israelis in the massacre itself, as cited in the Kahane Report. In their essay "Old Wars, New Wars," members of the Pil and Galia Kollectiv argue that in films like Waltz with Bashir, "the experience of war is presented as an amnesia... framed as completely external to culture and representation...in war, one is literally alien to oneself." They further argue that "the horrific condition of warfare in the postmodern age does not derive from the irresolvable friction between the supposed normality of everyday life and the real rawness of fighting, but, on the contrary, from the smooth blurring of the two." Hence the perceived dichotomy between states of war and states of peace is a fantasy in post-industrial states where militarism is an everyday part of life. My critique further highlights that Folman's intention to create an anti-war film positing the innocence of the common soldier is not a convincing project when most Israeli citizens are conscripted participants in militarism. The final thrust of my paper is a discussion of the film's critical reception, which has generally lacked nuance. I argue that such apolitical reception is only possible in a world in which the erasure of the Palestinian is well underway. In a successful closed circuit, the film helps to produce a passive viewer who will see the Sabra and Shatila massacre as an isolated past event, rather than a deranged process that continues to this day.

In the same year as the Balfour Declaration (1917), Franz Kafka wrote an important short story, Jackals and Arabs and published it in "Der Jude," the leading Zionist journal of the time. The story which unambiguously references the Zionist project in Palestine, dramatizes an encounter between a European travelling through the desert, his Arab guide, and a pack of jackals. A seemingly objective narrator presents the Arab as cynically abusing his position of power over a wretched, downtrodden pack of jackals who clearly represent the Jewish community. Throughout the story, the jackals do not tire of speaking to the traveler of their disgust with the Arab's filth and ask him to kill the Arab. Despite the story's disturbing racist overtones, and despite its relevance to the brewing conflict in Palestine, the vast majority of literary critics have failed to note the political and historical context of the story. In their decontextualization of Kafka's text, most literary scholars have argued that the Arab should be read as symbolizing the Czech or the Gentile, rather than taken at face value as a Palestinian Arab. Relying on extensive research, I argue that Kafka's story and the critical work surrounding it, are deeply informed by a Zionist narrative whose goal is the physical and symbolic erasure of the Palestinian. I demonstrate that Kafka--the quintessential author of the marginalized--invents a new Other: a fictional Arab who stands in stark opposition to the real one; an Arab who is an oppressor rather than a victim of colonialism. Furthermore, the paper maintains that by evading a contextual discussion of this invented Arab, scholars have missed a ground-breaking reading of the parable, which actually allows us to see Kafka in a completely new light: the un-Kafkaesque. Kafka gives us a fascinating example of the oppressed in a crucial transitional period in which he is transforming into an oppressor--an Other who is in the process of creating the Other of the Other. To continue to avoid any discussion of the disfigured figure of the Arab in Jackals and Arabs is like reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness without discussing the Belgian genocide of the Congolese, or like reading Camus' The Stranger without seeing the sacrifice of the Algerian subject.

This paper argues that Israeli director's Etyan Fox's film The Bubble (2006) is more a colonial fantasy, which articulates power and mastery over the colonial Other, than an anti-occupation film. By focusing on the absences, silences, and displacements of the film regarding the representation of queer Palestinians, my reading traces the transformation of Ashraf from Noam's lover (the gay Arab as the "good Arab," in the Israeli imaginary) into the demon lover (the sexy suicide bomber) who kills himself and his lover in an act of primal revenge. In the process of exposing the self-delusion of its twenty-something anti-occupation protagonists, the film constructs a bigger delusion about Palestinian queerness that is blind to the pernicious ways sexuality is deployed by the Israeli military occupation to consolidate its stranglehold on the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. This paper discusses the practice of sexual blackmail of Palestinian gays that the Israeli shabak engages in and its role in creating and consolidating the perception in the Palestinian community that equates gayness with collaboration. I argue that while homophobia in Palestinian society certainly facilitates the perception of gays as threats to national security, Israeli recruiting practices, which always prey on the most vulnerable groups in Palestinian society, give much credence to these fears. Ashraf's visibility in The Bubble goes hand in hand with the invisibility in the film of Palestinian men from the West Bank and Gaza who survive on the streets of Tel Aviv as sex workers. These "sweet boys," not only foreground the exploitative nature of the queer encounters between Israeli and Palestinian men, they also expose the myth of Israeli hospitality to gay Palestinians on which The Bubble is premised. But the presence of those queer Palestinians has to be suppressed along with any Palestinian queer activists who are Israeli citizens. The Bubble's representation of violence is how Ashraf's queer demonization is finally completed. In the film, Israeli violence is incidental and pragmatic, while Palestinian violence is premeditated and primal. The film, then, undermines its anti-occupation stance by its failure to represent Israeli violence against Palestinians in terms other than those of the hegemonic national discourse and by its insistence on the fantasy that the violence that punctures the idealistic bubble still comes, with the queer Palestinian, from elsewhere.