Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 12 It is in this decade that Israeli literature also changed as more novels were written on the Israeli-Arab conflict than before (Benziman, 2010). The primary genre in which the conflict was represented changed as well, from short stories to novels (Morahg, 1987). As Bruner (1991) notes, a change in genres “may have quite as powerful an influence in shaping our modes of thought as they have in creating the realities that their plots depict” (Bruner, 1991, p. 15). And so this change at this time should be related to a general perception that more must be written in order to understand the conflict; and it allows, at least theoretically, a more polyphonic (see Bakhtin, 1981) representation of the conflict, in which a variety of voices from the Israeli-Jewish narrative can be heard and in which even the Arab voice could be audible. The Arab characters in these texts became more rounded and complex (Levy, 1983; Morahg, 1986). They were no longer stereotypes (Ramras-Rauch, 1989), who only project onto the Jewish hero (Ben-Ezer, 1999). Instead, they stood for themselves, and exposed the reader to the Arab perspective of the conflict, and not only the Jewish-Israeli one (Perry, 1986). This new representation of Arabs and their more visible presence also resulted in ending the dichotomy and hierarchy between Jews and Arabs, and posited a more equal discourse (Gertz, 1993). Yet other aspects of the representation of the conflict in cultural texts show that they did not change as did the ethos of conflict, but actually went in a different direction. The focal point remained an Israeli-Jewish one; even when the Arab characters became more complex, they still told the story of how the Israeli-Jewish narrative looks at them. As Oppenheimer (2008) points out, these texts, like most of Israeli texts that represent Arab characters, were written with an Orientalistic approach, framing the topic from a supercilious perspective of how the Jewish-westernized society sees the inferior Arab-eastern one. What actually happened is that even though important changes occurred in the conflict and in the cultural texts of the time, the texts did not endorse the changes that occurred in the ethos of conflict. Looking at the tendencies shown in these studies and based on Benziman’s (2011) study of the representation of the conflict as a whole and not solely on the representation of the Arab characters, at least four themes of the representation of the conflict in the 1980s can be seen which contradict the changes in the Israeli ethos of conflict of the time. The tendencies listed below exist in most of the major texts of the decade which deal with the conflict, but in what follows only a few examples will be given to illustrate them: