SOURCE: "New Images of Arabs in Israeli Fiction," in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, May, 1986, pp. 147-62.

In the following essay, Morahg investigates the trend toward the depiction of Arabs in contemporary Israeli fiction as individuals rather than as abstractions.

Israeli fiction has been increasingly preoccupied with the implications of the Jewish response to the Arab presence in the land. Yet it has been habitually oblivious io the complex implications of the Arab response to the corresponding Jewish presence. This fact may well account for the general paucity and marginality of representations of Arabs in the fiction of several generations of Israeli writers, whose works form an illuminating backdrop for a new phenomenon: a body of narrative literature in which Arab characters figure in ways that are radically different from the functions traditionally assigned to them.

The corpus of narrative literature written during the...