SOURCE: "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Metaphor in Recent Israeli Fiction," in Poetics Today, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1986, pp. 603-19.

In the following essay, Perry notes the tension between Arabs and Israelis reflected in the fiction of Amos Oz, Avraham B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman.

Just prior to the Six Day War, a popular song writer, Naomi Shemer, wrote a song that quickly turned into a hit and included the following lines:

How dry are the water cisterns,
 How empty is the marketplace
 No one visits the Holy Mount
 In the Old City [ . . . ]
 No one goes down to the Dead Sea
 On the Jericho Road.

Right after the war, she changed these lines:

We have returned to the water cisterns
 To the marketplace and square
 A shofar calls on the Holy Mount
 In the Old City [ . . . ]
 Once more we go down to the Dead Sea
 On the Jericho Road.

("Yerushalayim...