In focusing on the shared culture straddling the Middle East's great divide, this new journal is a hopeful step towards mutual understanding
The Israel-Palestine struggle has not prospered from scrutiny. Few modern conflicts have caused more columns to be written, solutions proffered, hands wrung, bile spent or vengeance waged – and vengeance it so often is, even when dressed up as justice. (In the words of the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, "start your story with 'secondly', and the world will be turned upside-down".)
Amid the denunciations and counter-denunciations, counsel and complaint, from the Middle East to the west and beyond – not to mention the televised grief of Israeli occupation, Hezbollah rockets and the like – what tends to get bypassed is daily life, common culture, the actual stuff that comprises the societies the commentators spend so much of their energy trying to bring together (or keep apart). This normality is usually more important to the people who experience it than anything the rest of us witness in the news. From Homer to Chaucer, Primo Levi to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, literature has constantly taught us this: life goes on.
I was talking about this to the London-based Palestinian author Samir El-youssef last week, just before the official launch of his new online literary magazine, the Arab-Israeli Book Review. "I grew up in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon," he told me. "Do you think we talked about politics every minute of the day? My grandmother was more interested in whether I had brushed my teeth!"
Samir's new project helps to redress the narrative imbalance, away from policy and nationhood, towards people. As such, it is political in the most comprehensive of senses. Established in collaboration with the Jewish author and academic Ariel Kahn, the magazine evolved out of the pair's much-admired Arab-Israeli Book Club, which was set up in north London in 2009. The club, which meets bi-monthly, pairs books by Arab and Israeli authors "to create an ongoing dialogue between different voices". The Review seeks to go further, including reviews, essays, fiction, poetry, podcasts and – yes – commentary, providing a forum for cultural exchange.
I like the notion of dialogue between books (any decent reviews editor knows the beauty to be found in juxtaposition) and I like the aims of the Review, which seeks to "go beyond the news headlines and explore the Middle East through its rich, playful and provocative literature". This is about the long game – something that, sadly, will be familiar to anyone involved. "Our struggle has gone on for so long, and given the present indications it probably will see us all out," says El-youssef. "And one has to pass the time somehow."
To mark its launch, the site has published a new and extremely witty short story from Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, the forthcoming collection by Israeli author Etgar Keret, featuring a faithless husband refusing to take responsibility for his infidelity. An accompanying essay by El-youssef explores Keret's unique brand of comedy and its provenance in the conflict. Where El-youssef had once thought Keret's "jokes" to be a product of "innocence and political naivety", he has since come to realise that humour and absurdity bring us back to our humanity.
"Nations whose collective survival and national dignity are generally believed to be under constant threat demote daily reality to a source of shame," writes El-youssef. And yet: "One can't always overlook one's daily life in favour of national security … Gradually people's attention becomes more focused on individual, everyday needs. Writers who love humour cannot be oblivious to such an obvious irony."
The site currently includes a review by Hasan Ommary of Keret's collection ("imagine Woody Allen and JL Borges had met and decided to write stories together"); an article on the Hebrew anthology Poets on the Edge; five poems by Kamal Boustany, newly translated into English; a photo essay by Judah Passow; and a podcast of readings from two classics of Arab-Israeli literature, S Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh and Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun. A monthly newsletter will be emailed to subscribers.
The Review is strictly anglophone but it isn't simply there to service the diaspora. "Since the Arab Spring … we have had messages from people in Libya, Egypt and all over," says Ariel Kahn. "Most of them have been looking for a space in which to learn and think about these relationships and regions differently."
I am reminded of WH Auden's remark that poetry "makes nothing happen". Hopefully the Review will help its readers, however marginally, however gradually, to bring about such change. Before peace must come understanding.