Amman - 

After a research effort and extensive follow-up over a period of five years, the Palestinian Research Center in Occupied Jerusalem published a literary research author entitled "Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey... The Zionist Mentality in Etgar Kert's House, the Narrowest House in the World."

In the book, writer and storyteller Samia Al-Atoot strives to answer two questions: Why do the Israelis build wall after wall?

Do they aim to isolate themselves or isolate others?

In addition to revealing the positions of some Israeli intellectuals.

The author, who covered the period from 1492 to 2019 in 142 pages of large pieces, was gifted by the author to the heroes of the Gilboa Tunnel and saluted them, saying, "The Phoenix always rises from the ashes, and when they wall the earth with a wall of despair, we open a window or dig a tunnel."

Resistance and song

Al-Jazeera Net met the Jordanian writer and asked her whether "Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey" has anything to do with the escalation of armed resistance in the occupied West Bank, or are there other factors? She replied that the resistance was a catalyst for research, investigation and exploration of what the future holds.

She added, "In 2014, an Israeli song spread widely saying, "Farewell, the Land of Honey... I was not born to kill... with your honey, O bee, do not sting me." It calls on Israelis to emigrate because of the ongoing wars on Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. These two factors were a motive for picking up the idea and working on it with studies. Literary document that monitors what is happening inside Israeli society.

"Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey" issued by the Palestinian Research Center in occupied Jerusalem (Al-Jazeera)

The idea of ​​the book also came when I read Al-Atout about the smallest or narrowest house in the world (50 meters in the Polish capital Warsaw) and the name of the Polish-Israeli writer Atgar Crete, a storyteller and screenwriter who opened doors for him in Europe and America through translating and publishing his stories in English and other languages.

But the irony is that the Polish nation that survived the "Holocaust" and despite the fame of her son, she said to him, "You are a Polish writer who writes in Hebrew." And when "Atgar" went to live for a few days in the narrowest house in the world in Warsaw, he said to his mother, "I am now staying in my house," and she replied, " Your fame in Poland is more important to me than your fame in Israel," which proves their separation and their doubts about the continuity of Israel and that the Zionist mentality changes from bad to worse and shrinks to the point of entering this narrow house.

Israeli racism

The writer dedicated an entire chapter on "Etgar Crete" as a model for the educated class in the Israeli entity, where he says in his interviews with foreign newspapers that he feels the suffering of the Palestinian other and at home he does not oppose the policy of his entity, but rather considers it a forced policy to deal with reality.

According to her opinion, "there is a contradiction experienced by the educated class between what they realize are the rights of the Palestinian people and they do not speak out against the policy of their entity, and whoever does this awaits a package of pressures and harassment that may push him to emigrate," as detailed a previous report by Al-Jazeera Net entitled "Lost Hope and a Dead End ... Intellectuals." Israelis recount the journey of emigration without return.

Al-Atout says that she prepared a study that covered the last 500 years, during which she monitored how Judaism turned into Zionism, and then chauvinistic racism, which relied on negating the other, and dealt with the exodus of Jews and Arabs from Spain in 1492 and the discovery of America, where the Jews went to the nearest countries, Morocco in particular, and they resided from their fear of repeating what happened in Spain Some of them resorted to a "mallah" in the city of Fez, and in other cities that are overlooking the sea, and a navigator of an old Jewish neighborhood closed with walls with one or two gates to enter or exit.

According to what was stated in the book “Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey,” the name “melah” came from the salt industry. It is also said that the Jews were salting the bodies that were executed by the Sultan, and this is what the writer documented, and there may be other accounts.

Al-Atout objectively and impartially monitors the life of the Jews in Europe in "ghettoes" (isolated) and their claims to a national existence for them after the French Revolution and their persecution there and their flight, and the current reality of Israeli society and the extent of their dissatisfaction with their successive governments that continue aggression and assassinations that do not differentiate between a fighter, a sheikh, a woman, a child, a journalist, and so on. Some of the Israelis have become certain that the "state" they dreamed of will not and will not be realized. Therefore, they are looking for emigration, escape or return to the countries from which they came to the homeland of the Palestinians.

In her research, the storyteller Al-Atout reveals that those who immigrated to Palestine with the help of the British Mandate, which facilitated, armed and trained, did not live with the owners of the land, but rather resorted to building a “kibbutz” (agricultural and military settlement) and a “moshav” (agricultural village). The life of "navigators" and closed lanes is "ghettoes", but after the number of immigrants to Palestine increased, they established settlements and lived in them.

Isolate themselves or isolate others

But what happened after the Nakba of 1948?

The researcher says that she discovered during the stages of her studies that those who settled in Palestine could not live extensively, and therefore they built in 2002 an apartheid wall whose goal is not, as they claimed, to achieve security and prevent Palestinian operations, but rather the real goal is to isolate others abroad or isolate themselves inside as if they were They live in "salines" or "ghettos".

Writer Samia Al-Atout considers that the liberation of Palestine and its people's obtaining their legitimate rights takes place through struggle (Al-Jazeera)

In this regard, Al-Atout refers to what Pinhas Wallerstein, one of the settler leaders in the occupied West Bank, said when he compared the wall of "Auschwitz" (a Nazi camp in Poland) to the apartheid wall, saying, "The wall of Auschwitz was built by our enemy, but the separation wall was built by us ourselves." Therefore, the Zionist mentality that It cannot open up and deal with the other. It is, in fact, an isolationist mentality that isolates itself behind walls or in a house of "aggressive sulfur" in search of the illusion of safety through the banishment of the other.

From this point of view, and the talk of Samia Al-Atout, some calls appeared to the citizens of the Israeli entity, urging them to keep their original nationalities or try to regain them in order to leave at any time.

Perhaps the most important findings of the researcher are the results of the study of psychologists who tried to analyze the Israeli personality, that it bears the characteristics of isolationism, self-love, and paranoia. .

I think lofty

"Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey" did not ignore the Israeli fanatics who base their ideas and principles on the isolationist mentality that they have now reached... They want to banish the other and do not believe in his existence. They plan to establish a pure entity and displace the owners of the land or commit massacres, as happened in 1948, based on the thought of the Zionist Joseph Klausner. Who says, "We are not required to descend this time to the level of primitive, barbaric peoples.. Our hope is to become the masters of this land at some point in time, based on the civilizational superiority that distinguishes us from the Arabs."

This arrogant thought, according to what was monitored by Samia Al-Atout, confronted the Israeli writer and researcher in Arab culture, Isaac Epstein, who called for cooperation with the Arabs, preserving their right to land, and approaching their Islamic culture as a culture that protected the Jews throughout the ages.

Comparisons between the "salines" and Jewish quarters in the Arab and Islamic countries and between the "ghettos" in Europe during the past centuries indicate the distinguished treatment in most of the historical periods in which Jews were treated in the Arab world, unlike their treatment in European countries.

Two paths without a third

Among the most prominent findings of Samia Al-Atoot in "Farewell to the Land of Milk and Honey" is that the liberation of Palestine and the obtainment of its people's legitimate rights takes place through struggle and resistance and what she called "the liberation of Judaism from Zionist racism". Therefore, the chauvinistic racist mentality cannot continue or exist side by side. With a system that claims to be democratic.

And she added, "It is a mentality that not only affects the people, but also affects thinking minds, including philosophers, historians, and academics, and works to threaten and prosecute them for opposing the entity's policy, and many of them chose to emigrate, such as Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, and Shlomo Sand."

The novel advanced the story

As a storyteller, Al-Jazeera Net asked the Jordanian writer about the transformations of literary genres, and she said that the novel overshadowed the short story, but during the past twenty years it has returned to existence through the craze for the very short story and the short story in which the good and lesser-quality products were mixed.

Covers of collections of short stories and novels by Samia Al-Atoot (Al-Jazeera)

She believes that the technical or critical criteria are no longer clear for this fictional form, which has spread widely with the presence of social media. Despite this, the short story is flourishing with the emergence of the Short Story Forum Award, which is organized by the Cultural Forum in Kuwait in cooperation with the American University there, which led to moving the narrative scene. in the Arab world.

In her response, Al-Atout said, "We do not notice much interest from critics in the new collections of stories, and perhaps most of their attention is focused mostly on the novel, despite the emergence of a generation of female storytellers who are distinguished by mastering the art of the story, such as Sahar Malas, Siwar Al-Subaihi, Dr. Amani Suleiman, Magda Al-Atoum and others, and it constitutes a new wave that deals with issues social issues relating to women.

 Women and boat migrants

She referred to her collections of stories, especially "Picasso Cafe", and said that they dealt with women's issues and their exposure to oppression, inequality in society and work, and human suffering in general.

As for "The Bell Ringer... The Female Spider," she delved into the topic of cloning. In one of the stories, she imagined a father who encounters his son murdered in the street, but he does not care that there are four or five copies of his son.

While in the last group, 35 stories "like any blessed corpse" dealt with the problems of boat migrants to search for a better life in a place other than their homeland and their exposure to drowning and death. It called for changing the lived reality in their countries and not necessarily escaping in search of a better future, adding, "My mind does not imagine that a person should leave his homeland." And he risks his life on a boat with waves in search of an illusion in another place.

It also revolves around the civil wars in our region and the scourge that befell its people. Some stories dealt with the conditions the family suffers from within the political and economic conditions. Most of them come about the human search for a better life.

She concluded her speech to "Al-Jazeera Net" by announcing her new novel, "The Cave of Machfila", which talks about the heroes and martyrs of the city of Hebron, Ramallah and others, and a collection of stories entitled "Al-Qayyan".