The Distortion of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Contemporary American Fiction: A Study of The Haj

Abstract

Approaching The Haj (1984) as a colonial novel which views the Palestinian people as a barbaric race threatening the existence of Israel, the paper aims to undermine critical assumptions which categorize the book as historical representation of the Middle East conflict. Published at a time in which sympathetic American voices were raising a debate over the legitimacy of Israel’s imperialistic policies in the Arab world, particularly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, The Haj deployed a counter-discourse aiming to degrade the image of the Palestinians and the Islamic religion. The paper argues that The Haj, which depicts Palestine, prior to colonization, as a primitive country inhabited by nomadic barbarians coming from neighboring desert communities, is not a historical portrayal of the Middle East conflict but a replication of racial representations integral to American cultural mythology about a pre-colonial America populated by an inferior people. The paper also points out that the author's vision of the Arab-Israeli conflict is integrated into hegemonic/racist discourses incorporating narratives of barbarism and Orientalism perpetuated by the American culture industry since the 1980’s when controversy in the West about radical Islamic movements and political Islam reached culmination..