Maha Nassar's Brothers Apart is an imaginative work of cultural history that breaks new ground in the historiography of Palestine/Israel by attending carefully to the subjectivity and intellectual life of the Palestinians who would become citizens of the new state of Israel after 1948. In this regard, Nassar's monograph builds upon recent scholarship—such as Shira Robinson's exemplary Citizen Strangers (2013)—that investigates the lived experience and political activism of the oft-neglected community of Palestinians living within the Green Line during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet an added virtue of Nassar's study is her successful bid to situate her account within a broader regional context, deftly documenting how Palestinian citizens of Israel sought throughout this period to overcome their isolation (physical as well as cultural/intellectual) by marshaling prevailing Arab and global-left discourses of decolonization and national liberation.
The key actors in Nassar's rich historical narrative are a number of luminary Palestinian intellectuals—mainly writers and poets—who dominated the world of Palestinian letters across two main generations, beginning with those who spearheaded a period of nationalist creative ferment under the Mandate. While several of the protagonists are certain to be familiar to students of Palestinian history and culture—Emile Habibi, Hanna Abu Hanna, Rashid Husayn, Hanna Naqqara, Mahmoud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim (among others)—Brothers Apart succeeds in casting their legacies in new light, connecting their intellectual and cultural output to larger debates concerning how to achieve political rights and equality within Israel (Chapter 2); how best to navigate the tidal wave of pan-Arab and Nasserist sentiment sweeping across the Arab world in the late-1950s (Chapter 3); and, especially after 1960, how to cultivate a collective politics, as well as a cohesive national body of committed literature, that would consistently assert “the primacy of Palestinian self-determination—rather than Israeli goodwill—as being the most viable solution to the conflict” (p. 135; Chapter 4).
The unifying thread throughout Nassar's account is the consistent, even desperate effort of Palestinian citizens of Israel in these decades to transcend their isolation and connect with their Palestinian and Arab neighbors. As Nassar reminds us, this was typically an uphill battle, not only due to the severe restrictions that the Israeli government imposed on Palestinian mobility (even once Israel's regime of repressive military rule over its Palestinian population was finally lifted in 1966), but also because of the pervasive suspicion with which Palestinian citizens were commonly viewed throughout the wider Arab world. Indeed, it is precisely the struggle for Palestinian intellectuals to overcome this regional stigma of ostensibly being Zionist collaborators, and hence traitors to the Arab nation, that provides some welcome narrative tension in the book's fifth and final chapter, which documents the participation of Darwish and other Palestinian intellectuals in international gatherings, such as the World Youth Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1968, where they would meet face-to-face with fellow Arab intellectuals for the first time (though with mixed results).
The bulk of Nassar's analysis in Brothers Apart draws from Arabic periodicals—particularly al-Ittihad and al-Jadid (the flagship Arabic publications of the Communist Party of Israel, or CPI, where many of the intellectuals at the center of the story routinely published letters, essays and poems), as well as other regional journals such as al-Adab, a monthly literary magazine published in Beirut. On one hand, this concerted emphasis on Palestinian and Arab printed materials makes sense: Nassar argues convincingly that the (often fraught) circulation of texts served as the lifeblood of the Palestinian struggle to overcome their isolation, and to fight for political rights within Israel in the first two decades after 1948. Indeed, Nassar lovingly recounts the stories of two Palestinian students who—in order to evade Israeli censorship—spent hours upon hours in libraries copying collections of Arabic poetry by hand, in order to be able to distribute them widely and garner support for their cause (p. 106). Texts were undoubtedly crucial for Palestinian subject formation after 1948, and it is illuminating to see some of the most seminal intellectual and political debates from the period of the so-called “Arab Cold War”—Communist internationalism v. Nasserist pan-Arabism foremost among them—come alive in the pages of these Palestinian-edited journals.
On the other hand, the book's near exclusive focus on the same sorts of publications for source material lends a slightly monochrome quality to the analysis. While it is undoubtedly important to chart subtle, incremental shifts in Palestinian discourse and cultural expression across these turbulent two decades, several of the key debates and themes recur in multiple chapters. For instance, when Nassar writes in Chapter 4 that a new cohort of intellectuals who came of political age during the 1958 Arab revolutions “developed a shared political vocabulary that stressed overlapping concepts of leftist anticolonialism, pan-Arab nationalism, and Palestinian cultural pride” in the 1960s (p. 115), it is not entirely clear how this differs from her conclusions in earlier chapters about the positionality of previous generations of Palestinian intellectuals, or the significance of the texts they produced.
Elsewhere, one wonders if Nassar's presentation of some of the literary debates that coursed through the pages of al-Jadid and al-Ittihad comes off a bit too black-and-white—for instance, her distinction between the retrograde tendencies of Arab liberal thought and the revolutionary leftist inclinations of the Palestinian intellectuals of the CPI (pp. 63–64). On a more general level, some of the theoretical insights that Nassar so compellingly lays out in the book's excellent introduction get lost in the body of the work. In particular, it would have been helpful for Nassar to build more fruitfully upon the book's brief early discussion of divergent intellectual and cultural understandings of decolonization, given how central this question becomes later in the analysis. How, for instance, did Palestinian intellectuals contend with Israel's own claim to be a post-colonial state with clear social, political, and economic ties to the decolonizing “third world”?
Overall, Brothers Apart is a deeply thoughtful, engaging, vividly written work that adds a great deal to prevailing understandings of Palestinian cultural and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s, while also firmly situating Palestinian intellectual projects within the effervescent cultural and political milieu of the Arab world in this period. The book is highly recommended for scholars and graduate students specializing in Palestinian cultural and intellectual history or modern Arabic literature and poetry, as well as for upper-level undergraduates undertaking coursework on post–World War II Arab politics and Palestine/Israel history.
