Twenty years before “Geder Haya” (“Borderlife”), Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan’s novel about a romance between an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian man — which was denounced by the Education Ministry, became a best-seller in Israel and will be released in English on April 25 (as “All the Rivers”) — there was “Inta Omri.” Published in 1994, it is based on a relationship that its author, the Israeli poet and writer Smadar Herzfeld, had with a Palestinian man, and it is immeasurably more powerful and revealing than Rabinyan’s pleasant, adroit, apologetic and overly literary novel. [...]
It’s likely that “Inta Omri”’s attackers didn’t read the book. While it is set in the waning days of the first intifada, the narrative soon pivots from politics to the stormy emotional tie between its two stubborn, lost, educated main characters, both of them outsiders in their respective communities. It is precisely the nonjudgmental quality of the story that makes a possible allegory for life here. In any event, the novel’s sex scenes disqualify it for study in high school, so Education Minister Naftali Bennett is free to ignore it, unlike “Borderlife.”[...]
A superficial glance at the book can be misleading. It begins with some mutual violence between the couple, which externalizes the suspicion and nationalist hostility, for example the following insulting sentences said by the woman at a café: “’What did you do?’ I shouted at the Arab, wiping my lips with my sleeve, wiping his skin from my lips. ... ‘Do you always touch Jewish girls?’ I was right on the mark. I know that I had hit him in the heart.” However, these nationalist sadomasochistic scenes fade away quickly, and the couple’s love for each other turns personal and deep, devoid of any racism and certainly of pornography, too — unless by the word “pornography” one means simply sexual relations (which are in this case very creative). And perhaps the somewhat pessimistic end also arouses objection among those who hoped for a speedy peace in those days at the start of the Oslo Accords era.
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