Shunned by establishment, Israeli novel on taboo love flourishes

A love story between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim has become an unlikely bestseller, after Israel’s education ministry refused to allow the book in the high school curriculum.

Dorit Rabinyan’s Gader Haya, which means Borderlife in English, was left off courses last week in a bid to avoid encouraging relationships between Jews and Arabs, sparking a ferocious backlash by Israeli cultural figures and a buying frenzy.

The country’s main fiction chart announced on Friday that the book had shot to the top as a bestseller in book stores and online. The chart does not provide numbers but Rabinyan’s agent said over 5,000 copies had been sold in a week, a huge figure in Israel’s small market with many book stores selling out.

New deals to sell the rights in Hungary, Spain and Brazil have been discussed, while publication in the US, France and other countries where translation deals had already been agreed will be sped up, the agent said.

Reflecting on the controversy, Rabinyan said that while she was “worried” about the future of Israeli democracy, she had been encouraged by the support she received.

“I think this whole march to bookstores is a demonstration,” she told AFP. “It is not only my fans that buy Borderlife, it is the fans of Israeli democracy. “By buying my novel they reconfirm their trust and belief in Israel’s liberalism, in Israel’s freedom of choice and speech.”

Borderlife, published in 2014, is 43-year-old Rabinyan’s semi-autobiographical story of an Israeli woman who meets and falls in love with a male Palestinian artist in New York. The two later part ways as she returns to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and he to Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinians are extremely rare and are frowned upon by large parts of both societies.

The book was among the winners of the Bernstein Prize for young writers, an annual Israeli award for Hebrew literature. After requests to include it in the high school curriculum by a number of teachers, a committee initially backed the book, but was later overruled by senior ministry officials. Among the reasons given was that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity,” according to the protocol of a parliamentary debate on the issue.