Return to the Border: Commitment, Utopia and the Inescapable Green Line

• Main Author: Paul, Drew
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2020
• Subjects: sami
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456128.003.0002

This chapter examines the tension between utopian literary visions of a borderless Israel-Palestine and the increasing proliferation of borders in the region in two novels, Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal 1969 novella Returning to Haifa , and Sami Michael’s follow up to Kanafani’s work, Doves in Trafalgar (2005). Beginning with the notion of utopia as an antithesis to borders, this chapter traces a shift from Kanafani’s earlier work, which uses the Palestinian protagonist’s border crossing and return to his lost home as a galvanizing moment of renewed commitment to the utopian vision of Palestinian resistance, to Michael’s later novel, in which the border’s persistence and expansion produces the failure of a utopian vision of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. In this reading, borders function as post-utopian spaces that signify the decline of certain political ideologies and commitments in both Palestinian and Israeli literature.