Palestinian Author in Zagreb: “It Is Impossible to Tell an Israeli from a Palestinian on the Street”

Adania Shibli opened Zagreb’s 14th World Literature Festival with a novel about lives shaped by occupation, identity and resistance. Deception follows a young Palestinian woman beginning studies at an Israeli university and a former prisoner trying to find his place after release.

Their intertwined stories examine how political reality enters the most intimate parts of life. Seid Serdarević, Fraktura’s editor-in-chief and the festival’s programme director, described the book as a story of loneliness and choices made under pressure. It is also, he said, a story lived between Arabic, Hebrew and English, and between what can be said and what fear, exhaustion and power relations leave unspoken.

Shibli said politics cannot be an abstract subject for Palestinians because it forms part of daily life. She focused on how loss survives in places and memories. After a loved one is forcibly disappeared or killed, she said, small objects, trees and ruins preserve traces of that person’s existence. Details that appear insignificant can reveal what violence has destroyed, interrupted or pushed aside.

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If you walk down the street, you cannot easily distinguish a Palestinian from an Israeli.

“ If you walk down the street, you cannot easily distinguish a Palestinian from an Israeli,” Shibli said. Apart from the different forms of oppression Palestinians face, she said language is the only certain marker. Instead of serving as a bridge, it can become a means of humiliation, abuse and an assault on dignity.

Silence in her work is both a consequence of violence and a form of self-protection. Shibli said her parents remained silent about the events of 1948, but that silence created space for stories and imagination. Words can be censored, she said, while thought and imagination cannot.

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It is a struggle that the characters face.