Tags: Hebrew literature | Israel studies | Literary criticism
Two novels published in Hebrew during the Second Intifada and immediately after deal with the effects of the unprecedented string of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian population. Human parts by Orly Castel-Bloom creates a doomsday scenario where terrorism is associated with fictive calamities, thus emphasizing both the absurdity of suicide bombings and the perception of terrorism as a natural phenomenon. Almost dead by Assaf Gavron offers a double first-person narrative from the point of view of a young Israeli man and a Palestinian boy, the latter being a terrorist. Both novels emphasize the normalisation of terrorism through the tone of the narrators, an unemotional narration of shocking events, yet in Gavron’s work the reader witnesses a development of characters following the knowledge of the enemy.