Dancing Arabs (Hebrew: ערבים רוקדים, romanized: aravim rokdim) is the 2002 debut novel of Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua.

At the beginning of the novel, he is especially close to his grandmother, who charges him with making sure to inform the rest of his family about her secret stash of items to be buried with her upon her death.

This newspaper clipping reveals that his father was held under administrative detention and questioned by Shin Bet for 2 years in connection to a bombing in a university cafeteria.

The father, who often physically hits the narrator and his siblings, continuously attempts to instill a sense of national pride in his children, chiding them for not understanding what the Palestinian Liberation Organization is as well as reminding them of their grandfather who died a shahid during the war of 1948.

During this same period, the oblivious narrator and his siblings witness a news report of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, which they incorporate into their childhood games due to a lack of understanding of the events.

It is also during this time in his life that the narrator begins to prove his intelligence, as he solves a city-wide trivia competition and tests into an elite boarding school in Jerusalem.

Although he is still fairly unaware of the state of his poor living conditions in Tira, his grandmother pointedly tells him that “maybe it’s good you’re going away” as this chapter of his life comes to a close.

He thus begins a rapid transformation, quickly buying himself clothes popular in the Jewish parts of Israel, learning Western songs, and generally distancing himself from his Arab family and friends.

Naomi’s father was killed serving in the Israel Defense Forces, and the narrator’s refusal to stand for the memorial siren on Yom HaZikaron causes their relationship to begin with a rough start.

Nevertheless, he does end up cheating on her with an unspecified Jewish woman, after which he shows intense remorse and lapses back into thinking of himself as an Arab man who can go on and accomplish great things in the name of his people.

However, his ability to access old documents from the era of the British Mandate of Palestine due to this position makes him a hero, as he begins to uncover the forgotten birthdays of everyone in town to allow them to properly celebrate.

Additionally, when the first male grandchild in the new generation of the narrator’s family is born, he gets a Jewish name instead of a Russian or Arab one since it would save him problems in the future.

Throughout the novel, there is a pervasive struggle between the narrator’s sense of identity as an Arab citizen of Israel and his desire to blend into the Jewish-dominated spaces that he spends most of the novel inhabiting.

[2] This intense desire is born out of his inability to navigate life outside of Tira normally as an Arab, as he is continuously ostracized and singled out by both civilians and the state of Israel itself during his childhood and adulthood.

The select instances in which this mask falls, including when his wife gives birth to their daughter, are moments of profound embarrassment for the narrator whose life view is built around denying his self-identity to be able to access Jewish spaces.

Several instances of major protests against the state, including one against a visit by Meir Kahane, occurred during this early part of the narrator’s childhood.

His youngest sibling’s wall at the end of the novel, which includes many references to Western and Israeli culture right alongside pictures of Keffiyehs, indicates a Tira that is beginning to assimilate just like the narrator.

There is a heavy usage in the novel of diasporic tropes, like that of the love between Naomi, who came from the majority population in a more liberal society, and the narrator, who came from a closed-off minority community.

As the narrator leaves Tira behind, he increasingly parallels several tropes associated with the Zionist movement’s depiction of Israeli-born Jews, also called Sabras.

Additionally, his grandfather’s death as a martyr in 1948 and the resulting myth that anemones grow on where he fell strongly echoes Zionist imagery.

Specifically, it evokes the famous Zionist poem “Behold, here our bodies lie” by the poet Chaim Gouri dedicated to those who died in the Israeli War of Independence.

And yet this Arab-Israeli newcomer is never once self-indulgent or sentimental, with the result that his story rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth.