The jackals attempt to enlist the traveler's assistance in destroying them, offering him old rusted scissors with which to slit the throats of the Arabs.
For Judith Butler, Kafka's "short story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, published in Der Jude in 1917, registers an impasse at the heart of Zionism.
"[1] Butler continues:"In that story, the narrator, who has wandered unknowingly into the desert, is greeted by the Jackals (die Schakale) a thinly disguised reference to the Jews.
After treating him as a Messianic figure for whom they have been waiting for generations, they explain that his task is to kill the Arabs with a pair of scissors (perhaps a joke about how Jewish tailors from Eastern Europe are ill equipped for conflict).
That same year, he clarifies to her in a letter: ‘I am not a Zionist.’ Slightly earlier he writes of himself to Grete Bloch that by temperament, he is a man ‘excluded from every soul-sustaining community on account of his non-Zionist (I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it), non-practising Judaism’.
"[4] Sokel finds Kafka's tale reminiscent of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: The sovereignly cheerful mockery and the ultimately good-natured tolerance exercised by the contemptuously benevolent figure of the Arab stands in remarkable contrast to the irrational and murderous hatred of the ascetic spiritualist.
"[9] Gregory Triffit has suggested that to attempt to "find sources" for Kafka's tale is a futile endeavor, owing to the "very multiplicity of equally valid or invalid equivalents".