Abstract

This article charts a relational history of Palestinian and Israeli temporalities. Probing the interplay of political and cultural discourses, I show how while literature and film are indices of the temporal views that inform political action, they also work to expand those views. What are the key temporal concepts of Zionism and Palestinian thought, and how have they been negotiated in literary and cinematic works from the 1940s to the present? How have major political developments influenced temporal attitudes and cultural discourse? What emergent temporalities are at play in the current political climate? To address these questions, I bring insights from the social sciences into dialogue with close readings of Hebrew and Arabic works. After delineating what I call the syntagmatic model of Israeli and Palestinian temporalities, I discuss the fluid and nonlinear temporalities that are increasingly salient in Palestinian cultural production.