Palestinian Like Me : MY ENEMY, MY SELF <i> by Yoram Binur (Doubleday: $18.95; 240 pp.) </i>

Interpersonal relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the experience of Palestinians under Israeli rule have in the last decade or so become major concerns of Israeli fiction and other forms of imaginative writing. In the last three years alone, six books dealing with this theme appeared in Hebrew and were subsequently published in English translation by major American and British publishers. These are: Uri Avnery, “My Friend, the Enemy”; Amalia and Aharon Barnea, “Mine Enemy”; David Grossman, “The Yellow Wind”; Anton Shammas, “Arabesques”; Yoram Kaniuk, “Confessions of a Good Arab,” and Amos Kenan, “The Road to Ein Harod.” What these books try to do, with various degrees of success, is delve beneath the stereotypic view of the Arab in search of a human face.

Much of the credit for this development in Israeli fiction belongs to A. B. Yehoshua, whose pioneering effort to depict a credible and fully individualized Arab character in “The Lover” (1978) exploded a long tradition of stereotypic representation of the Arab. In the works of Amos Oz, the most consummate practitioner of that discredited tradition, the Arab invariably appears as an ontologically different “Other,” a kind of sinister mythic force lurking permanently at the edge of the rational and orderly world of the Jewish characters.

Yoram Binur’s “My Enemy, My Self” is the latest addition to the non-literary spate of Hebrew books that deal with the “Arab theme.” Like John Howard Griffin, author of “Black Like Me,” who ventures into the segregated South, disguised as a black, to experience first-hand the dehumanizing effects of racism, Binur makes a number of forays into mainstream Jewish life disguised as a casual day-laborer from a refugee camp in the West Bank to gauge the effects of military occupation on both Palestinians and Israelis. Recast as an Arab named Fathi, Binur volunteers for work on a Kibbutz, works briefly as a dish-washer in a Tel-Aviv restaurant, as a mechanic in a garage in the city, visits a border town populated predominantly by Sephardic Jews (Jews from Arab countries), stays in the company of Arab casual day-laborers from the occupied territories at an Arab boarding-house in Jaffa, and spends some time in two refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. An acquaintance of Binur, a photographer by profession, rendezvous with him on several occasions to immortalize in pictures some moments in the writer’s personal odyssey. The narrative of “My Enemy, My Self” presents these experiences in conjunction with Binur’s personal commentary on their significance to him as an Israeli Jew and, by extension, to Israelis in general.

While the idea, procedure and purpose of “My Enemy, My Self” readily evoke Griffin’s “Black Like Me,” the two books remain different in some crucial respects. To begin with, in the absence of any color difference between Arabs and Jews, Binur endures none of the elaborate, often harrowing undertaking of having to change the color of one’s skin from white to black and back several times in the course of a 10-week period. In fact, all Binur has to do to be (ill-) treated as an Arab in Israel is to pretend to be an Arab. He does this simply by wearing rags, carrying a day-laborer’s lunch basket with a box of Arab-made (Farid) cigarettes and a crumpled East Jerusalem newspaper in it, and mimicking an Arab worker’s limited and heavily accented Hebrew speech. All forms of racial discrimination are obscene; the Israeli variety of this ugly practice appears even more grotesque than most because it can be triggered by the slightest alteration in one’s external attire and accent.

Nor does Binur have Griffin’s intellectual breadth or stylistic virtuosity. As a result, “My Enemy, My Self” makes its primary contribution in an area that falls somewhere between the factual reporting about, and the fictional rendering of, Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. The facts are more systematically and more comprehensively stated in Rafik Halabi’s powerful book, “The West Bank Story” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, revised edition 1985) and in Meron Benvenisti’s regular reports from The West Bank Data Project. Similarly, the range of emotions has been represented more fully and in greater nuance in the works of such Israeli novelists as Yehoshua, Grossman, Ballas, and others.

And yet, the narrative of “My Enemy, My Self” contains many personal anecdotes whose value derives precisely from Binur’s dissembling. One instance may stand for many. Late one night, when he was washing dishes alone in the kitchen, a Jewish employee of the restaurant brought her Jewish boyfriend into the kitchen where the two proceeded to make love in full view of the “Arab” dishwasher. Here is how Binur describes this incredible scene:

“I lowered my eyes and concentrated on washing the dirty dishes in the sink, carefully going over each place, so I wouldn’t embarrass them with my presence. The breathing got heavier as they got bolder, and for a fleeting moment I thought I might as well enjoy the little scene that had come my way. I ventured a peek at them out of the corner of my eye.

“Then a sort of trembling suddenly came over me. I realized that they had not meant to put on a peep show for my enjoyment. Those two were not the least bit concerned with what I saw or felt. For them I simply didn’t exist. I was invisible, a nonentity! It’s difficult to describe the feeling of extreme humiliation that I experienced. Looking back, I think it was the most degrading moment I had during my entire posing adventure.”

Binur’s diction in this passage recalls another important book from the pre-civil rights era of American history. I mean, of course, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” If for no other reason, “My Enemy, My Self” deserves attention for raising the comparison between the two societies in regard to the racial/ethnic question. Will the Israelis learn the valuable lessons of America’s past, or are they doomed to repeat its mistakes?