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Anton Shammas is a noted Palestinian editor, TV producer, freelance journalist, author and poet. His book, Arabesques, was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best novels of 1988 and has been published in six languages. He was born in 1950, and was educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in English and Arabic literature and art history. He writes in both Hebrew and Arabic. He is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has taught Arabic and Comparative Literature since 1997. His essays on the current cultural and political scene in the Middle East and his life have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine.
In his lecture, Shammas advocated for a cultural, literary and bilingual solution to the post-1948 divisions in the Middle East. Speaking shortly after the Madrid Peace Conference, he said that there Palestinians had begun to reclaim their voice. He urged the audience to recognize the Israel-Palestine conflict was not between two national movements, but a longstanding conflict between types of storytelling: between orality and literacy, and between storytelling and fiction. He saw, therefore, no political solution for the Middle East, but rather a cultural, literary one: a bilingual solution. He opposed ethnic states for both Jewish populations and Palestinians, objecting to the idea that Israel was the only democratic state in the Middle East, since it was far from a democracy for Palestinians.
His lecture was held on November 7, 1991. During his visit during early November, he met with Israeli and Middle Eastern students, reportedly the first time the two groups had held a joint event in several years, at which he discussed the conflict between his citizenship (Israeli) and his nationality (Palestinian), among other things.