FRANZ KAFKA’S WRITINGS have crossed many ideological and cultural borders, yet the country to which he wanted to emigrate — Palestine then, Israel now — named a street after every important Jewish figure and virtually every Zionist except Kafka. Even his friend Max Brod, a writer of much lesser renown, is now receiving this posthumous honor in Tel Aviv. The reasons for ignoring Kafka were largely ideological: Kafka’s generation of German-speaking Jews presented a challenge to the militant and chauvinistic ideology of political Zionism that became prominent after the Second World War. Kafka was also regarded as a Diaspora writer, whose social critique exemplified the political defeatism and passivity that postwar Zionists vehemently rejected. However, precisely the intellectual debates and self-criticism that Kafka was exposed to — the critiques of Zionist prejudice and political dogmatism, combined with a firm belief in a humanist, spiritual, cultural Zionism — represent a path that Zionism did not follow but could have taken after the war and offer an alternative vision for contemporary political Zionism, even today.

Many Israeli writers and intellectuals have long been critical of their society. It therefore comes as no surprise that Kafka’s individualistic, dia-logical, ambiguous prose, which invites commentary and debate, has inspired many Israeli artists and that in their works we encounter familiar Kafkaesque themes, such as metamorphosis, existential absurdity, bureaucratic nightmares, marginality, power, and identity. However, there is little scholarship on the topic of Kafka and Israeli literature and none, to my knowledge, that involves the history of Zionism. Yet Kafka has had an important influence on the Israeli and Palestinian literatures that criticize the Zionist state: we will see how two writers, one from each side, have utilized Kafka in their social satires.

Given the fact that Kafka was never able to visit or migrate to Israel/ Palestine, I will ask for the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” and invite Kafka to continue his journey — which began with “Jackals and Arabs” (“Schakale und Araber”) in 1917 — in order to witness his legacy in the contemporary literary landscape.