Literature is a highly effective vehicle of expressing national energies, conflicts and aspirations. Literary translation may help to get them across to another nation where they will be received and interpreted according to the state of political and inter-cultural contacts between source and target literatures at the time when a particular translation is made and published. In fact, it is precisely the nature of these contacts that rules two complementary elements critical to both the creation and reception of literary translations. It is responsible for answering, first the question of whether a particular text is to be translated at all, and if so – why, by whom, where it will be published – and next, the question of how it will be received by target readers – whether ignored, praised or rejected.

The present chapter will try to answer these questions with regard to two important segments of translation, of both classical and modern Arabic literature into Hebrew, representing two opposite poles from the advent of Zionism in Palestine to the present day (1868–2005). The first pole demonstrates the way translations from Arabic into Hebrew were used to help consolidate Jewish identity during the earliest stage of Jewish nation building in Palestine (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The second demonstrates the earliest stage of recognition of the Palestinian national identity by Israeli Jewish culture (1970). Thus the two politically opposed sides of the Jewish (later Israeli)-Arab conflict in Palestine found within the same literary system some support for their respective national claims of their right to exist, though separated by almost a century and under completely different political circumstances.