The Palestinian Nakba, the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, was by no means an isolated event or series of events but an ongoing process of uprooting, permanent persecution, displacement, and occupation. Against the background of the Nakba, the process of nation-building has been the major aim of all branches of Palestinian culture as illustrated above in the fields of theater and poetry. A good example was the rise of the Palestinian theatrical and dramatic movement, particularly the growth of professional theater after 1967. More rooted in Palestinian collective memory is poetry, encapsulated in our present study in the poetry of Maḥmūd Darwīsh, the national Palestinian poet, especially his attempt to provide a chronicle of the ongoing Nakba in the mid-1980s against the backdrop of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the lead-up to the outbreak of the first Intifāḍa in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in December 1987. Apart from Palestinian Arabic culture, the emergence of Palestinian authors writing in Hebrew has been encapsulating the cultural Palestinian dilemma of life as a minority among the Jewish-Hebrew majority in Israel.

Unlike the flowering of Palestinian culture, we are currently witnessing the demise of Arab-Jewish culture—a tradition that started more than 1,500 years ago is vanishing before our very own eyes. The main factor in the Muslim–Christian–Jewish Arab symbiosis up to the twentieth century, from the Jewish point of view, was that the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam adopted Arabic as their spoken language. This symbiosis does not exist in our time because Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language spoken and used on a daily basis by Jews. The image of an hourglass is an apposite one: the grains of sand are quickly running out. In the field of belles lettres, there is not even one Jewish writer of record who was born after 1948 and who is writing literature in Arabic. Jews who are now fluent in Arabic have probably either been born in an Arab country (and their numbers, of course, are rapidly decreasing) or have acquired the language as part of their training for service in the military or security services (and their numbers, needless to say, are always increasing).