Sahar Khalifeh's novel The Inheritance (Al-Mirath, 2005) opens with a Palestinian in New York selling ‘holy water and holy sand from the holy river’ to unsuspecting locals. Under the pretence of being from Jerusalem, when he is in fact from a small West Bank village, he asks a passing woman: ‘Is there a baptism in your family? We have many baptisms in ours, we get baptised every day’. A similar vignette appears in Elia Suleiman's 1996 film Chronicle of a Disappearance (Sijill Ikhtifa), in which the proprietor of a Nazareth souvenir shop named ‘the Holyland’ fills bottles marked ‘holy water’ from a tap. Many social, cultural and political meanings of the deceptively ‘natural’ substance of water collide in these brief scenes. For these characters water is both an object of religious reverence and an unholy commodity, sold under comically false pretences to pious American Christians and gullible foreign tourists. The depiction of Palestinians as tricksters, meanwhile, challenges the ‘tragic discourse’ through which Palestinian lives are often narrated.Through representations of water Khalifeh and Suleiman undermine cliches about Palestinian experience, affirming Palestinian agency and suggesting a playful rather than reverential relationship to the homeland. Water, in these scenes, intersects with existing understandings of Palestinian life while telling us something new.

The role of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature has largely been overlooked until now. Israeli and Palestinian literatures are widely understood as determined by their relationship to the land. This is perhaps unsurprising given the centrality of the settlement or loss of land in the Israeli and Palestinian national narratives and in the present-day conflict. Conflict over land persists in Israel's ongoing land grabs in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, its control of Palestinian movement over land through the siege on Gaza, the separation wall and the West Bank system of floating checkpoints, and in the as-yet unresolved debates about future borders. Water quality, availability and rights are recognised as major Israeli and Palestinian political issues, yet are largely seen in technocratic terms as problems to be ‘solved’ by politicians, engineers and hydrologists, with water understood as a mere ‘biological fact’.