This is a book about the cultural representation, transmission, and circulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It examines the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli writers whose work achieves the status of ‘world literature,’ in David Damrosch's sense of texts that travel beyond their culture of origin (2003, 4), intervene in the asymmetrically waged local and international contests over the region's political past and future. It is also a book about national narration as a reading and a writing practice, which draws its evidence from a settler-colonial context that is still only controversially recognized as such in North America and Europe. This is true even within metropolitan formations of postcolonial literary studies where, for various reasons - political, institutional, linguistic - the region's literature has often been overlooked. The book sets out to show that an engagement with contemporary Palestinian and Israeli writing can invigorate the common and yet commonly dismissed question of how writers and their readers conceive of the idea of the nation, within and against colonial forms of rule and thought. It aims to complicate a reader-response understanding of national narration (we want to read Palestinian and Israeli texts as national allegories, for ‘cultural information’ and because they seem to give us access to a particularly intense kind of national belonging) with an appreciation of how writers anticipate such readings, and how they wrestle with the problem of needing to envision a future territorial and demographic nation-state in a political and cultural context that is saturated with competing ideas of national sovereignty, identity, and citizenship.