In September 1985, on the occasion of the Jewish new year, a young, relatively unknown writer named Anton Shammas published a piece in the Jerusalem weekly Kol ha-‘ir which charged Israeli society with excluding non-Jewish citizens like himself from participation in the common life of the state (Shammas, 1985, 13-18). While the basic premise of this claim was hardly unprecedented - debates about the social and legal status of the ‘Arab minority’ had been going on since Israel's founding, and had become increasingly heated since the 1970s - Shammas went beyond the demand for political and civic equality for Israel's Palestinian citizens. He offered a more radical proposal: that Israeli nationality be divested of its automatic equation with Jewishness, and that ‘Israeli-Palestinians’ be included in a genuinely pluralist definition of the Israeli nation.

A number of high-profile cultural figures, including the Iraq-born novelist Sami Michael, responded angrily to Shammas’ appeal, but the leading novelist A. B. Yehoshua's reaction was the most vehement. Yehoshua's notorious challenge to Shammas went as follows: ‘If you want your full identity, if you want to live in a state with a Palestinian character, an original Palestinian culture, arise, take your belongings, and move one hundred meters east, to the independent Palestinian state that will exist alongside Israel’ (Yehoshua, 1985, 11). Shammas retorted that he had no intention of leaving ‘my motherland and my father's home, for the country Yehoshua will show me’ (Shammas, 1986b, 45), and indeed Shammas and other members of the Israeli left argued that Yehoshua's suggestion was not significantly different from the extremist Knesset member Meir Kahane's call for the organized expulsion (or ‘transfer’) of all non-Jewish citizens.