The transnational histories of the Middle East, including Ottoman imperialism and European colonialism, render it fertile ground for investigating regional globalgothics.1 An apt starting point is Israel/Palestine, a gothic nerve-centre steeped in the horrors of its histories: a gruesome genocide in Europe, centuries-old Jewish communities across North Africa and the Middle East abruptly abandoned, military occupation and the devastation of the Palestinian Nakba. In the territorial dispute between Palestinian nationalism and Jewish nationalism (Zionism), history and historiography have emerged as foremost battlegrounds. Official histories are questioned in Israeli academic, public and cultural discourse.2 That the gothic is amenable to the expression of contested histories is unarguable; the Hebrew novels I examine here are no exception. But something more is at stake in their gothicism. It beckons beyond ‘alternative histories’ – those that challenge authoritative accounts – to consider the way stories are told, manipulated and silenced.

The two authors I bring together here are both preoccupied with storytelling, and both experiment with obfuscation in narrative. Alon Hilu (b. 1972) and Ayman Sikseck (b. 1984) write in Hebrew, were born in Jaffa, and live in Israel. Both have published highly acclaimed novels in Hebrew, and both have publicly discussed their homosexuality and their experience coming out.3 These seemingly straightforward biographical facts, however, belie the challenge they pose to hegemonic Israeli identity – European, Jewish and heterosexual. Hilu, an Israeli Jew of Syrian origin, and Sikseck, a Muslim Palestinian citizen of Israel, exemplify the complex matrix of identities that defy the perception of Israelis and Palestinians as neatly divided along ethno-religious lines in a mono-national Israel. Their perspectives reflect the globally inflected histories of Israel and the Middle East as a whole. Without discounting the hierarchy that positions Jews above Muslims in Israel, I see these authors’ experiences as gay Arab men raised in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa as bearing on their writing and on their understanding of history. These experiences create the conditions for narratives of Palestine that might be conceptualised as queer: ‘transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to dominant ideology’, as George Haggerty characterises the gothic iteration of queer theory (Haggerty 2006, 2).