Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity

212 Pages·2011·1.458 MB·English

by  David Ohana (auth.)

Israel and Its
Mediterranean Identity
Israel and Its
Mediterranean Identity
David Ohana
israel and its mediterranean identity
Copyright © David Ohana, 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11276-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-58491-8 ISBN 978-0-230-37059-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-37059-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ohana, David.
Israel and its Mediterranean identity / David Ohana.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. National characteristics, Israeli. 2. Mediterranean Region—
Relations—Israel. 3.Israel—Relations—Mediterranean Region 4. Self-
perception—Israel. 5. Political culture—Israel. I. Title.
DS113.3.O345 2011
956.94—dc23 2011017317
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: October 2011
Contents
Preface vii
Part I Identity
1 A Bridge over Troubled Water 3
2 Multiculturalism or Dialogue? 31
Part II Region
3 Mediterranean Humanism 49
4 Levantinism as a Cultural Theory 77
Part III Culture
5 A Man in the Sun 101
6 Camus and the Israelis 135
Part IV Politics
7 The Politics of Political Despair 157
8 Where East Meets West 171
Part V Memory
9 A la Recherche du Temps Marocain Perdu 189
Bibliography 201
Index 211
Preface
Between the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where I was born, and
its eastern bay, by which I now live, stood ideology, historical circumstance,
and the destiny of the Jewish people. My whole store of associations about
the Mediterranean Sea, it sometimes seems to me, is drawn from the collec-
tive memory I learned to use during the few years I spent in my birthplace,
Oujda, Morocco. Before that, I have my personal memory to guide me back
through a narrow channel of unforgotten anecdotes and images: a cream-
colored ice-c ream cart, of a sort I have never seen again, gives me its flavor,
my taste of the Madeleine; a city park, near a neoclassical post office building,
where I would sit with Tata Titin, my grandmother’s sister, the two of them
immigrants from nearby Algeria; the Muslim milkman, a lunatic, who every
morning as he left the milk bottles by the door of our house at Casablanca
14, would mutter to himself “dada, dada,” a deliberate or habitual modifi-
cation of “Dehdeh,” my nickname. I remember the Moroccan king’s return
from his exile in Madagascar. Oujda dressed itself in holiday pomp, and the
masses, among them a large portion of the Jewish population, gathered in
the streets to celebrate their king’s homecoming, returned by the colonialist
courtesy of the French authorities, and to declare by this their unanimity in
the cause of Moroccan independence. Perched on my father’s shoulders, I
saluted “Yihyeh al Malik! Long live the king!”
Oujda’s pluralistic atmosphere fit in with its Mediterranean geography:
Algeria was its neighbor on the eastern border, and to the north were the
coastal cities of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish colony. Our nearness to
the French and Spanish communities lent a cosmopolitan air to the city
and especially to the Jewish community. For the Jews, many of whom had
come, like my mother, from Algeria, French was the lingua franca. My
father worked as a waiter at his brother’s café, a place of bohemian happen-
ing that inspired many of my future dreams. With Jewish merchants, Mus-
lim natives and Algerian neighbors, Spanish tourists and American soldiers
(from the Second World War) populating the tables, my father, Maxim,
meanders between them with nonchalance and an incorrigible smile. So it
lives perpetually in my memory, a multinational and multicultural micro-
cosm, free of change and innocent of the causes that bring change about.
viii PREFACE
Then comes 1948. The State of Israel is declared, and three weeks later
blood riots break out in Oujda and nearby Jirada. Muslim fundamental-
ists, encouraged by the silence and powerlessness of the French authorities,
assault, loot, and kill Jews in the two cities. The thugs break into our house
as well, a wing of four connected houses sharing a yard. But all this was four
years before my birth. In my infancy I was nursed by Zalo, our neighbor from
across the way, being that my mother was ill. The four Jewish families made
up one large family. Back then the rioters killed Zalo’s father- in- law, who
also lived in the complex, and raided our house. My brother was at home
alone and hid under the bed; his resourcefulness saved his life. At the end
of the day the body count came to 44 Jews. Thus in my childhood became
apparent to me the two sides of Mediterraneanism: multicultured openness
on the one hand and tribal nationalism on the other. When we emigrated to
Israel, I having completed my fourth year, we were welcomed there by this
same Janus-f ace of the Mediterranean Sea, which we had known before and
continued to characterize the place we left on her eastern side.
The ship Kabu Daurnus led us away to different shores, to a new
land, the fresh nation- state of the Jews. Now nationhood, religion, and
culture— life’s new landscape— kept out of view the sunlight and soil
that had bred us there in our native Morocco from our new homeland,
which had been built up by European expatriates. Zionist socialization,
but also my sobering up, maturing mind- set, made me an Israeli patriot
who loves his land and fights her wars but who is yet concerned about
her well-b eing and the way in which she pursues her continued exis-
tence. In these days of worry about my homeland’s future, I reflect a lot
about the Mediterranean option, which has been sought as a remedial
for our gory wound, Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. On top of the
many other rational reasons that suggest the Mediterranean option to
our consideration— there has always been a shared, supranational tradi-
tion between the nations now conflicted; there are now political and eco-
nomic bridges between Israel and its neighbors as well as many others in
the region; there has been a broadening of the social group from bilateral
contention to regional partnership; there is a strong common denomi-
nator between the various Israeli communities, a common identity— I
feel in the most immediate way that my own identity can be very well
summed up as Mediterranean. This I feel is equally true of many others in
Israel, who seem in terms of personality, rationale, and mental structure,
both in the private and the collective spheres, typically Mediterranean.
Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity attempts to depict the lights and
shades of this identity. It is too easy to slip into an oblivious nostalgia,
forgetting to rigorously examine the geocultural questions, or to be swept
up in a romanticizing fervor, swiping away the complex reality in favor
PREFACE ix
of an imagined, desirable one. No doubt, as a person I do fall into these
pleasant traps once in a while. Nonetheless, as a historian I see Mediterra-
neanism in a philosophical way and not as an ideology. Whereas ideologies
have their ready solutions for every situation, philosophy asks questions
and discovers problems. At the same time, my discourse does not begin a
priori but comes upon Israel’s Mediterranean identity from its particular
vantage point and from there embarks on its analysis. The Mediterranean’s
thematic contexts of history and identity strike me as axiomatic, and my
discussion takes place within their framework. This is not an abstract pic-
ture drawn on a blank slate. The Mediterranean option stands before us as
a model, a proposal, a challenge— now let us begin to discuss it.
My inspiration for the Mediterranean option was sparked by Albert
Camus and Jaqueline Kahanoff. I find myself easily acclimating to the
landscapes of Camus’s youth, the poverty from which he emerged, which
wasn’t signified by embarrassment but by a joy of life, and I identify natu-
rally with his immigration to a new country, which was yet old, where he
was an outsider among the bourgeois intellectual elite, the offices of its
thought and literature. It is no wonder to me that he revealed a lifelong
empathy with the Jewish destiny and a concern for the survival of Israel. It
is no wonder that he has been adopted in Israel as the most popular for-
eign writer. Kahanoff supplies me with the model she proposed to Israel in
her early years, where she challenged the western hegemony by means of a
dialogue between east and west, putting forward her example of feminism
before its time had come and pointing out the cultural wealth of Israel’s
various immigrant communities in a time of nationalist and provincial
isolationism. Camus and Kahanoff, writers who saw their assumed societ-
ies from within and without, document their unique viewpoints without
resentments or disaffection, and they are both Mediterranean humanists
who passed away before their time.
My youth in Israel was spent in a small town, Kiryat Gat, which was
populated largely by immigrants from North Africa and survivors of the
Nazi persecution in Europe. I saw a spectacular human laboratory of
Eastern and Western elements, immigrants from Christian and Muslim
countries who tried, and in most cases succeeded, to build a shared future.
Every weekend we would travel the distance of several minutes to swim
in the Mediterranean Sea. Our nearness to the waters of the Mediterra-
nean expressed for us our version of normalness, a wistful longing for the
big world that was, then in the 1960s, light years away. Then I came to
the mountain. Jerusalem’s people, mountain people, embody the tough-
ness and dignity of a besieged town. At last (or currently, at any rate) I
have found my place in Sede Boker, a small village in the desert. Here, far
from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, one finds the quiet and content
x PREFACE
of mind to adjust to a clean environment, untouched by history’s remains
and unaffected by the fever of the times. So I have lived all my life up until
now near the Mediterranean, in the mountains and in the desert, seeing the
various faces of my country and discerning the different colors of Israeli
identity. This book doesn’t wish to do away with Israel’s other dimensions
but will try to call attention to the possibilities for development open to
Israel’s Mediterranean identity.
Part I
Identity