Israel Has Moved PDF
Preview Israel Has Moved
Diana Pinto israel has moved ISRAEL HAS MOVED ISRAEL HAS MOVED Diana Pinto HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, En gland 2013 Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America An earlier version was originally published in French as Israël a déménagé, © Éditions Stock, 2012. Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data Pinto, Diana. Israel has moved / Diana Pinto. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-674-07342-5 (alk. paper) 1. Israel. 2. Israel—Politics and government. 3. Israel—Social conditions. 4. Israel—Religion. 5. Israel—Economic conditions. I. Title. DS102.95.P56 2013 956.9405'4—dc23 2012038241 For my cousins and friends in Israel CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. The Intergalactic Café, or Ben-G urion Airport 17 2. The Two Roads to Jerusalem 27 3. The Lesson from East Talpiot 43 4. In the Eye of the Storm 60 5. Rooted Utopias 81 6. The Aquarium 99 7. The Bubble 112 8. The Tent 131 9. Between Memory and Memory Chip 151 10. Stargate 175 Epilogue: Israel Quo Vadis? 188 Notes 195 Ack now ledgm ents 213 INTRODUCTION Israel has moved. The country has changed its geographic and temporal references, its pol itic al horizons, and its cultural giv- ens. It still occupies, of course, the same GPS geostationary co- ordinates in the Middle East. However, both mentally and sym- bolically, Israel has abandoned its Arab neighborhood, whose recent springtime revolutions with their heavy autumnal over- tones never really inspired it. Even more important, the country is also in the pro cess of forfeiting its more than 2,000- year-o ld anchoring— be it in symbiosis or in confl ict—w ithin the grand Western symbiosis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Israel today thinks of itself as living in its own cyberspace at the very heart of a globalized world with increasingly Asian connotations. It lives inside its own utopia, in the literal sense of a non- place. Its postmodern future is being built on scientifi c in- novation, and yet the country seems to be rooting itself in an in- creasingly ancient, even archaic, past whose tenets are ever more religiously and ethnically exclusive. This grand conceptual move, prefi gured by many individual geographic shifts, has been taking place silently while the rest of the world (or rather, those who considered themselves friends of Israel) continued to repeat the same old “two- state solu- tion” mantras linked to the peace proc ess. In Israel itself these mantras have lost all relevance, given the absence of po litic al will and the population’s desire to look beyond what it
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