Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture

384 Pages·2012·4.655 MB·English

by  Rachel S. Harris (ed.), Ranen Omer-Sherman (ed.)

War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture
of
Narratives Dissent
E
DITEDBY
Rachel S. Harris Ranen Omer-Sherman
AND
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
∫ 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narratives of Dissent : War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture /
Edited by Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman.
Pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8143-3803-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8143-3804-9 (ebook) (print)
1. War and literature—Israel. 2. Art and war.
I. Harris, Rachel S. (Rachel Sylvia), 1977– II. Omer-Sherman, Ranen.
pn56.w3n37 2012
700%.458569405—dc23
2012029607
Publication of this book was made possible through the generosity of the
Bertha M. and Hyman Herman Endowed Memorial Fund.
contents
Introduction: Zionism and the Culture of Dissent 1
ranen omer-sherman
I. Private and Public Spaces of Commemoration and Mourning
1. ‘‘Music of Peace’’ at a Time of War: Middle Eastern Music Amid the
Second Intifada ..................................................... 25
galeet dardashti
2. Privatizing Commemoration: The Helicopter Disaster Monument and the
Absent State ....................................................... 44
michael feige
3. ‘‘Cyclic Interruptions’’: Popular Music on Israeli Radio in Times
of Emergency ...................................................... 65
danny kaplan
4. Consuming Nostalgia: Greeting Cards and Soldier-Citizens ................. 78
noa roei
5. The Photographic Memory of Asad Azi ................................. 99
tal ben zvi
6. ‘‘We Shall Remember Them All’’: The Culture of Online Mourning and
Commemoration of Fallen Soldiers in Israel ............................. 117
liav sade-beck
II. Poetry and Prose
7. Bereavement and Breakdown: War and Failed Motherhood in
Raya Harnik’s Work ................................................. 135
esther raizen
v
Contents
8. From IDF to .PDF: War Poetry in the Israeli Digital Age ................... 153
adriana x. jacobs
9. ‘‘Unveiling Injustice’’: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Poetry of Witness .............. 167
ilana szobel
10. War at Home: Literary Engagements with the Israeli Political Crisis in
Two Novels by Gabriela Avigur-Rotem ................................. 187
shiri goren
11. Forcing the End: Apocalyptic Israeli Fiction, 1971–2009 .................. 205
adam rovner
12. Oh, My Land, My Birthplace: Lebanon War and Intifada in Israeli Fiction
and Poetry ........................................................ 221
glenda abramson
13. Vexing Resistance, Complicating Occupation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Sahar
Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns and David Grossman’s The Smile of the Lamb ......... 241
philip metres
14. Gender, War, and Zionist Mythogynies: Feminist Trends in
Israeli Scholarship ................................................. 264
esther fuchs
III. Cinema and Stage
15. Representations of War in Israeli Drama and Theater ..................... 281
dan urian
16. From National Heroes to Postnational Witnesses: A Reconstruction of Israeli
Soldiers’ Cinematic Narratives as Witnesses of History ................... 300
yael munk
17. A Woman’s War: The Gulf War and Popular Women’s Culture in Israel ...... 317
rachel s. harris
18. Beaufort the Book, Beaufort the Film: Israeli Militarism under Attack ........ 336
yaron peleg
19. Shifting Manhood: Masculinity and the Lebanon War in Beaufort and
Waltz with Bashir .................................................. 346
philip hollander
List of Contributors 365
Index 369
vi
Introduction
Zionism and the Culture of Dissent
Ranen Omer-Sherman
We have to guard ourselves from might and simplistic thinking, from the
corruption that is in cynicism, from the pollution of the heart and the ill-
treatment of humans, which are the biggest curse of those living in a disastrous
region like ours.
—David Grossman, from the eulogy for his son, Uri,
who fell in the Second Lebanon War
For younger Israeli men and women, a true sense of national belonging has almost
always required a commitment to serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and many
later consider the occasion of their military inductions as a joyous rite of passage. For a
representative account, one need only begin with this singular moment in Avraham
Burg’s gripping memoir, which speaks for many more than those of Burg’s own gener-
ation, recalling that dream of wearing one of the great icons of national heroism, the
coveted beret of the paratroopers:
The red beret was a legend since the British Mandate. Hannah Czenes and
the other World War II paratroopers, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem
and the Western Wall in the Six-Day War, all wore a red beret. They were the
models of heroism, attracting us like moths to a flame. Every child dreamt of
a red beret folded under the shoulder strap, paratrooper wings on the chest,
and red boots. Being a paratrooper was pure Israeli-ness at its best, and I
wanted to be one. I wanted to run fast, strike, sneak around, and fight.∞
As a typical youth of the 1960s who came of age between the Six-Day War and the Yom
Kippur War, Burg was hyperconscious that the paratroopers embodied the demarcation
1
RANEN OMER-SHERMAN
between the powerless Jew of exile and the confident and empowered Hebrew future.
Hence, as a youthful idealist, Burg sought to ‘‘be an Israeli hero, di√erent from my
father, the Jew in exile. He walked and I ran; he escaped and I jumped from the sky’’
(116). He recalls his fierce pride leaping in harness from the high training tower that
generations of Israeli paratroopers (including this writer) have come to know as ‘‘the
Eichmann’’: ‘‘I climbed the Eichmann as the son of a Jewish refugee from Germany,
jumped and landed as an Israeli that even Eichmann could not scare any more’’ (116).≤
Yet just as ardent young men like Burg grew up under the influence of both traumatic
history and the constant menace of future wars, their earliest understandings were also
inevitably densely filtered by cultural renderings and interpretations of war’s mythic
and ideological significance. Indeed, no social phenomenon provides a more urgent
sense of collective identity than war. For instance, in Avraham Balaban’s elegiac mem-
oir of his kibbutz childhood, he recalls the indelible influences of the songs of the War
of Independence and the Suez War, in particular Haim Gouri’s lyric ‘‘Bab el-Wad’’ com-
memorating the siege of Jerusalem:
The music teacher who came to the kibbutz every Tuesday, taught us this
song when we were in fourth grade, and after the first couple of lines the
chatting and laughter and throwing of paper planes ceased. The armored
convoys to Jerusalem had left from our woods, we saw their burnt-out shells
on our annual trip to Jerusalem, and the melody seeped into us like water
into the soil and raised delicate flowers of sorrow. This sorrow brought me
closer to myself, the way a wound or a pain brings one closer to oneself, and
at the same time submerged me entirely in the singing group.≥
For Balaban the powerful emotive e√ects of such militaristic songs created a ‘‘dual
sense of intensified, solemn, burnished selfhood combined with total self-oblivion,’’
suggesting that they dissolved the self into the collective in his childhood imagination.
Considering those lyrics’ powerful ideological uses (in a chapter evocatively titled
‘‘Singing and Crying: Homeland Songs’’), Balaban further examines how the ‘‘battles
and the fallen . . . in those songs intensified the sorrow, and the more it grew, the greater
the joy. The greater the sadness, the more beautiful we became in our own eyes,
convinced that people are measured by the degree of sadness they have in them. . . .
These songs molded us at will, implanted in us strange longings . . . and attached us to
the great family of children returning to their motherland and promising her liberty
and eternal loyalty’’ (101). Even today he wonders at the power ‘‘Bab el-Wad’’ wielded
over his childhood—the song was a veritable ‘‘Israeli identity card, the identity of every-
thing we dreamed of being’’ (102).∂ But just what did this renewed Jewish national
identity amount to, as expressed in the soaring imagery and tropes delineated in this and
other period songs of martial sacrifice?∑ Above all, Balaban recalls the stirring reso-
nance for a spartan time, a society of ‘‘abbreviated families,’’ pioneers who had left their
2
Introduction
doomed families in Europe and youngsters who separated themselves at a young age to
fight for the State of Israel:
Native Israeliness absorbed the intensity of a life-and-death struggle. But it
was not only the struggle that shaped the particular character of this identity.
After all, many other countries achieved independence after a prolonged
struggle. We find other reasons in the core of the song: ‘‘Here we fought
together on the rocks/ Here we were one family, we all.’’ ‘‘One family’’
means companionship and comradeship in arms, and all that they imply. . . .
it was the shortest way to forge a bond between the generations, to create an
illusion of family where there was none, an illusion of roots in a place of
sand and rocks. And these songs certainly fulfilled their purpose: all the
schoolchildren in my native kibbutz, who learned these songs and sang
them in youth movement meetings, parties, and holidays, are living in
Israel today. Our children, however, are scattered all over the world. I can
testify that, as a child growing up in the kibbutz . . . I was a complete
outsider. Yet when I sang these songs I was a faithful, enthusiastic kid . . . a
total Israeli, confident of his strength and the justice of his cause. In retro-
spect, I am amazed by what a huge part of me was this Israeli identity—as
though I was first of all an Israeli, and only secondly an individual child with
his own personality. (103–4)
As Balaban’s experience with the constructed nature of identity would suggest, many
Israelis were raised with an indelible sense of a national belonging reinforced through
songs and other cultural narratives. Beginning in 1948 with the War of Independence,
further conflicts followed in 1956 (the Suez Crisis), 1967 (the Six-Day War), 1968–70
(the War of Attrition), 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), 1982 and 2006 (the First and Second
Lebanon Wars), as well as 1987–93 and 2000 (the First and Second Intifadas). Further-
more, there were many other military engagements such as Operation Litani (1978 in
Lebanon), the Gulf War (1991), and Operation Cast Lead (2008–9 in Gaza). As Harris
states, ‘‘The centrality of the army, militarization, and the soldier within the nation-
building enterprise is evidenced not only within the encounters themselves, or even
within the ways in which war shaped Israel’s political agendas, but also in the explicit
construction of the notion of precisely what it meant to be an Israeli—both at home
and abroad.’’∏ Within Israel this meant that the military often created and dissemi-
nated culture, while simultaneously being the subject of culture. Abroad it meant the
creation of an identity for Israel focused on depictions of the soldier as a metonym
for the state struggling as the weak against the strong, the few against the many. With
a few notable exceptions (more on this below), it would be many years before those
forms would begin to transmit anguished questioning and contradictions of the o≈cial
narrative, and this collection was conceived to account for how those changes came to
3
RANEN OMER-SHERMAN
be a dominant narrative in the expression of writers, artists, musicians, and other
Israelis.
Although the condition of war is a terribly intimate and familiar realm for Israelis,
it is not the editors’ claim that Israel’s literary, cinematic, or artistic products somehow
makes experience of war sensible or enables us to transcend the most horrific endeavor
that human beings engage in. And yet as Balaban testifies, somehow they are essential
nonetheless, bearing witness to a society’s fragility and exhaustion as well as its fervent
hopes for a better future, for a generation of youth not cynically sacrificed on war’s
terrible altar. Inevitably, whether overt or otherwise, the mythic permutations of the
Akedah—the sacrifice of Isaac—are never distant from the works addressed in this
volume.π The biblical story of the Akedah has long imbued such works with urgently
suggestive, uncomfortable layers of meaning. Just who are the respective killer and
martyr, the father and the angel? Who is doing the sacrificing, and where is the divine
redeemer who might intervene at the last possible moment to stay the hand with the
knife that precipitously hovers over the child? As such tormented questions intimate,
the aftermath of every war in Israel created a di√erent generational response, one that,
with the notable exception of the euphoria surrounding the 1967 war, sometimes
amounted to a weakening of the national narrative. However, on the whole, it wasn’t
until the advent of Israel’s ‘‘new historians’’ that the heavily mythologized War of
Independence was portrayed in a far less flattering light.
It has now been over two decades since the appearance of Benny Morris’s Birth of
the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947–1949 (1987) and Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million:
The Israelis and the Holocaust (1991). In these works, the young historians brought to life
important details of the Zionist leadership’s actions against the indigenous Arabs of
Palestine. Although initially dismissed as radicals, Morris’s and Segev’s meticulous
archival research eventually wielded unprecedented influence over a new generation of
scholars. Subsequently, in the summer of 1999 the IDF’s History Division cosponsored
the publication of The Struggle for Israel’s Security, which o√ered an unsparing assess-
ment of Israel’s policy toward Arabs throughout the 1950s. According to Daniel Polisar,
that same year also saw the appearance of a new curriculum by the Ministry of Educa-
tion that introduced into ninth-grade classrooms across the country the first three
textbooks about Israel aimed at teaching history from an expressly ‘‘universal’’ (as
opposed to ‘‘nationalist’’) perspective.
Perhaps the text that departed most radically from earlier pedagogy is A World of
Changes: History for Ninth Grade, edited by Danny Ya’akobi and published by the Minis-
try’s Curriculum Division, which attributes the victory of Jewish forces over five Arab
armies in the War of Independence to the Jews’ organizational and logistical edge rather
than to the traditional notions of determined leadership, brilliant military tactics, or
individual heroism that once held sway, even suggesting that ‘‘Israel precipitated the Six
Day War by acting aggressively against Syria in the months prior to the outbreak of
fighting.’’∫ Yet it is also important to emphasize that in the immediate aftermath of the
War of Independence, there was already a literary struggle over representing what
4
Introduction
transpired, most notably revealed in the urgent voice of S. Yizhar, whose fiction was
largely concerned with the nation’s conscience.Ω In the short story ‘‘The Prisoner’’
(composed during November 1948), an Arab peasant is seized from the pastoral land-
scape and abused during his interrogation. Yizhar’s protagonist recoils uneasily from
the insidious toll that war has taken on his comrades’ ostensible decency, as in this
passage that scathingly underscores the fate of liberal humanism in wartime:
And there were some who had steady jobs, some who were on their way up
in the world, some who were hopeless cases to begin with, and some who
rushed to the movies and all the theater and read the weekend supplements
of two newspapers. And there were some who knew long passages by heart
from Horace and the Prophet Isaiah and from Chaim Nachman Bialik and
even from Shakespeare; some who loved their children and their wives and
their slippers and the little gardens at the sides of their houses; some who
hated all forms of favoritism, insisted that each man keep his proper place
in line, and raised a hue and cry at the slightest suspicion of discrimination;
some whose inherent good nature had been permanently soured by the
thought of paying rent and taxes; some who were not at all what they
seemed and some who were exactly what they seemed. There they all stood,
in a happy circle around the blindfolded prisoner.∞≠
Repulsed by the rapidly escalating cruelty he witnesses (‘‘kick him—he’s an Arab; it
means nothing to him’’ [71]), Yizhar’s protagonist struggles mightily, but only within
himself. In the end he fails to act, and the mute prisoner is led o√, his execution a likely
prospect, the text insinuates. Of Yizhar’s early stories, Nurith Gertz astutely observes:
‘‘He is supposedly dealing with the Israel-Arab conflict but actually his subject is the
conflict between Israeli and Israeli; that is, between what is revealed in the Hebrew
literature of the War for Independence and what is suppressed in it.’’∞∞ More notori-
ously, Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh (published just months after the war’s end)
addressed the grim reality of Palestinian dispossession and the flawed behavior of the
IDF toward civilians.∞≤ Inexplicably only very recently translated and published in En-
glish (in spite of the fact that it was read and debated by generations of Israelis who first
encountered it as part of the standard high school curriculum), it still makes for disturb-
ing reading and is widely considered a masterpiece of wartime testimony that raises
uncomfortable questions regarding the mythic stature of the conflict itself.∞≥
In his afterword to the new Ibis edition of Khirbet Khizeh, cultural historian David
Shulman praises the very fact of its publication (and strong public resonance): ‘‘here is a
case where the Establishment seemed to make room for a dissonant, destabilizing voice,
something in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets—the voice of conscience . . . Yizhar
wrote about what he himself had seen and felt’’ (115–16). Shulman, a passionate peace
activist who has confronted Jewish settlers vandalizing Palestinians’ orchards, claims a
direct genealogy between the novella and ‘‘today’s peace movements, peopled by ordi-
5