Women, Violence, and the Arab Question in Early Zionist Literature Andrea Siegel Submitted in ...

307 Pages·2011·24.15 MB·English

Women, Violence, and the “Arab Question” in Early Zionist Literature

Andrea Siegel

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2011
© 2011
Andrea Siegel
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Women, Violence, and the “Arab Question” in Early Zionist Literature

Andrea Siegel

This dissertation examines the themes of rape and domestic violence in Zionist
literature on the “Arab Question” published in Hebrew from the last years of
Ottoman rule in Palestine through to the 1929 riots that erupted during the British
Mandate. By bringing to light the import of rape and domestic violence in works
by authors such as L.A. Arieli, Yehuda Burla, Aharon Reuveni, Yitzhak Shami,
and Shoshana Shababo, I demonstrate that Zionist motions of race and gender
developed in an intertwined manner as writers imagined the future of Jewish-
Arab relations in Palestine. Moreover, while scholarly treatments of gender in the
yishuv have thus far largely concentrated on questions of masculinity, I show
how reading for masculinity and femininity together reveals Zionismʼs horror-
stricken sexual underbelly; as authors do away with early fantasies of Jewish-
Arab interweaving in an increasingly volatile political climate, they translate
pogrom-associated fears of bodily violation from Russian and Eastern European
settings into the Palestine arena. In novels, short stories, poetry, medical
literature, and propaganda pamphlets Zionist intellectuals also urge reform of
Jewish family life, sexual partnering, and hygiene education̶this, all the while
that they mount a case against turning to the Arabs as a viable folk source and
partner for the New Jew.
Table of Contents

Page

List of Illustrations.................................................................................................. ii

Acknowledgements...............................................................................................iii

Introduction............................................................................................................1

PART ONE:
ON RAPE: PUSHING PAST THE WOMAN

Anti-Semitism, Vitalism, Nationalism...................................................................26

L.A. Arieliʼs Allah Karim! and Aharon Reuveniʼs Devastation..............................61

PART TWO:
VIOLENT DOMESTICITY: WHAT DOES THE WAYWARD WOMAN WANT?

Jews, Arabs, and Aggression as Internal Critique.............................................103

The Hebrew Heroine.........................................................................................157

PART THREE:
FURTHER DIRECTIONS

Order, Chaos, and the Sexualized “Spatiality of Fear” After 1929....................221

Works Cited.......................................................................................................280

! "!
List of Illustrations

Page

1. Abel Pann, “Terror”..........................................................................................26

2. Abel Pann, “You are not going to die . . .: (Gen. 3:4)”.....................................61

3. Arnöld Bocklin, “The Isle of the Dead”...........................................................120

4. Meʼir Gur-Arie, “Poster for the Levant Fair”...................................................157

5. Avraham Melnikoff, “Jerusalem Effendi” .......................................................157

6. Zeʼev Raban, logo for Ha-sneh ....................................................................221

7. Na(cid:2779)um Gu(cid:2851)man,1 from A Journey to Health Land.........................................267

8. Na(cid:2779)um Gu(cid:2851)man, To Ishmaelʼs Grave, cover.................................................267

9. Na(cid:2779)um Gu(cid:2851)man, from Book of Strewn Light..................................................272

10. Na(cid:2779)um Gu(cid:2851)man, “Disarm!”..........................................................................274

11. Na(cid:2779)um Gu(cid:2851)man, “Our Fortresses”...............................................................274

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 Copyright for all illustrations by N. Gutman are owned by the Gutman
family and used with permission through the Gutman Museum of Art in Tel
Aviv.
! ""!
Acknowledgements

My graduate training, including the research for this dissertation, would not
have been completed without the support of the Wexner Foundation, the
Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, the
Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Cultures at
Columbia University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the
American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

I thank my advisor, Dan Miron, for inspiring me with his erudition ever
since I was a young undergraduate student in his Introduction to Hebrew
Culture class over fifteen years ago. I greatly appreciate his guidance and
unflagging insistence on excellence.

I could not ask for a better mentor in Nili Gold. Her brave conviction that
the study of literature begins both with the text and with self-reflection will
be with me always. I wish to thank, as well, the other members of my
dissertation committee̶Hannan Hever, Wael Hallaq, and Uri Cohen̶for
their thoughtful comments and generosity.

David Fishelov of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been both a
professional sounding board and a personal friend ever since he lectured
at Columbia University as a visiting scholar. Rachel Hallote, Director of
the Jewish Studies Program at Purchase College SUNY, has welcomed
me into the professorate and encouraged me as I have moved into the
final phases of bringing the dissertation to completion.

! """!
Phillip Hollander, who took me under his wing back in his doctoral
candidacy days, provided a listening ear over many long hours in libraries
both in the United States and in Israel. Among the cherished friends who
have put up with my laments and musings over the past few years, I wish
to single out for a hearty thanks Sara Zatz, Jai Kasturi, Wendy Amsellem,
Faye Lederman, Avital Eliason, and Rachel Alexander.

Lucette Benezra and Deni Koenhemsi have been my “home away from
home” in Istanbul for the past two years; they opened their apartment and
their hearts to me as I edited dissertation chapters in local coffee shops of
Ulus. I am so fortunate to have them in my life.

Finally, I thank my family. If only my mother, Karen Siegel z”l, could have
lived to see me finish my Ph.D.! I dedicate this dissertation to her. My
fatherʼs support for my doctoral studies, including the long nights of
comprehensive exam preparation, has been crucial to the completion of
this dissertation. He has modeled for me the goodness of the “life of the
mind,” and I take his passion for teaching with me whenever I enter the
classroom. Harriet Siegel, Joanna and Dan Seiden, Debbie Schechter
(who read an earlier version of this manuscript) and Ellie Sigelman mean
the world to me. I look forward to continuing to build our family together in
years to come.

! "#!
1
Introduction

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish anxieties about
male-female partnerships, familial domesticity, and sexual vitality contour
early Zionistsʼ writings on Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine. Key Hebrew
authors in the years preceding and following the watershed Arab riots of
1929 soberly assessed regnant hopes for Jewish-Arab coexistence through
stories that explore the often uncontrollable urge to use force̶upon oneʼs
family member, neighbor, or oneself. In particular, the motif of violence
against women (and those put in the position of ʻwomanʼ)1 perpetrated by
both Jews and Arabs surfaces repeatedly in stories by writers such as L.A.
Arieli, Aharon Reuveni, and Yehuda Burla. Zionist intellectuals probed, and
intensified, their concerns about interethnic tensions in Palestine through
tropes of rape and domestic violence.
Joan Wallace Scott in her seminal essay “Gender: A Useful Category
for Historical Analysis” makes the case that scholars of history must grapple
with the ways that people create systems of social relations based upon their
assumptions about differences between the sexes. Gender is at the heart of

1 The phrase is from Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silverʼs Rape and Representation
(New York, 1991), 2.
2
how people inherit and rework symbols, choose frameworks via which to
interpret those symbols, and develop political, familial, and literary spheres
that supply those interpretive frameworks and dynamically evolve through
them (1069). A fundamental inquiry of the present study, then, is how can
gender (and, specifically, violence against women) be a useful category for
historical analysis of Arab-Jewish conflicts at the dawn of Zionism?
Moreover, do modern Hebrew writers supply gendered interpretive
frameworks and rework specific tropes of womenʼs experiences in ways that
consolidate or challenge visions for Arab-Jewish cooperation in Palestine?
Such inquiries have not received sufficient attention in existing scholarship
on the Arab Question in Zionism.

The Arab Question in Zionism
One of the central moral and social issues for Zionists, dating as far back
as Ahad Ha-amʼs essay “Truth from the Land of Israel” (1891) and continuing to
this very day, is what has become known as the “Arab Question” (ha-sheʼela ha-
ʻaravit): the recognition that at the dawn of Zionist settlement efforts in Palestine
the majority of the local population was not Jewish and had no desire for the
3
Jews to take control of the contested homeland.2 As the initial Jewish
immigration waves (ʻaliyah, pl. ʻaliyot) to Palestine got underway (each of the first
five major successive waves with its own character, 1881-1903, 1904-1914,
1918-1923, 1924-1926, 1932-1936), Zionists debated about Arab-Jewish
relations on various fronts--including economics, labor, natural resources,
demographics, immigration and the associated impacts on government structure,
language, urban and rural planning, and security.
Since its first appearance in Ahad Ha-amʼs essay and in ensuing
milestones like Yitshak Epsteinʼs “A Hidden Question” (1905), the “Arab
Question,” as its name indicates, is as much a matter for philosophers and
observers of the human passions as it is a matter for social scientists, workersʼ
rights activists, and urban planners. The notion of “accursed questions”
(proklyatye voprosy) from nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history as
explained so beautifully by Isaiah Berlin in his well known essay on Tolstoy, “The
Hedgehog and the Fox,” applies as well to the prominence of “Questions” in
Zionism: “those central moral and social issues of which every honest man, in

2 Zionist writers during the pre-state period differed in how they referred to
Palestinian Arabs (“Arabs,” “Ishmaelites,” “non-Jews,” etc.). On the formation of
Palestinian Arab identities, see Khalidi (New York,1997); on the earliest Arab and
Turkish reactions to Zionism, see Mandel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London,1980).