Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies

Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada

Adia Mendelson-Maoz

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781612495361
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadowof the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on themultifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested incontemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflictand the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prosewritten between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises criticalquestions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel asa democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals, the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and thesovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks.The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its criticalextensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and inparticular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari andtheir successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoreticalanalysis of the collageof voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times ofpolitical and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.

PART 1

In the Heart of Darkness

Meyer, the soldier narrator of Etgar Keret’s story “Darukh ve-natsur” (Cocked and Locked), finds himself in a narrow passageway in a Palestinian village. A Hamas activist, who likes to curse and intimidate soldiers, is standing in front of him calling him a “cocksucker” and “homo.” He asks him if “Your cross-eyed sergeant bush [push]¹ it up your ass too hard yesterday?” and makes crude sexual remarks about Meyer’s sister or mother.² Later he points at his heart and urges Meyer to shoot him, knowing that Meyer will not do a thing.

Keret’s story, published in Hebrew in 1994, illustrates the asymmetric power relations between Israelis and Palestinians and raises crucial questions about military conduct. It does so by depicting a single point of friction between a Hamas activist and Meyer, the narrator, a soldier who is positioned facing him, but is duty-bound not to respond in kind.

Meyer, whose friend Abutbul was severely injured and will probably remain in a coma, is frustrated by the situation and feels completely powerless during his everyday encounters with Palestinians. When he points his rifle at the Hamas activist just to scare him, the sergeant approaches and shouts at him: “what the hell do you think you’re doing, standing there like a damn cowboy with your weapon smeared over your cheek? What do you think this is? The fucking Wild West or something?”³ The sergeant admits that he is also upset about Abutbul and has fantasies of revenge; however, the role of a soldier is to refrain from these actions, which are those of terrorists—“if I did that, I’d be just like them. Don’t you get it?”⁴ Unlike the Palestinians who use any means at their disposal to hurt and kill (as they did with Abutbul), Israeli soldiers must act differently, be better than them, and not shoot.

The next day, the Hamas activist continues, as usual, to call Meyer names, inquire about Abutbul’s condition, and send the Hamas’ regards. But this time, Meyer cannot stand this situation in which his power to act and his masculinity are continuously attacked and finds an original solution. Meyer makes an unexpected gesture: he tears the wrapping off his field dressing and ties it across his face like a kaffiyeh. He takes his rifle, cocks it, and makes sure the safety is on. He swings the rifle over his head a few times and then, suddenly, lets it go. It lands about midway between him and his Palestinian counterpart.

“That’s for you, ya majnun” I scream to him. […] He’s faster than me. He’ll get to it before me. But I’ll win, because now I am just like him, and with the rifle in his hands he’ll be just like me.⁵

Meyer feels he can only win and vindicate his manhood by relinquishing his weapon. He decides to throw down his rifle and confront his antagonist with his bare hands. He approaches him, knocks him down, kicks him hard, grabs his face, and bangs it into a telephone pole, letting his anger fuel his actions. The ending is clearly a nod to cowboy movies, when a rifle flies into the sky and spirals slowly downward in slow motion as the protagonist shows his manly power.

This story is about space and ethics: cowboys could shoot whenever they wanted, whereas the Israeli soldier in the Occupied Territories must refrain, to preserve his moral superiority over his enemies. Meyer is depicted as a gentle soldier who cares about his friends and family, but the nature of the situation prompts him to commit an act of brutal violence. Eventually, the solution has much to do with this Wild West image. Meyer tries to internalize the rules of engagement as formulated by the sergeant, and thus abandons his rifle so he will be on an equal footing with his counterpart and will be able to smash his head, just like what happened to his friend Abutbul. Throughout the story, the Palestinian points at his heart, as though he is ready to be killed. He feels free to expose his genitals and say whatever he likes. This “freedom” reflects the cynical behavior of a person who has lost all notion of the value of life. Meyer, on the other hand, has a lot to lose, including his morality. At the end of the story, after he “takes care” of the Palestinian, he symbolically recovers his masculinity and power, but has incurred a great loss.

Keret’s unique style in “Cocked and Locked” employs radicalism and sarcasm to capture the ethical challenges posed by warfare in the Occupied Territories. These challenges stem from the unclear nature of military intervention in the Territories and the asymmetric power relations between Israelis and Palestinians, as Uri Ben-Eliezer states in his book Old Conflict, New War:

These wars are not waged between professional, conscript, or mass armies, even if such armies take part alongside other military groups. In fact, these wars involve a welter of forces: private armies, militias, autonomous military units, paramilitary groups, regional armies, segments of national armies, tribal armies, national movements, underground organizations, mercenaries, terrorist gangs, and even criminal organizations.⁶

Ben-Eliezer, a sociologist who writes on militarism in the context of Israeli society, discusses how these new wars differ from conventional ones between states. New wars are often asymmetric, in particular if they are conducted between a state and a non-state. The stronger side can have greater technical capabilities, but the weaker side can surprise the stronger side with unpredictable tactics, such as guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Many such wars do not have differentiated battlefields, and the dichotomies between the front and the rear, soldiers and civilians are often conflated. Thus, “the violence often shifts from the battlefields to the big cities, refugee camps, and villages—in short, to civilian habitats.”⁷ In many cases these wars are not declared; they have clear objectives, such as to conquer enemy territory or appropriate material resources. Thus, it is unclear when the war is over or who the winner is. Another aspect of new wars is the involvement of media, both traditional and local and also new and global. Thus, stories and images are quickly redistributed and become part of the conflict.⁸

With no such clarity of objectives and successes, and with the big eye of the media, perfect military conduct is impossible, as illustrated in Yuval Shimony’s text “Omanut ha-milhama” (The Art of War, 1990). This short allegorical text unfolds the story of a commander who decides to train for combat in a built-up area by constructing a perfect life-size model of a residential combat zone. In a Kafkaesque manner, the model becomes the essence of the operation, as the whole group works on every detail, trying to model the people and even the birds. They never carry out the operation, because they cannot make the model perfect.

Unlike Shimony’s model, in Keret’s story the protagonist is plunged into an actual residential combat zone, in which he cannot engage in rule-book military conduct. The contrast between Shimony’s ideal model and the forlorn appearance of Keret’s protagonist underscores not only the problematic circumstances of soldiers in the Territories, but the literary power of the authors, who articulate these situations through images, myths, and concepts.

CHAPTER 1

On a Hot Tin Roof

We climbed the slope of a hill, which had never even in its dreams seen anything driving over it with such dizzying boldness […] and there we sought out a place and surveyed the entire land below us.

A first glance and the great land stretched out before you, emphasizing all its sharp-hewn outlines, hunched and hollowed with drenched lushness, in a light that was growing whiter, and with a bit of a breeze that had started in the meantime and blew upon us a breath of beauty […] suddenly here was the checkerboard of fields, plowed and verdant, and the patches of shade-dappled orchards, and the hedges that dissected the area into peaceful forms stretching into the distance.¹

These lines are taken from “Hirbet Hiz’a,” a story written in 1949 by S. Yizhar. It takes place during the 1948 war, as a group of Israeli soldiers is ordered to demolish an Arab village and expel its inhabitants. The story documents their cruelty toward the helpless villagers. Apart from the narrator, a soldier himself, whose feelings about the incident are mixed, the other soldiers act with insensitivity and are completely unaware of the heinous nature of their deeds.

This passage highlights the spatial setting of the story by placing the soldiers on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. The village, located beneath them, blends into the carefully nurtured fields. Here, while the “village lay spread out before us,”² the soldiers “took position, set up machine guns, and were ready to start.” However, since “there was still a wait until zero hour,”³ they sit together relaxing and eating their tinned rations, playing games and enjoying themselves, as if they were on a school outing. Soon, however, their spatial topographic position, combined with their boredom and the acknowledgment that “this whole Khirbet Khizeh presented no problem”⁴ (that is, no military challenge), inspires them to start a kind of hunting game in which the soldiers target people (or animals) and try to score points by shooting.

“Hirbet Hiz’a” was one of the first stories to criticize the events of the 1948 War of Independence. Soon after its publication and to this day, this story is considered one of the most important and controversial literary texts on the 1948 war.⁵ Yizhar was brave enough to paint unflattering images of Israeli soldiers, and to demonstrate a mechanism that can lead to unethical and unlawful military conduct, which earned him both praise and condemnation. The commentary on this story is extensive. This chapter does not dwell on the richness of the text, but rather examines elements that have not been widely discussed elsewhere that are critical to the context of space and ethics and evidenced in contemporary prose on the Intifada: the power of the topographic settings and the portrayal of physical and mental distance.

This chapter focuses on scenes found in almost every literary text that describes a friction point between soldiers and Palestinian civilians and families, when soldiers requisition apartments and roofs for military purposes. They are suggestive of what Karen Grumberg calls “the hierarchy of space in Israeli society,”⁶ since they create a realm where the Palestinian home is always penetrated, and the Israeli soldier is the master of the landscape. On the other hand, the spatial presentation emphasizes that the soldiers are doomed to play a certain role they did not anticipate. They are ordered to leave their natural environment and are plunged into a completely foreign territory with different rules. This creates a state of deterritorialization—a state of movement or process, in which something escapes or departs from a given territory, which may be a marked space, or any other system, whether conceptual, linguistic, or social.⁷ This deterritorialization blurs individuals’ familiar system of thoughts and affects later traumatic recollections of these events. Though these literary works are often influenced by concrete events, they do not so much copy reality as endow a space and topography with a tangible, figurative, and symbolic role. This, in turn, reveals a range of ethical issues and the responses to them.

On Distancing

Former chief of staff Dan Halutz, who served as a military pilot, was asked how he felt when bombing from the air. The context of the question was a debate on the role of pilots in the Second Intifada, after the IDF adopted a policy of “targeted elimination,” which consisted of aerial bombing of wanted Palestinians that often caused the death of family members and other innocent people and children. Halutz only responded to the physiological notion of sensation. He said that when the bomb was dropped he felt a jerk in the aircraft that only lasted a second.⁸

The psychological mechanism of distancing is widely recognized as one of the key reasons why ordinary individuals can be made to kill. It involves a process of dehumanization the Other, and thus enables people to deny the fact that they are killing human beings.⁹ Physical distance ranges from impersonal and long range as in the case of artillery, to short and even intimate in the case of hand-to-hand fighting.¹⁰

When engaged in artillery fire, soldiers cannot see their individual victims without using mechanical devices such as radar, binoculars, or a periscope.¹¹ Dan Halutz’s response is indicative of the effect of topographic distance on pilots, whose exposure to the sights and sounds of war is muffled, and for whom the outcomes of bombings are not tangible.

Another type of long-range warfare involves situations where soldiers can see the enemy but cannot kill him without special weaponry such as sniper guns, tank fire, or antimissile missiles. Unlike when they use artillery, the soldiers have an idea of what is taking place on the battlefield, but use mechanical distancing devices to observe the target through their weapons; by contrast, at mid-range, soldiers can see their counterparts but cannot see their facial expressions. The soldier can only see his opponent at close range, when “looking at a man’s face, seeing his eyes and his fear”¹² eliminates denial. At this range the interpersonal nature of killing shifts: “instead of shooting at a uniform and killing a generalized enemy, the killer must shoot at a person and kill a specific individual.”¹³ There is even greater intimacy in close combat, which has been related to sexual abuse or even rape.¹⁴ Clearly, while military action at long range blurs the attributes of the scene and makes the strike more sterile and thus more probable, getting closer to the enemy emphasizes individuality and makes the act of killing more difficult and traumatic for the soldier.

Distance can be mental as well as physical. Mental distance is created by military education (formal and informal) and the process of becoming accustomed to violence. Research has shown tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: In the Heart of Darkness
• Part 2: Does Literature Matter?
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index