Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (31 page)

Thus the Musklejud plays out his greatest triumph as an endlessly repeat- able drama: overcoming the sissy within. Queerness, then, enacts an impor- tant role in the Zionist project and needs not only to be kept around but to be endlessly reproduced. More than acting as a counterpoint to the (presum- ably) straight Musklejud, queer men—the idea of queer men—legitimate the need for their own ongoing, always incomplete, repression. But unlike other military cultures that also hype hypermasculinity, Zionism ascribes a positive value to the soft sabra core as well, for the threat of vulnerability is what guar- antees international affection and protection for the state; it is the cushiony bedrock of Israel’s very raison d’être.

To be sure, this is a matter of rhetorical abstraction; the IDF is no more free of homophobia than other armies, and real gay men are offered no spe- cial privileges for the rhetorical duty that queerness performs. Still, there are compelling ways in which this paradigm allows entry to gay men seeking na- tional acceptance. Queerness has a venerated role in the Zionist narrative; gay men can be interpellated into the national ethos by virtue of its valuable func- tion. They can come out and be ingathered at one and the same time. In both instances they are fulfilling their own historical destiny—and Israel’s.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the mainstream gay movement has not sought to challenge Zionism, but to be pressed to its bosom. Nor that it has attempted to do so by claiming a piece of Zionism’s most vaunted, defining emblems: the Land and the Holocaust. Certainly these terms are always con- tested, and, predictably, trying to queer them has outraged their most miser- ly protectors—even though the gay movement’s most publicized actions around Land and Holocaust did not challenge these pillars of Zionism but paid homage to them.

In the earlier action the gay movement asserted its worthiness of the na- tion by attempting to engage in the quintessential Zionist gesture: planting trees. At a 1979 meeting of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations, an international group of gay Jews raised money for three thousand trees for a grove near Lahav, in the Negev. But for years the Jewish National Fund, which controls 90 percent of Israeli land and is entrusted with the job of “Judaizing” it, had refused to inscribe a plaque at the site naming the donors. So in 1992 the SPPR issued an ultimatum to the JNF. “If it does not fully honor its thirteen-year pledge to dedicate the plaque at Lahav for- est,” wrote SPPR spokesperson Liora Moriel in a public statement, “the SPPR will hold demonstrations, petition the public and lobby MKs [Knesset mem-

bers] to ensure that justice is done.”
23
The failure to see a broader injustice in the very effort—the expropriation of Palestinian land that such tree plantings not only mark but gloat over—suggests that the tree-planting episode Zion- ized the queer movement more than it queered Zionism.

A more complex and controversial way in which the movement essential- ly wrapped itself in the flag was by staging a memorial ceremony in 1994 for homosexuals who perished in the Holocaust. Beyond the chutzpah of recog- nizing non-Jews as victims of Nazi extermination, the SPPR service also at- tempted to claim space in one of the country’s most sacred and symbolic are- nas: it was to take place at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. While the wreath laying and recitation of
Yizkor
was absolutely sincere, the ceremony must also be read within the larger context in which the Shoah circulates in Israeli discourse: as the often crassly contested site through which Jews compete for authenticity and political rectitude.

As Tom Segev has painfully demonstrated in
The Seventh Million
,
24
the Shoah was manipulated early on to serve nationalist objectives. Since the rise of Likud in the mid-1970s especially, it has been widely invoked to justify the occupation. Menachem Begin said that when Israeli tanks rolled into Beirut he felt as if he were storming Berlin to catch Hitler in his bunker, but it was the liberal politician Abba Eban who referred to the green line dividing Israel from the West Bank and Gaza as “Auschwitz borders.” In the 1980s Israeli high school students started being taken on an annual field trip to the death camps of Europe as one means of indoctrinating them into a fortress mental- ity. Certainly the SPPR was honoring the homosexuals who perished under Nazism, but this group, too, was deploying the Shoah to justify its cause. Yad Vashem is not just a national shrine, it is also, as an editorial defending the gay ceremony put it, “a repository of the nation’s collective memory, a re- minder of the commonality of Jewish destiny.”
25
By bringing some 150 gay and lesbian Jews to lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance, SPPR was claiming to be part of that commonality too.

That content was not lost on the religious right, which predictably went berserk. They took out ads in the paper condemning homosexuality as a ha- lakhic abomination and threatening Yad Vashem with a boycott for desecrat- ing the memory of the holy victims of the Shoah. On the day of the ceremo- ny they attempted to block the driveway when buses arrived and then disrupted the service inside the Hall of Remembrance. “AIDS is your pun- ishment!” shouted one protester—a sentiment that authorized him as a guest on Israel’s leading TV talk show
Popolitica.

The Israeli media couldn’t get enough of the incident. TV news coverage re- peatedly showed a clip of two men yelling the words of the Kaddish at each

other—one a protester being dragged away by a policeman, the other a partic- ipant in the ceremony, intoning the old Aramaic prayer under a torrent of tears. Thus, in the images of hoary
haredim
(ultra-Orthodox) and horrified homos hollering at each other, the Israeli public saw the rawest representation of their most explosive social drama. In a thoroughly post-Zionist twist, the gay action came to stand for secular values of free speech and assembly, while the religious objections threatened theocracy—both values displayed, of course, in specifically Jewish terms. Thus even as right-wing a paper as the
Jerusalem Post
ran an editorial justifying the gay assembly (while invoking lib- eral democracy to defend, at the same time, its publication of the right-wing’s advertisement the day before). An editorial in
Ha’aretz
went further, noting the vicious irony of inciting violence to protect the memory of Holocaust vic- tims. Through this action gays and lesbians became heroes of secular liberal-

ism; the religious right remains their only staunch opponents.

Viva la Diva Citizen

The only opponents, that is, of the assimilationist gay movement. The more radical wing is considered downright traitorous, for it attaches queer libera- tion to liberation for all. Even Arabs.

If Daniel Boyarin is right that “Diaspora is essentially queer,”
26
then Zionism—the supplanting of diaspora—is essentially antiqueer. And then it only follows that queerness is anti-Zionist. The radical wing of the gay move- ment might not take on either loaded label—
queer
or
anti-Zionist
—but they are battling the inequities that are built into the very foundations of Jewish nationalism. A huge proportion of activists in the radical wing of the Israeli peace movement are lesbians—close to a third in some cities.
27

To this day in Israel there is little space for women to enter political dis- course on equal footing with men. After all, they haven’t “earned” their place in the discussion by “defending” the country. When women have spoken up—even in as unprovocative a way as standing silently on a street corner every week, as the Women in Black began doing during the first intifada— the opposition has been expressed in violent sexual terms. “You should be fucked by an Arab,” was a common shout flung, along with oranges, out of passing car windows at women standing with “End the Occupation” signs in Jerusalem. It is the nationalistic corollary to that crude old insult that lesbians are merely women in need of a man’s “good fuck.”
28

Zionism’s masculinizing project has been harder to crack than its impera- tive to male heterosexuality. An early Zionist adage, variously attributed, of-

fers, in a telling, heavily gendered fantasy, the meaning of a Jewish state: the place where a (female) Jewish prostitute could be arrested by a (male) Jewish policeman and tried by a (male) Jewish judge; today, on the supposedly egal- itarian kibbutzim women still tend to be relegated to child care and kitchen duties. Israeli feminists have frequently been accused of treason for demand- ing equality. In the words of the feminist activist and former Knesset member Marcia Feedman, Israel is a country “where the liberation of women . . . [is] seen as a threat to national security.”
29

Even the mainstream peace movement casts women into the exclusive role of grieving mothers—from the founding of Peace Now in 1978, when male organizers would not let a female officer sign their joint letter to Begin op- posing the occupation, to a recent group called the Four Mothers, women who worked to end military operations in Lebanon. Ben-Gurion once summed up the attitude most starkly: “Any Jewish woman who, as far as it de- pends on her does not bring into the world at least four healthy children” is like “a soldier who evades military service.”
30

Lesbians who have refused to comply with the assigned duties as wives and mothers are making a political statement larger than the familiar feminist gesture. They are rejecting their given role in the nationalism that is the only otherwise unbroken piece of the fragile national consensus. It is precisely their lesbianism that enables their public displays of defection.
31

During the hoopla over Israel’s fiftieth anniversary, an alternative ceremo- ny was held by the peace camp in which activists from a range of groups were invited to light and dedicate torches. Gila Svirsky, leader of the feminist peace group Bat Shalom, came out as a lesbian as she lit her torch in honor of all the women’s peace groups and their feminist vision. Such groups, she said, have “always included a high proportion of lesbians. The time has finally come to make note of this important contribution.”
32

Bat Shalom is one of the most active groups in the peace camp producing public events (as distinct from long-standing direct-action groups, such as Physicians for Human Rights, which quietly goes about improving Palestini- ans’ access to medical supplies and services)—the only one, for example, to organize a counterdemonstration to Israel’s most nationalistic secular holiday, Jerusalem Day, on which thousands of soldiers parade around the walls of the Old City to celebrate “unified Jerusalem.” (Never mind that the city remains divided—taxis at the bus station on the west, Jewish side, typically refuse to take passengers to the east, Arab side.) Meanwhile, right-wing extremists pa- rade through Palestinian neighborhoods, rifles slung across their backs. Bat Shalom and its supporters—about seventy at the 1998 demonstration—stood in a long line on a hill overlooking the nationalistic fervor, holding signs with

such slogans as “East Jerusalem is Occupied Territory”—enough to provoke some men to leave death threats on the group’s answering machine. Bat Shalom was also involved in organizing Israel’s first conference on conscien- tious objection in October 1998—a subject so touchy in a state that glorifies its military that the participants were hounded out of the kibbutz where the conference was supposed to have taken place by a dozen people shouting such things as, “Had we had an army then, my family would not have burned in Auschwitz.”
33
The 150 conference-goers assembled, instead, in one organiz- er’s backyard and got on with their effort, in Svirsky’s words, “to rethink—to get past the veils of convention and myth—the issues of militarism in Israeli society and service in the army.”
34
They listened to testimonies, read by women, of young men discharged from the army on the grounds of “unfit- ness” because of their conscientious objection (for which there is no legal pro- vision in Israel). They heard narratives directly from four young men and one woman recounting their ordeals of refusing to serve.

These stories, of course, might constitute Israel’s most profound acts of Diva Citizenship, if only they garnered the all-important mega-publicity that, Berlant notes, is crucial to its impact, for they, most urgently, “call[_] on peo- ple to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.”
35
Neither Svirsky nor the military refuseniks, nor the physicians working with PHR, will ever sashay onto an international stage in a Gaultier gown, but with critiques of Zionism that attach its animating mas- culinist and heterosexist values to its chauvinism and political recalcitrance, their threat to the state’s “dominant story” runs deeper than Dana Interna- tional’s. This is the Diva Citizen waiting in the wings, ready to enter the spot- light Dana International has attracted—if no one pulls the plug.

Notes

1. Dana International, quoted in Barbara Demick, “Israeli Star in Spotlight for Her Singing and Her Past,”
   Inquirer
   (London), 18 June 1998.
   

2. Dana International quoted in H. Keinon, “A Victory not Celebrated by Everyone,”
   

   Jerusalem Post
   , 11 May 1998.
   

3. Author’s interview with Tom Segev, New York City, 4 May 1998.
   

4. Dana International quoted in Tor Henning Pederson, “Dana Will Not Come to Mo- markedet,”
   Blikk
   (Norway), trans. DRK for the website “The Other 10%: The Gay and Lesbian Student Union of the Hebrew University,” http://www
   .ma.huji.ac.il/ˇ7Edafid/ dana.html.
   

5. Shlomo Benizri quoted in Allison Kaplan Sommer, “The Divine Miss Dana,”
   

   Jerusalem Post
   , 10 May 1998.
   

6. The full text of Dana’s prize-winning song, written by Yoav Ginay, is “There is a woman who is larger than life. / With senses only she owns. / There is magic and there are
   

   tough days, / and a stage, which is hers alone. / For the angels, Diva is an empire. / On stage, Diva is hysteria. / She is all a love song. / Diva, we will cheer, Diva Victoria, Aphrodite. / Viva la diva, viva Victoria, Cleopatra. / There are women, tears of life, / They will carry out a wordless prayer. / For the angels, Diva is an empire. / On stage, Diva is hysteria. / She is all a love song./ Diva, we will cheer.”
   

7. Lauren Berlant,
   The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Cit- izenship
   (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 223.
   

8. Dana International quoted in Demick.
   

9. See Michael Berkowitz,
   Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933
   (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David Biale,
   Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America
   (New York: Basic, 1992); Daniel Boyarin,
   Unheroic Con- duct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of Jewish Man
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Paul Breines,
   Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilem- ma of American Jewry
   (New York: Basic, 1990); Howard Eilberg-Schwartz,
   God’s Phallus and other Problems for Men and Monotheism
   (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Howard Eilberg- Schwartz, ed.,
   People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective
   (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Sander Gilman,
   Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Sander Gilman,
   The Jew’s Body
   (London: Routledge, 1991); George Mosse,
   Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism
   (New England: Brandeis University Press, 1993); Naomi Seid- man,
   A Marriage Made in Heaven? The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The urtexts, of course, are Max Nordau’s
   Degenera- tion
   , introduction by George Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968) and his “Muskeljudentum” in
   The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History
   , ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 434–35.
   

10. Boyarin, p. 222.
    

11. Dana International quoted in
    Times of London
    , 11 May 1998.
    

12. Berlant, p. 223.
    

13. See, for instance, Avi Machlis, “Israeli Gays, Lesbians March Amid Growing Ac- ceptance,”
    Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
    10 July 1998. One marcher, Amnon Rahav, is quot- ed as saying, “Dana International has created a very strong momentum.”
    

14. Of course the Orthodox have had political power from the earliest days of the state thanks to what’s known as Ben-Gurion’s “historic compromise” with the rabbis. But since the rise of Likud, they have acquired more influence on Israeli-Arab relations as well as on internal affairs. Ironically, one victory they won from Ben-Gurion—their control of mar- riage—has backfired in gay rights cases brought to court. Because there is no civil marriage in Israel, many secular straight couples choose not to be legally married, yet the law rec- ognizes their status as a couple. Thus when gays sued for parallel benefits there was no re- course to the argument that only married people were eligible for such benefits.
    

15. There is a growing population of other non-Jews as well—untold numbers of the émigrés from the former Soviet republics as well as the increasing numbers of (nonvoting) guest workers from Thailand, Rumania, and elsewhere, who have replaced Palestinian labor.
    

16. For a thorough discussion of these different trends, see Ilan Pappé, “Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians, Part 1: The Academic Debate,”
    Journal of Palestine Studies
    , 26:2 (Winter 1997): 29–41; “Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians, Part 2: The Media,”
    Journal of Palestine Studies
    , 26:3 (Spring 1997): 37–43; “Post-Zionist
    

    Critique on Israel and the Palestinians, Part 3: Popular Culture,”
    Journal of Palestine Stud- ies
    , 26:4 (Summer 1997): 60–69. See also Uri Ram,
    The Changing Agenda of Israeli Soci- ology: Theory, Ideology, and Identity
    (New York: SUNY Press, 1995).
    

17. Yaron Ezrahi,
    Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel
    (New York: Far- rar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 83.
    

18. Zeev Sternhell,
    The Founding Myths of Israel
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
    

19. Joyce Sala, executive board member of the Society for the Protection of Personal Rights for Gay Men, Lesbians, and Bisexuals in Israel, quoted by Sandi Dubowski in a re- port from Israel in
    10 Percent
    (July/August 1994): 47–49 and 70.
    

20. For a thorough summary of the hegemony of an Ashkenazi perspective in Zionist ideology and implementation, see Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,”
    Social Text: Theory, Culture, and Ideology
    , 19/20 (Fall 1988): 1–35.
    

21. Simona Sharoni,
    Gender and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance
    (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995).
    

22. There are innumerable examples of the abuse of Holocaust imagery in contempo- rary Israeli politics—even in popular journalistic accounts. In
    From Beirut to Jerusalem
    (New York: Anchor, 1989) Thomas Friedman states, “Israeli leaders such as Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, instead of fighting against the ‘Holocausting’ of the Israeli psyche, actually encouraged it, turning the Palestinians into the new Nazis and Is- rael into a modern-day Warsaw Ghetto aligned against the world. Begin, more than any other figure, reintroduced into public rhetoric the language of the Israeli as the inheritor of the traditional Jewish role of victim, whose fate, like that of all Jewish in history, is to dwell alone.” He concludes, “Israel today is becoming Yad Vashem with an air force” (280–281). David K. Shipler writes, in
    Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land
    (New York: Penguin, 1986) that the memory of the Holocaust “in Israel, of all places . . . is also frequently cheapened by Jews who use it for political propaganda” (345). Shipler cites posters from the eighties showing Anwar Sadat with swastikas drawn on his necktie. More recently, as Avishai Margalit recounts in “The Kitsch of Israel” (
    New York Review of Books
    , 24 November 1988, 20–24), Israel answered the internal and external criticism of its response to the
    intifada
    with its “secret weapon, the Holocaust. In Israel this year we had longer, and more vulgar, memorial services for the Holocaust than any I can remem- ber previously. But the climax was an event that, even in a kitsch-haunted country like this one, many people felt went too far. It was a Holocaust Quiz, shot ‘on location’ in Poland.” He quotes Benjamin Netanyahu asserting, “Arafat is worse than Hitler.”
    

23. Liora Moriel, “Battle of the Plaque,” letter to the editor,
    Jerusalem Post
    , 6 June 1992.
    

24. Tom Segev,
    The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,
    trans. Haim Watz- man (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
    

25. “Desecrating Yad Vashem,” editorial,
    Jerusalem Post
    , 1 June 1994, p. 6.
    

26. Boyarin, p. 231.
    

27. Hannah Safran, “Alliance and Denial: Feminist Lesbian Protest Within Women in Black,” Masters thesis in Liberal Studies, Simmons College, 1994, p. 23.
    

28. Similarly, when a group of American Jews stood with anti-occupation signs along- side New York’s annual Israel Parade—a parade that promotes “Greater Israel”—spectators would spit and yell at them, and even threaten them with violence. They would screw up
    

    their faces and scream out the worst insults they could think of: “You’re the ones Hitler should have gotten!” and “Faggot!” That this right-wing parade became the site of a battle for gay inclusion, when New York’s lesbian and gay synagogue, Congregation Beth Sim- chat Torah, was denied permission to march, only shows how thoroughly unquestioning Zionism has become equated with Jewish identity in the U.S.
    

29. Marcia Freedman, quoted in Sharoni, p. 40.
    

30. David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Sharoni, p. 96.
    

31. In a series of profiles collected in
    Lesbiot: Israel Lesbians Talk About Sexuality, Fem- inism, Judaism, and Their Lives
    , ed. Tracy Moore (London: Cassell, 1995), Israeli lesbians often associate sexual dissidence with sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.
    

32. Gila Svirsky, email correspondence, 7 May 1998.
    

33. Ibid., 3 November 1998.
    

34. Ibid.
    

35. Berlant, p. 223.