The Idea of Israel (33 page)

This book is, in essence, a thorough examination of what might be called diet Zionism. That is, it revisits the acclaimed links between Zionism and liberalism, and all in all comes back worried and uncertain at the end of the journey. Juxtaposing liberal and modernist concepts of morality against the ideologies and practices of Zionism throughout its history, Ezrahi concluded that liberal humanism had a tough time penetrating or integrating into the political culture of Israel. However, he seemed to be ambiguous in his analysis of the causes for this poor state of affairs. Leaders of Zionism and Israel, when willing to admit the existence of such a problem, justified the dismal conditions of liberalism in Israel by pointing to the ‘objective environment’ that forced them to be economical on human and liberal rights. At times Ezrahi ridicules this excuse, but at times he wholeheartedly endorses it.

The reason for this ambiguity becomes clearer as one gets to the end of
Rubber Bullets
. It is a matter of periodisation. In pre-1967 Israel, according to the author, Zionist leaders were justified in their inability to make a clear choice between power and morality or between human rights and nationalism. Ezrahi, in fact, devotes only two pages in the book to a discussion – an indirect and elusive one at that – to the implication of the Palestinian Nakba on Israeli consciousness. Beyond those two pages, readers will not find in the book either the term ‘Nakba’ or other references to the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe. Ezrahi describes the immorality of the choice made after 1967 in an original manner, by highlighting the use of rubber bullets during the Intifada. Israelis considered this ammunition to be more humane than live ammunition. In the book, the phrase ‘rubber bullets’ becomes a concept, not just a kind of ammunition. The concept of rubber bullets appears here as yet another of many Israeli attempts to square the circle – it is immoral to use live ammunition against defenceless youths, but covering the bullets with rubber makes them kosher. However, Ezrahi applies this exercise in Israeli morality only to the post-1967 period, and particularly to the
post-1977 period, during the rule of the Likud Party. This ambiguity is inherently imbued in the psyche and outlook of the Israeli Zionist left. This is why the words of praise attached by Shimon Peres to the book ring true: ‘This excellent book will serve as a means for the non-Israeli to understand the contemporary reality of Israeli society well beyond the fog of myth and conventional wisdom’.
¹⁵

Indeed, the book is a manifestation of the Zionist left interpretation of the present reality in Israel, but the fog of myth still lingers – the myth of the small and harmless pre-1967, and especially the 1948, Israel. As the opening words of the book convey so clearly, the images of the Intifada were indigestible to Ezrahi. This gut reaction, analysed in a lucid manner in the book, led to the development of a moral and logical position supporting the rights of the Palestinians for their own state and was an important factor in pushing a sizeable proportion of Israeli Jewish society behind the Oslo Accords. However, people like Ezrahi perceive peace as constituting only a termination of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, an end that will cleanse the Hebrew language from absurd terms and free the army from immoral actions such as the use of rubber bullets.
¹⁶

But the Palestinians expect more than that. They want compensation or rectification of past evils dating back to 1948. Thus, what is missing in this approach is a gut reaction, similar to the one prompted by what Ezrahi witnessed during the Intifada, to the ghastly images from the criminal Israeli uprootings and massacres that took place during the 1948 war and afterwards. Palestinians are not likely to get such a reaction from Ezrahi, who does not want, as he clearly shows in the book, to confront his father with the past follies of Zionism, although he does want to educate his own son on the basis of the horrific pictures from the Intifada.

The book reveals an only partial foray into the darker side of the Israeli collective soul. It comes from within the Ashkenazi ‘yuppie’ groups of Israelis, who are willing to compromise with the Palestinians provided it will extract them from the Orient, the Middle East, the Arab world. They become less liberal and compromising when they encounter their ‘own’ Palestinian minority or those Arab Jews who
succeeded in escaping the efficient machinery of de-Arabisation within the State of Israel.

Rubber Bullets
is a genuine description of the paradoxes that currently tear Jewish society apart; it is also convincing proof that there is a metanarrative of Zionism, the implementation of which omits from a prospective solution of the Arab–Israeli conflict the Palestinians in the refugee camps, the diaspora, and those inside Israel itself. The book thus describes the transformation of the Zionist left within the boundaries of that metanarrative.

When, optimistically, I wrote in the 1990s about a post-Zionist media, I wrongly assumed that the liberalism of the left Zionist media would allow more confrontational views on Zionism to be aired freely and engaged with fully. But it was impossible for the Israeli press to display such tolerance for long. The film-makers had a far more interesting divide, between non-Zionist and liberal Zionist artists, and their post-Zionist legacy has lingered longer and might even have a more lasting effect on the idea of Israel in the future. The next chapter, which is this book’s last to describe this unusual decade in the history of knowledge production in Israel, is devoted to it.

TEN

On the Post-Zionist Stage and Screen

We kiss your ass, General Boom,

If it were not for you we would have kissed
Kloom
[‘nothing’ in Hebrew]

I remember how you lowered your shoulders when the soldiers fell, General Boom,

I have lost my two sons, but if it were not for you I had
Kloom

I remember how your red eyes were flooded with blood, General Boom

I was also flooded a bit with blood, but if it were not for you I would have nothing left but
Kloom

This is why we love you, General Boom, your blushy cheeks in the receptions

and your upright chin in the evening papers

Therefore we kiss your ass, General Boom

If it were not for you we would have been left with
Kloom
.

I
n this passage from
You, Me and the Next War
, the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin ridiculed the most revered group of people in Israel’s ethos and history: the combat generals. Levin was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv and staged this play at a small cabaret in the summer of 1968, when the Israeli public was engulfed by messianic euphoria after the June 1967 war.
¹

From then on, scores of his plays displayed this unwillingness to accept the militarised, nationalistic, Zionist nature of the local culture, politics and human attitudes. He also masterfully brought to the stage the ordinary life of ordinary people, with all their miseries, cruelties and dreams. His play
The Queen of the Bathtub
, staged in 1970, was a series of sketches that left very little of the Israeli ethos intact. The bruised political élite reacted by censoring the play; years would pass before it would be allowed to be shown again. Other, no less biting plays followed suit in the 1980s and 1990s, always accompanied by public outcry and an attempt by the public censor to silence this highly original and gifted playwright, who died in 1999.

Levin was not the only courageous Israeli playwright, though. Long before the 1990s, Yosef Mundi, Joshua Sobol and many others understood that the stage was a space where the worst could be said through the voices of others. When theatre became less popular, and hence less important in the eyes of the powers that be, these playwrights became even bolder and began to touch the rawest nerves of Zionism, as did the scholars and artists of the post-Zionist age.

But they were only a handful. Israeli theatre, apart from these exceptional cases and the relatively open period of the 1990s, was not only loyal to Zionism, it was a blunt reflection of the idea of Israel. In his comprehensive 1996 book
The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre
, Dan Urian showed that in most plays, Arabs were portrayed as shallow, one-dimensional figures, the objects of the playwrights’ hatred, fear, and hostility.
²
Directors generally embellished the racist texts on stage with ‘typical’ Arab traits such as sloppy clothing and slurred speech. These stereotypes were present in plays as early as 1936 and were not limited to the work of right-wing cultural producers alone.

Self-criticism in the theatre, as in other artistic domains, was largely limited to post-1967 Israel and focused on the moral implications for Israeli Jewish society of the never-ending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This self-imposed limitation, namely, not to pry beyond 1967, was particularly clear in the plays written by liberal and left-leaning Zionists, which appeared in the
wake of the First Lebanon War. Since the focus was the effect on the Jews, not the experiences of the Arab victims, in even the more seemingly subversive plays the Palestinians appear as cardboard figures playing secondary roles, while the fully developed Jewish heroes engage in shooting, killing, and torture, but then regret their actions.

There was a non-Zionist approach in the theatre as well, but it was marginal in commercial terms and had no political impact on the society at large. This approach appeared both in translated Palestinian works and in original non-Zionist Israeli plays. One of the translated works was a Hebrew adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s story ‘Men in the Sun’.
³
The play, which appeared on the local stage in the 1980s, was a commercial disaster but hinted at the potential of such a glimpse into Palestine cultural production. It is the story of three Palestinian refugees who are trying to escape from Iraq and go to Kuwait, a journey that reflects the despair of being a refugee because of the Nakba. Original Hebrew works, however, were more popular. For example, some of Sami Michael’s stories were adapted for the stage, becoming the first plays to humanise Palestinians by endowing the traditionally shadowy figures with names, histories, and ambitions.
⁴
In this context, one might mention fringe theatre, where one was able to see plays written by Palestinian Israelis depicting the occupation and the lives of Palestinians in Israel through personal and individual stories. An example of this was the 1994 national co-production in Jerusalem, by Palestinian and Israeli theatre groups, of a contemporary version of
Romeo and Juliet
.
⁵

Yitzhak Laor, although primarily a poet, was one of the few Israelis who created clearly non-Zionist work for the stage, incorporating his general critique of Israeli militarism. Unlike the extroverted liberal Zionists, Laor was less interested in what happened to Israeli society as a consequence of the occupation than in the suffering of the Palestinians themselves. His play
Ephraim Hozer La-Tzava
(Ephraim Returns to the Army) included realistic descriptions of Shin Bet interrogation and torture; when staged in the mid-1980s, it was censored for a time because of the connection it made between Nazi behaviour and Israeli occupation policies.
⁶

Joshua Sobol may have been less willing to tackle the essence of Zionism but he was very clear when it came to the evils of the occupation. In his 1985 play
The Palestinian Girl
, he provides a softer version of what Laor conveyed. A prolific playwright who was born in Palestine in 1939, he succeeded in covering in his sixty or so plays every aspect of life in Israel. More often than not, he did so critically, and occasionally even subversively. One of his recent plays,
Darfur at Home
, has one character shouting the following words, which capture very well the manipulation of Holocaust memory that was explored above:

If you really believed there was a Holocaust, you would not have allowed the Israeli members of Knesset to pass a law that prohibits giving a glass of water to a refugee [referring to the African refugees who began to reach Israel in 2005]. You in your indifference, and the members of Knesset you have elected, who mete out a punishment of twenty years to anyone helping a refugee, you are the proof there was no Holocaust.
⁷

But this was the exception, not the rule. Mostly it was the horrors of the occupation that made their way into the more open-minded and, in a way, post-Zionist theatre of the 1990s. Those who produced these plays are still at it today, but the medium’s popularity has dimmed, and its share of ‘political’ plays has dropped dramatically.

Post-Zionist Celluloid

In the early 1970s, the Israeli film director Ram Levy decided to adapt to the screen S. Yizhar’s (Yizhar Smilansky’s) famous story on 1948, ‘Hirbet Hiza’. The story was unusual in that the ethnic cleansing, in this case of a fictional and eponymous village, was described in detail, and raised some moral questions about the criminality of this policy through poignant dialogues between the soldiers.
⁸

Levy went in search of a village, and in talking to Yizhar he discovered that the fictional village was based on a real one, in which
similar events indeed did happen. But that village, like another five hundred or so, had been wiped out, and in its stead stood a Jewish colony. After touring the West Bank (in those days, Israelis could move quite easily in the occupied territory), he found a village that, according to Yizhar, resembled the one of 1948. Levy succeeded in persuading the mukhtar, the head of the village, to let him shoot the film there, but the mukhtar agreed on condition that the local villagers would not be used as extras. With the help of the area’s military governor, Levy then found a more cooperative village willing to supply the people for the film; as the director recalled later, they were transported in with trucks as if it were a military operation.
⁹
The movie turned out to be a powerful fictional representation of the Israeli crime, which only one or two post-Zionist films of the 1990s succeeded in reproducing. The feature-film industry could have challenged the idea of Israel had its practitioners been willing to do so. We will return to it shortly.