The Gods that Failed in Israel

What happens when the God you believe in fails? Or the ideology, once taken for granted as a narrative of the past and a projection for the future cannot explain what is happening in the present? The difference between what is imagined and what is real generates a deep feeling of loss, something that has become a defining characteristic of the Israeli experience. When I say loss, I am not talking about the death of parents or of children who are buried by their parents in a country still at war. I am referring not to the end of life so much as the ending of a set of values that have been taken for granted as critical in shaping the nation's identity. Not that everyone meets the standards set by these public values but almost everyone acknowledges their pre-eminence. Judging by two Israeli ideals that bracket the country's seventy-year anniversary and that seem wildly different—utopian socialism now buried by the entrepreneurial spirit of the start-up nation—it is striking to note the common ground both share. Both are imagined as the normative grid against which individuals are measured and as a collective dream everyone possesses.

No one captured the agony of living with the loss of this normative grid better than David Grossman in the "Sticker Song".¹ Perhaps he thought that only lyrics blasting out a series of brutal slogans in rap could deliver the truth about Israeli society and the fractures that provoked a sense of dislocation as profound as any in the past. No celebration of diversity, the "Sticker Song" is a lament for the losses suffered by people trying to bypass politics and ignore the idealistic visions that once gave Zionism its momentum. Perfectly poised for the present contentious moment, David Grossman has marked the fifty-year anniversary of the Six-Day War with "Yesh-Matzav" ["There is a Situation"],² a rock 'n' roll commentary paying homage to Zionist hymns and religious scripture, and urging Jews and Arabs to share the burden of forging a common destiny. One of Israel's preeminent novelists, Grossman has become a kind of prophet for the causes he champions and for the country whose flaws he laments where Israelis, worn down by "Ha-Matzav" [or "The Situation"]³ think nothing can be done. Israel, once a symbol not of hate and violence but of high hopes, currently presents its national narrative in the singular rather than in the plural because an ugly mixture of religious, political, economic, and social hatred has produced miseries on the ground and bred, on every street, a cynicism and fatalism about the larger impasse.

Grossman's song is not merely aimed at advancing the popularity of the country's left-leaning parties—although it is surely supportive of that partisan stance. Rather, it is intended to force a reckoning with the Palestinian problem, an issue most Israelis either prefer to avoid contemplating or reject as unresolvable. Embedded in Grossman's lyrics are reminders that the Jewish state was predicated on visions and ideals—extraordinary acts of the imagination at their time and perhaps for all time. To live without one of these visions disrupts not only Israel's identity but also the understanding Israelis have formed of who they are. For Grossman, the idea of Israel operates more powerfully on the psyche than the State's reality. That idea can never be totally discarded without a sense of deep loss and a crisis of confidence in the possibility of creating a future better than the past.

Grossman's lyrics capture a mood of melancholy self-consciousness about the 1967 War when Israel administered a blistering defeat to Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, tripled the size of its landmass, and necessarily had to assume responsibility for more than a million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The joy and comfort in military victory soon turned into a chronic entanglement with more landmines than exits on Israel's yellow brick road to a level of security and power unimaginable in the...