Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen

Conclusion

169 Conclusion ■ It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. Theodor W. Adorno InhisfirstpoetrycollectionKinatHamMhager (TheImmigrant’sLament,1995) Moroccan-born poet Moshe Ben Harosh, who immigrated to Israel with his parents in 1972, describes his sense of alienation from Israel. He writes that, since his immigration to Israel: I feel lonely in Israeli society and even more of a stranger with my diaspora family or with the diaspora Jews and with my family in Israel I even developed a chronic estrangement from myself.1 In this poem the immigrant—the oleh who arrives in Israel by ascending (aliya), according to the Zionist terminology, and exits the land by descending (yerida)—presents himself as a stranger. This poetic articulation of displacement , of being exiled at the very site that signifies the end of exile, of being homeless even at the center of home, is at the core of the “immigrant’s lament.” It parallels recent developments in Israeli new critical sociology, which no longer discusses Israeli society in Zionist terms (such as “aliya” and the Jewish melting pot) but rather analyzes it as a society of immigrants.2 The feeling of displacement in Palestine/Israel—in one’s own “home”— is not peculiar to Oriental Jews;3 it has always hovered in the background of the Zionist project. However, it was not openly expressed, discussed, or debated , either in prestate Palestine or in Israeli political public space. Most expressions of displacement, internal exile, and homelessness were articulated in the relatively “safe haven” of the cultural and aesthetic spheres.4 Although Ben Harosh laments his estrangement from both “home” and the “Diaspora ,” there is, nonetheless, a nostalgic sentiment toward the Diaspora in his poem. Implicitly the poem suggests that his “homecoming” is to be blamed for creating his feeling of “homelessness.” The Israeli home deprived Ben Harosh of the ability to feel at home. Paradoxically the Zionist “homeland” has only sharpened his exilic consciousness and placed him back in the Jew’s “natural place,” the spiritual Diaspora. An even earlier immigrant to Palestine than Ben Harosh, the Polish Jewish poet Avot Yeshurun, manages, as Tamar Berger perceptively observes, in a single line, a single metaphor, to connect separate worlds. The identification of the Jewish shtetl with Palestine, Polish Jews with Arabs, is a recurring motif in Yeshurun’s writing. “The Bedouins who came from Poland” is the opening line of his poem “A Lullaby to the Nordia Neighborhood.”5 The hybridization of the Polish Jews and the Arab nomads into one entity, recalling both the mythic figure of the wandering Jew and the mythic figure of the Arab nomad, draws attention not only to the “rootlessness” of the two peoples but also to the tragedy inflicted by the diasporic Jew victimized by Europe on the Palestinian Arabs. This tragedy, according to Yeshurun, was twofold because it turned the Palestinians into either homeless refugees or (in the case of those who stayed in Palestine/Israel) exiles in their homeland. Furthermore, the “returning Jews” were not redeemed by the act of “return” either. To the contrary , both missing their diasporic home and consciously (or not) feeling guilty for depriving the Palestinian Arabs of their own home by their act of “redemption,” they became “Jewish-Polish Bedouins,” forever trapped and locked in the tragic dialectics created by what Rashid Khalidi calls “the contrasting narratives regarding Palestine.”6 Hannah of My Michael is a fictional embodiment of Tel Avivan poet Avot Yeshurun. “Representative of one type of Jerusalemite, the child of European immigrants, Hannah” as Hannah Wirth-Nesher observes, “is identified by her feelings of displacement, of being exiled from the very site that marks the end of exile, of being homeless even at the center of home.”7 This feeling of displacement also is experienced by the film director Hanna Azulay Hasfari as well as by Cheli, her fictional alter ego in Shchur, and even by the Palestinian female protagonist she plays in Nadia. Feelings of displacement, “one of the most formative experiences of our century,”8 are pervasive also in the postmemory Holocaust cinema. The metaphor of home, so prominent, in particular in the Israeli films dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is 170 Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen yet another expression for the dominance of the politics of displacement in Israeli cinema, which desperately attempts to create imagined homes...