Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. I am borrowing the term “politics of ideas” from Azmi Bishara’s introductory remarks to the conference titled “The Conflictual Construction of Identities in the Middle East,” The Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, November 24 –26, 1998. Since Bishara defines himself as an oldfashioned modernist (following the tradition of Jurgen Habermas), he renounces this politics as “sectorialism.” According to Bishara, this contemporary sectorialism is common to both Jewish and Arab populations in Israel. 2. Edward Said made this claim in a meeting at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute on November 16, 1998. Despite being hounded by the audience regarding this position, Said steadfastly refused to refer to the topic as worthy of discussion. 3. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1 (London: Sage Publications, 1996). 4. Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity , 301. 5. Michael Peter Smith, “Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics,” Social Text 39 (1994): 23. 6. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, 51. 7. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). 8. According to Ella Shohat, the Mizrahim (like the Palestinians) are certainly the victims of Zionism. See Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,”Social Text, vols. 19–20 (spring–summer 1988). The title of this article is a conscious ironic reference to Edward Said’s article “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text, no. 1 (1979). 9. In the case of Mizrahim and Holocaust survivors, the anger and the frustration is usually not directly channeled against “Zionism” or the Jewish state but is displaced and disguised in different forms. However, among intellectuals and artists of the second generation of Mizrahim and Holocaust survivors the anger is sometimes openly targeted against Zionism or at least against the “historical mistakes made by the state” with regard to the absorption of immigrants from the Islamic countries and Holocaust survivors from Europe (see chaps. 2 and 3). 173 174 Notes to pages xiv–2 10. David Ben-Gurion’s famous phrase “without Maki [the former Israeli Communist Party] and Herut [the former Likud Party]” was extensively used in Netanyahu’s political rhetoric expressing his unwillingness to forge a political alliance with the Labor Party. 11. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 52. 12. Idith Zertal, Zehavam shel HaYehudim: HaHagira HaYehudit HaMahtartit L’Eretz Yisrael , 1945–1948 (From Catastrophe to Power: Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine, 1945–1948 [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996]), 499. Unless specified otherwise, translated works are in Hebrew. Chapter One 1. It is interesting to note that the leader of the passengers ofExodus, the Zionist Polish Jew Mordechai Rosner, said that members of the Palyam (the navylike branch of the Palmach) who were in charge of the Exodus operation looked to the Jewish refugees like demigods. For elaborations on the Zionist body (the new Jew) versus the diasporic body (the old Jew) see among others Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the InventionoftheJewishMan (Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1997);SanderGilman,TheJew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991); David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Basic Books, 1992), particularly chapter 8, “Zionism as an Erotic Revolution ”; and Judith Doneson, “The Image Lingers: The Feminization of the Jew in Schindler’s List,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky, 140–52 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). For a comparison between the construction of the Sabra image and the new American Adam, see Ella Shohat, “Columbus, Palestine , and Arab-Jews: Toward a Relational Approach to Community Identity,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires, 88–105 (London: Lawrence and Wichart, 1997); and Ella Shohat, “Taboo Memories and Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. Jeniffer Fink and May Joseph (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). For a discussion of the male body in Israeli cinema, see Yosef Raz, “HaOr HaKarua: Fantaziot Gavriyot, Haradot Gavriyot VeYitzug Guf HaGever HaNashi BaKolnoa HaYisraeli” (Broken Skin: Male Fantasies, Male Anxieties, and the Representation of the ‘Feminine’ Male Body in Israeli Cinema), Cinematheque 94 (March–April 1998): 20–25. 2. For a discussion of the heroic-nationalistic genre in Israeli cinema, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West...