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George Mosse and the Israeli Experience
- University of Wisconsin Press
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George Mosse and the Israeli Experience Emmanuel Sivan The Silver Platter In 1977, toward the end of his semester in Jerusalem, George Mosse agreed to give an annual public lecture on nationalism. He relished the irony that this endowed series was funded by the South African Jewish friends of an ultra-right-wing Knesset member who had recently died. He mused maliciously about the kind of lesson he should teach them, and finally he chose as his topic “The Commemoration of Fallen Soldiers after the Great War.” As I sat listening to him in the packed lecture hall, I could not avoid feeling that he was actually speaking about us Israelis, even though he had always protested, rather coyly, that he did not know enough about the country to be directly relevant to its concerns. George was speaking of the fallen all being dubbed “heroes,” in a country where many a town has a street named after Ha-Giborim, the heroic fallen of the 1948 war. He analyzed the Pietà-like icon of the mother country holding in her lap a dying soldier, while its exact analogue, with no Christian connotations to speak of, could be found on many an Israeli monument to the fallen. The altar he described in monuments and in paintings recurs in their Israel counterparts, though there with the particular Old Testament twist referring to the sacrifice of Abraham, which, for the first twenty-five years of Israel’s existence, stood (in poetry and plastic arts) as the ultimate symbol of the price in blood paid for independence. He waxed rhapsodic and ironic when discussing the myth of camaraderie in virtually the exact terms of the Israeli notion of Re’ut, which had supposedly been born out of the underground activity of the volunteer Palmach troops in the 1940s and later in their crucial role in 1948. The German 239 origin of this allegedly Echt-Israeli notion was unsettling (all the more so as the song “Re’ut” has been for the last half century the most popular in the Hebrew hit parades). And yet there was more to it, I felt. From a certain point on I heard humming in my head bits and pieces of a text. This was so unnerving that when I came home later that early summer evening I went straight to the bookcases, took out a tattered poetry volume, and indeed there it was— “The Silver Platter,” a poem by Natan Alterman, a prominent poet, published in a Tel Aviv daily in December 1947, three weeks after the beginning of the war, and which in the following gloomy months was to become spontaneously a part of the burial ritual of many of the fallen soldiers, in addition to the traditional Kaddish. After the end of the war (in March 1949) it was turned into the standard recitation to be read aloud on Memorial Day and learned by heart by all Israeli schoolchildren. Rereading the familiar text through Mosse’s eyes, so to speak, I perceived that what I had taken to be a sort of secular prayer for the dead was actuallyapieceofnationalliturgy.Itwasthenationratherthanthefallenthat wasglorified,sanctifiedbytheirsacrifice.Sacralizedpoliticswerenotthebelatedproductofthepost -1967,messianicRightofGushEmunim,aswe,liberal secular Israelis, tended to think. It had its origins in the sacralized politics of the civic culture, the Zionist Left, that Alterman spoke for: the nation, hence the fledgling nation-state, was the historically consecrated, quasitranscendental embodiment of the Jewish quest for redemption. I verified my impression on a second and third reading. Obviously shaken by foreboding fears of heavy losses, the poet foresees the day hostilities would end, the guns fall silent, and the smoke peter out slowly over the reddened sky. The nation, draped as a female figure, appears upon the scene: . . . heart torn, but still breathing, Ready to accept that unique miracle . . . preparing herself for the ceremony, Exalted and horrified . . . And then a boy and a girl Come forward Slowly walking towards her. Clad in army fatigues, Heavy boots, 240 e m m a n u e l s i v a n [107.20.94.88] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 08:59 GMT) Silently they ascend the path. They had not had the leisure To change their dress, To wash the traces Of mud, blood and fire. Tired to the bone . . . Still smelling of the dew Of Hebrew youth, They stop, stand at attention. And there is no way of knowing Whether they are dead or alive. Asks the...