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Introduction
- Northwestern University Press
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5 Introduction An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature explores the depiction of suicide within the Israeli literary canon. In literature this image serves to represent, in metaphorical terms, the rupture at the heart of Israeli society between its ideological narratives of creation, which in every sense may be considered to construct in Benedict Anderson’s sense an imagined community, and the reality of life within the Israeli state. During the nineteenth century, key European Jewish thinkers, writers , and political figures developed Jewish nationalism, building on Diasporic Jewish identity. This modern political movement known as Zionism called for a physical piece of land that would allow this nation to become a self-governing state. By its establishment in 1948 as the State of Israel, a clearly recognizable set of Zionist national narratives existed that were consciously constructed, reinforced, and maintained through national institutions, public rhetoric, and the fabric of daily life. The construction of the hegemonic discourse was the result of a consciously imagined community sharing ideas about a unifying past, beliefs about territorial claims, and commitment to the revitalization of the Hebrew language. Within Zionism there was a powerful cultural force with a deep desire to create an authentic local culture. A tension existed in this very notion that rejected many of the tenets of European Diasporic Jewish life (Yiddish, folk culture, traditional family structures) while attempting to re-create the values and institutions of the European world that had birthed precisely these manifestations of Jewish national identity. 6 introduction Simultaneously, the encounter with the Levantine world with its Arab architecture, heat, and alien foods forced the hybridization of European values and aesthetic tastes with the local environment to create a new set of expectations appropriate to the circumstances. At the heart of this enterprise to create a national collective was the expectation that the Jew himself would be remade. The new Jew would reject the yoke of European oppression and the insular and supposedly unhealthy life of the Diaspora in exchange for physical vigor, social equality, bravery, courage, independence, and liberty. The paradigmatic sabra generation born to the land or arriving as children in the 1920s were raised within the—by then—established expectations and institutions of Jewish life in Mandate Palestine. They represented the iconic understanding of the new Jew. By day the sabra would work the field, redeeming the land from its barren state—while in turn being redeemed by it for the investment of his (and her) labor. By night the sabra would be armed in order to defend the landscape from attack, keeping his brethren safe and protecting the borders of Israel. Once independence was declared in 1948, and the nation found itself at war with the surrounding countries, the rhetoric was already deeply rooted. The various forms of militia and defense groups that had existed in Mandate Palestine during the decades leading up to the war were unified under the guise of the IDF (the Israel Defense Forces) and centralized the already prominent role of military service (and success) in the national narratives. Connecting the land to both a biblical right and the culture of physical labor meant that the landscape served prominently in the discourse of the movement to create a national homeland in Palestine (Zionism). In addition to protecting the borders and those who dwelled within them, working the land was constructed as an act of redemption, and agricultural activities were preeminent in the political discourse. Despite internal political divisions about ways in which this might manifest—the differences between the socialist labor movements in the creation of kibbutzim, the more individualist moshavim, the relatively independent pioneer farmers and their cooperatives, and the urban pioneers building new cities, the narrative remained fundamentally the same: the land was fallow, the new Jew would make it fruitful, and both he and the country would flourish. Tel Aviv, the greatest of all urban development narratives, epitomized this ideology. Built both literally and figuratively as a city reclaimed from [3.237.65.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:47 GMT) introduction 7 the very sands on which it stood, Tel Aviv was established in 1909 as a suburb of Jaffa, flourishing over the succeeding twenty years to become the dominant economic, cultural, and social center of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine). By the time the state was established, Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem, the historic and notional capital, was the most important civil and social representation of the transformation of a modern...