Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature

Conclusion

247 Conclusion In Eran Riklis’s film Ets limon (Lemon tree, 2008), loosely based on a true story, a lemon grove that has been in a Palestinian woman’s family for half a century becomes one of the film’s protagonists. Salma Zidane, a lonely widow, earns a meager living from the lemons. Her bond to the trees is first and foremost emotional: they evoke the memory of her father, they rustle outside her window at night, they depend on her care for their survival as she depends on them for hers. When the Israeli defense minister moves into a fancy house adjacent to the grove, it is determined that the thick trees pose a security risk because they could hide terrorists, and Salma is served with a letter informing her of their imminent uprooting . A fence is erected around the grove and a watchtower constructed within it. She is not allowed to enter. As she battles the Israelis in court, we see the trees lose their luster and fullness, the browning lemons drop heavily, the parched earth harden. The high metal fence that separates her from her beloved trees also separates her from her neighbors, a nonetoo -subtle allusion to the controversial separation barrier that casts its shadow over the entire film. Ultimately, the case is argued in the Israeli Supreme Court, whose judges arrive at a compromise: the trees shall be substantially trimmed for visibility. The film’s last shot pans over the now naked grove, a graveyard of tiny, fruitless tree skeletons, dwarfed by the giant separation wall now erected between them and the defense minister ’s house. The grove’s unfortunate position on the Green Line seals its fate. Yet it has been situated there for fifty years, with nary a problem. The film’s innovation , in terms of its spatial representations, lies not in this clash between political and vernacular place (the Green Line and the lemon grove) but 248 • Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature in the imagined transformation of this quintessential vernacular place into a threatening political place. The haunting image of the forcibly stunted trees and the long take of the monstrous separation barrier towering above them convey this transformation forcefully. The grove has become indisputably a political place—both in its capacity to harbor terrorists and in its new role as a buffer zone between the defense minister and enemy territory –but we are left wondering if it ever had a chance to escape its fate, considering its location. The politicization of its vernacular spatiality was latent, the film suggests, bubbling just beneath the tranquil surface. The “unbridgeable gap between the Place and our place,” in Yigal Schwartz’s words, reflects one of the fundamental tensions of Zionist ideology , which insists on the “normalcy” of Israel as a secular nation at the same time that it bases this nationhood on Jewish cultural bonds and a purported common Jewish historical narrative (2007, 11). Focusing on this irreconcilable clash between Place and place, however, relegates the spatial to abstraction. In a nation as diverse as Israel and as densely packed with “spatial stories,” to use Certeau’s terminology, the dream of Zion and the discordant reality of Israel do not by any means exhaust the possibilities of place experienced by people every day (1984, 115). Vernacular places, which occupy a prominent position in contemporary Israeli literature, tell us a great deal about how people conceive of their relation to Israel and to the nationalist ideology that continues to predominate there. Examining representations of vernacular places–the unremarkable places where people eat and sleep, work and relax, where they live their lives from day to day—acknowledges the importance of quotidian experience and thereby humanizes these characters who can so easily be subjected to pure political abstraction and transformed into lifeless symbols and slogans. The disproportionate academic and popular emphasis on Israel’s political landscape risks reifying the Israeli experience of place and losing the multifaceted nuance that characterizes this experience on a daily basis. A denial of the ideological resonance of these places, however, results in a crucial blind spot in the examination of Israeli identity . The way people inhabit, move through, construct, and, significantly, regard vernacular places reveals the complexity of their understanding of themselves; it also illuminates their role in the larger ideological construct Conclusion • 249 that assigns them to simplistic categories based on ethnicity, religion, or devotion...