Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature

Preface

ix Preface As I complete this manuscript a week after a cease-fire ends the Gaza War, Gazans attempt to clear streets filled with debris, to reopen shops, to rebuild homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, police stations, factories, and mosques, bombed because they allegedly harbored arms caches or were situated on top of tunnels used by Hamas for smuggling weapons and ammunition . In Sderot, the southern Israeli town whose eight-year pummeling by Hamas rockets instigated the Gaza invasion, eerily empty streets reflect the dubious nature of the Israeli “victory” that has left residents hesitant to venture outdoors. The Israel-Palestine conflict has always been about territory. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that “territory,” that is, swaths of land subject to national sovereignty and delineated by maps and borders, is not the only type of place that determines the political and ideological configurations of the conflict. Ordinary, everyday places resonate as much in the minds of Israelis and Palestinians as does the more abstract concept of “territory” that has dominated debates on the conflict since the early twentieth century. Photographs of Gaza show houses turned literally inside out, their interiors now exteriors, intimate artifacts of private life pornographically on display to the outside world. A lone man on a Sderot sidewalk says he is happy to be able to smoke a cigarette outside again, without fear of rockets. These, more than the ceding or gaining of territory, are the spatial consequences of this war. This book examines the Hebrew literary representation of “vernacular” places such as these to illumine the intricate processes by which ideology invades—in the case of the recent war, quite literally—everyday lived experience, and shapes Israeli identity. The question of what it means to be Israeli is not an easy one to answer, and I do not purport to resolve it here. I do, however, seek to expose the x • Preface often overlooked spatial factors that contribute to Israelis’ understanding of themselves as Israeli. With a few exceptions, Israeli authors do not represent explicitly the conflict that periodically bursts into the foreground of everyday life. Israeli literature rarely takes place in settings of war and political violence, but is replete with evocative descriptions of quotidian places. The resultant displacement of ideological elements from clearly political topoi such as contested borders to these ordinary, seemingly apolitical places, and its effect on the individual Israeli’s self-conception, are the main concerns of this book. The imaginative spatiality of literature proffers alternative mappings of Israeli identity: bound less by the walls, fences, barriers, and borders that characterize the current political-spatial discourse in Israel, Israeliness and the ideological elements that determine it are increasingly defined according to diverse Israelis’ experiences of everyday sites. The significance of vernacular places and of their sometimes discrete ideological components, this book demonstrates, alerts us to the dynamic complexity of Israeli identity. Acknowledging the relationship between places, ideology, and identity not only brings us a step closer to understanding ourselves, but also enables us to better understand the one we consider other. ...