Land and Desire in Early Zionism

2 Desire and Rebirth

2 DesireandRebirth Psychoanalytic interpretations of history are speculative in the extreme, as well as more complex than I can present here. Nevertheless, I will examine the various psychoanalytic approaches to the ecstatic-symbiotic pioneer experience at some length because almost every historiographic explanation and description of pioneer Zionism is based—intentionally or unintentionally—on the oedipal mechanism . My critique of psychoanalytic-oedipal explanations applies equally to these other historiographic narratives of the Zionist-pioneer enterprise. Oedipal Desire In the psychoanalytic view, the pioneers’ desire for the Land of Israel was a reenactment of patterns shaped in their early lives. By this logic, when the halutzim experienced themselves as children returning to the bosom of their Mother Earth, they were in effect reenacting in the Land, or projecting onto it, their oedipal relations with their parents. Certain elements of the pioneer psyche in which a longing was expressed for the Land reproduced, in the psychoanalytic view, the process of psychosexual development as formulated by Freud. Freudian theory provides a way of describing, explaining, and understanding the attraction to Mother Earth and the praxes of amalgamation, assimilation, and suckling that characterized the pioneers’ world. The halutzim spoke of suckling from the breast of Mother Earth, like a child in the oral stage—a stage at which the child still does not distinguish between “inside” and “outside,” between its own body and that of its mother. Similarly, other elements of the pioneer psyche in which a longing was expressed for the Land of Israel reproduced the anal stage. At this stage, the child derives pleasure principally from its bodily substances, until it undergoes toilet training. The pioneer world was indeed permeated by fluids of all kinds, including bodily fluids. In human life and society, however, progress requires a certain dryness. Culture is based on concealing, or at least channeling, fluids such as sweat, blood, and tears. The pioneer world was, in contrast, saturated with these fluids, and contact with them was often a source of pleasure for the halutzim. Ac29 30 land and desire in early zionism cordingly, the pioneers’ oral repertoire was augmented by anal-stage praxes such as wetting, absorbing, and adhering. For example, halutzim enjoyed sweating and rejoiced in being privileged to “water” the soil with their perspiration—but no less did the soil rejoice to receive their sweat. They slaked the soil’s thirst with their perspiration.1 Normal psychosexual development concludes, according to Freud, with the genital stage, which appears after the resolution of the oedipal conflict. At this stage, the (male) child redirects his desire from his mother to other objects, and finally to members of the opposite sex and to “culture.” The halutzim evinced attraction to the opposite sex and to the “culture” that they called the Land of Israel, but significant traces remained of desire for the mother, Mother Earth. The Land as a whole, and its soil in particular, was female: virgin, beloved, and, especially, maternal. No evident sanction prevented enacting this desire in the pioneer world, which included no father figure to forbid the halutzim to consummate their desire for this female entity. An examination of the objects of pioneer desire seems to support the psychoanalytic paradigm. The halutzim yearned for the Land of Israel and for nearly every element in it—its soil, its inanimate objects, its plants, its animals, its sights, its landscapes, its natural surroundings, and its open spaces. “From within a burgeoning appetite for life, I opened my arms wide to the broad, open spaces,” Tzipora Zeid wrote when she reached Sejera, “because a desire welled up within me to embrace and kiss those fields, to return them love as their reward.”2 But what about desire for the opposite sex? Pioneer testimonies reveal that such expressions were rare. How, then, does this absence affect the psychoanalytic paradigm? The absence of expressions of desire for the opposite sex does not prove that the halutzim had no romantic, erotic, and sexual relationships. Of course, they did. And expressions of such desire appear in pioneer texts. But these expressions are far more puritanical than the pioneers’ unbridled effusions about the Land. The historian Amos Elon claims that pioneer depictions of sex, especially those written by members of the Second Aliya, read like “annals of monastic orders.” Even though most of the halutzim were young men and women in their twenties, and even though they appeared to live freely, displaying contempt for tradition and bourgeois mores, with men and women...