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  • Love Sanctified by Blood
  • Aeyal Gross (bio)
The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture. Danny Kaplan. New York: Berghahn, 2006. xiv + 175 pp.

The Men We Loved explores the relationship between friendship, an experience usually interpreted as a private emotion, and nationalism. Following the work of Jacques Derrida, Danny Kaplan reads fraternal friendship as an "emotional-ideological" space, a collective system of often contradictory, shared emotions (9). The book focuses on male friendship in Israel and argues that some of the emotions associated with it can be experienced only through a sense of loss. As they enter the public discourse, these emotions are transformed into rituals of passionate commemoration, suggesting a dynamic of collective necrophilia. Kaplan analyzes the relations between haverut, the general Hebrew term for friendship, and re'ut, a more literary term that connotes heroic male friendship, most often associated today with combat fraternity. He shows how circumstances of anxiety and loss on the verge of death bring men closer together and present a unique instance in which desire between men is publicly declared and legitimized. The rituals of re'ut serve the double function of masking a national ideology that demands self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and of producing a symbolic stance of collective necrophilia, an erotic gazing on the dead, thus transforming a repudiated personal sentiment into a national genre of relatedness. Kaplan shows forcefully how the ideology of re'ut and its cultivation as a national emotion create an intensive, collective homosocial fantasy, operating through a double bind: re'ut acts as a hegemonic script for Israeli men, a frame for interpreting their friendships in light of the model of life-and-death situations; at the same time, some men actually play down the significance of combat fraternity in their personal experiences (145). Fraternal rituals of commemoration provide a crucial link between individual friendship and national solidarity because they are gendered and eroticized: commemorative desire is an emotional construct that plays a significant role in the national identity (147). [End Page 660]

Bereavement and commemoration assume a special significance in Israeli society. Themes of the idealized sacrifice and heroism of "the fallen" are central to the Israeli ethos of bereavement and commemoration and are deemed essential to the persistence of the "Jewish state" in the "promised land." Israeli culture endows "the fallen" with an aura of symbolic immortality, and the depiction of bereavement in Israeli literature and poetry, too, has been largely ideological, uniform, and uncritical. Moreover, as argued by Meira Weiss, this ideology has institutionalized bereavement and commemoration as a part of the larger national discourse of soldiering and commitment that is generally taken for granted.1 Casualties among soldiers—indeed, the war experience in general—have been constructed by dominant groups as an inevitable price to be paid for Israel's survival.

Kaplan's contribution, which is rooted in his analysis of the ideological aspects of friendship as associated with hegemonic masculinity (1), is to show how the rituals of commemoration are both gendered and eroticized, how the act of declaring the lost and yet eternal friendship symbolizes the passionate "blood pact" between men (a "love sanctified by blood," as the poet Haim Guri put it in his popular "Song of Re'ut" [96]), and explains the precedence of the imagined ties of the national over ties of kinship and matrimony. At the same time, the death of the friend signifies the cultural notion that sexual love between men equals death, but also enables this desire, allowing it to appear when its object has disappeared (138). Death is imagined in men's friendship even if it is implicit (140). Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's exposition of the denied continuum that exists between the homosocial and the homoerotic (11), Kaplan looks at how the gendered nature of nationalism is mediated by practices and emotions associated with male bonding (12). Interestingly, Kaplan's heterosexual interviewees sharply denied the idea that desire played a role in their male bonds, adopting a narrow definition of desire as a sexual attraction, associated with homosexuality (74). Against this backdrop, Kaplan argues that heroic death becomes the cultural marker that fends off the continuity between the...

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