Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance

Conclusion

CONCLUSION While the romantic writers poignantly expressed the spirit of their age, ultimately, their literary flight—their attempt to lift off the bumpy Israeli surface and soar into the comfort of a smooth Western sky—was short-lived. The breaking of the second Intifada in 2000 with its devastating effects on the country resurrected the reality of a Middle East that does not allow, at least not yet, the manufacture of a new Israeli way of life through imported narratives. Certainly not when a very immediate reality was cruelly tearing those narratives apart and announcing itself ever more loudly each time a suicide bombing exploded in the country with increasing frequency toward the end of the 1990s. As the momentum of peace slowed after the assassination of Rabin in 1996, and the relations with the Palestinians cooled and soured, the Oslo Accords eventually expired as well. The country’s euphoria of the decade’s beginning gave way to a deep melancholia, exacerbated by the rising death toll of both soldiers and civilians. The borders around Israel seemed to close in tighter than ever before as the Hezbollah continued to bleed the army on the Lebanese front, and as suicide bombers added civilians to the mounting toll of deaths on the home front. Literary history itself makes the 2000 dividing line visible. All of the romantic writers stopped publishing shortly before or after the second Intifada.1 The reasons for it are numerous but surely they had something to do with the end of an era. The country’s siege mentality, which returned toward the end of the millennium, was justified for once, even if Israel was largely responsible for it. The frequent attacks on buses, restaurants , and discos in the heart of the country were severely depressing, especially coming, as they did, on the heels of the earlier optimism. The heightened sense of personal danger fragmented the country deeper still, but it also aroused a sense of unity, a renewed form of tribalism that in some ways was more harmful than before. For those who believed in it, 122 Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas the steep fall from the grace of Oslo and the promise it held made reality all the more bitter and resulted in the dangerous unilateral moves Israel made in 2000 and 2005, the withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon and the evacuation of the Gaza Strip respectively. Both steps proved even in the short run to be detrimental to Israel, who found that it could not extricate itself out of an exasperating Middle East simply by walking away from Lebanon and building a fence between itself and the Palestinians. From a literary perspective, the end of the era was marked by the fizzle of Keret, Taub, Weil, and Amir, who stopped writing, at least for a while, around that time. At the same time, the resurrection of some of the country’s old demons inspired a new generation of young authors to engage once again with the greater national story, which was somewhat abandoned during the 1990s. “Abandonment” is an exaggeration, of course. Although the four romantic writers were popular, there were numerous other contemporary writers who were more prominent, and just as popular if not more so, and who continued to engage these issues throughout this time. The long list includes some of Israel’s veteran writers, like S. Yizhar, Aharon Megged, and Yoram Kanuik, who had a second wind toward the end of the millennium; State Generation writers like Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Yehudit Hendel, Aharon Appelfeld, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Sami Michael, who continued to enrich the culture with their works; and later arrivers like David Grossman, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Ronit Matalon, to name but a few. However—and this is where the literary historian walks on thin ice— most if not all of these writers began writing before the Intifada and as a matter of course continued the literary traditions of their predecessors. That is, they fulfilled the more traditional literary role of “prophet,” as Shaked calls it (larwy tybl hpvx), and which Keret, Taub, Weil, and Amir relaxed or abandoned. By “prophesying” I mean creating a literature that was deeply and directly involved in the affairs of the nation, giving it perspective, illuminating it, admonishing it, analyzing it, and foreshadowing its future. Each of the novelists listed in the former paragraph engaged with one or more of these aspects, continuing a long tradition. The romantic writers were different in...