Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen

Chapter One. Screening the Birth of a Nation: 'Exodus' Revisited

chapter one Screening the Birth of a Nation Exodus Revisited ■ Terror, violence, death: These are the midwives of all new nations. Akiva (the leader of the Irgun) to Ari Ben Canaan in Otto Preminger’s Exodus ■ After the Six-Day War there was a certain sense of pride . . . like you didn’t have to associate yourself with Woody Allen; you could identify with Paul Newman. Lester Friedman His masculine naked torso bathed in moonlight and gently wrapped in white soft foam created by the light waves of the Mediterranean Sea, a necklace with a big star of David adorning his neck—this is how Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman), the protagonist of Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), first “penetrates ” the film spectator’s space of desire. This sensual image of male beauty, a doppelgänger to Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, has engraved, for many years to come, for world audiences at large and the American in particular, the definite and ultimate image of the birth of the “new Jew.” Like Elik—the protagonist of Moshe Shamir’s Bemo Yadav (With His Own Hands, 1954), considered by critics and scholars to be the prototypical Sabra in the literature of the Palmach generation, a mythic Sabra, a Rousseau-like “noble savage ” born from the sea—is Ari Ben Canaan: a powerful eroticized counterimage to the diasporic Jew epitomized, perhaps, by the on- and offscreen image of the neurotic, intellectual, urban “persona” of Woody Allen. If Elik was a projection from the inside of a fantasized Sabra, an ideal ego constructed by nascent Israeli manhood, then Ari Ben Canaan is the ultimate external validation of this fantasy. Ari Ben Canaan, personified by the handsome Newman, demonstrated that the way the new Jew was represented to 1 2 Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen himself was not far from how he was perceived by others. Self-representation and “objective” perception, self-projection and projection of the “other,” narcissistic fantasies and fantasies of the “other” have thus become one in the long and traumatic historic affair between the Jew and the non-Jew. Hence it is for the birth of the mythic “new Jew” that the Exodus film stands. And it is in the filmic image of Newman, the actor who appeared to cinema audiences of the 1960s as a Greek god reborn as Hollywood star, that this mythic hero found such intensity of expression.1 Although Exodus is not an Israeli film, it has become an inspiring model text for the heroic-nationalist genre in Israeli cinema.2 As Yael Munk observes , almost at the same time that Exodus, Hollywood’s ultimate Zionist epic, used Paul Newman as the iconic Sabra, the film They Were Ten (1961) was released in Israel starring Oded Teomi in a no-less-heroic role, evidence of the compelling new Jewish image that Preminger’s film created. A comparison between the two actors/characters reveals many similarities. Both are handsome European-looking men whose devotion to the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state is total, and both are admired by women who despite their courage occupy a less central place in the narrative. Both films are loaded with symbolism of sacrifice and sanctification of death, and both came to be known as the ultimate shapers of the image of the new Israeli (identified with the Ashkenazi male.)3 It is important, therefore, to note that Paul Newman (whose family name ironically fits into the film’s ideological scheme) in the role of Ari Ben Canaan has become a model of pride for both Israeli and American Jews. Furthermore, the influence of Exodus has surpassed the sphere of images and idealized self-images and infiltrated into the territory of “high politics,” reinforcing the view of America and Israel as mirror images of the promised land.4 My study of Exodus approaches the film as a conscious cinematic attempt to turn history into a contemporary Zionist myth in order to create a new national tradition of modern Israeli society. Exodus, I suggest, constitutes an interesting locus of ideological tensions and contradictions because it, like the biblical story, is a story of origin, or genesis. My reading of Exodus is centered around the question of how the film reenacts the foundational Exodus narrative to support the Zionist project of establishing Israel and to eliminate the “Palestinian question.” A close reading of the film reveals new meanings and opens the way for fresh...