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27 1 Two Stories in One Noni is an unusual Israeli fourth-grader. Growing up on a settlement during the second Intifada in a town called Gilo (an occupied neighborhood of East Jerusalem), he lives in a neighborhood divided by a wall from the adjacent Palestinian town, Beit Jala. Noni’s brother Zahi and his friends have made a game of climbing on top of the dividing wall to taunt and yell at Palestinian snipers. In A DiͿerent .ind of War, the short Àlm by Nadav Gal (2004) in which these events take place, these Jewish Israeli boys have learned to imagine survival by way of group aggression and resistance to vulnerability. A diͿerent kind of barrier, however, separates Noni from his brother and his friends. To his brother’s consternation, Noni is not so tough. Furthermore , Noni might really be a girl whose desires are encouraged by his mother, who helps him apply makeup. So when he is chosen for the lead role of King David in the end-of-the-year school play, which is to be attended by the Israeli prime minister, Noni secretly longs to be the princess . When Zahi Ànally manages to badger his little brother into playing the boys’ war game, Noni climbs on top of the wall but does not follow the script and yell “Death to the Arabs!” at the snipers. Rather, in a pretty princess dress, Noni dances tenderly. David, who famously killed the mighty Goliath, became the King of Israel. Responsible for uniting the tribes of Israel as one people, he was considered most righteous of all kings and a champion. Though slight in stature, David was a warrior and a military strategist whose triumphs in securing the Israelites a kingdom came by sword and blood. But young David was not only small; like Noni, he was also queer. The Bible is 28 The Better Story ambiguous about the nature of his close, some say erotic, relationship to Jonathan, who was also a hero and a rival for the crown. The David and Goliath myth is interesting because it arguably represents Israel’s ethos: from a vulnerable, and even precariously queer predisposition, the Jewish people defeat and displace their enemies, occupy and settle on the land, securing a strong Jewish state. But A DiͿerent .ind of War revises this ethos in Noni as King David. Despite Noni and David’s shared social queerness, youth, and size, they have little else in common. Noni does not identify with David and struggles to perform him. David, the youngest and beloved son of Jesse, surprises both his father and his king. &rossing the valley that separates the Israelites from the Philistines, David encounters Goliath, leader of the Philistines . Unable to resist Goliath’s goading, he returns to Àght Goliath and kills him. In the end, he saves his people from defeat and humiliation. Noni, on the other hand, cannot connect with his father, who seems to have an important post with the Israeli military. His father appears to get on better with his other son, Zahi, with whom he plans to go on a road trip adventure in a jeep. Noni, in contrast, is repelled by the games of boys and men. During rehearsals at school, he fails to kill Goliath with gusto and eventually loses the role. But Noni not only rejects masculine bonding ,1 he also rejects the group. In Noni, the story of David and Goliath is undermined by a queerness that is both informed by and in excess of his queer gender identity. For me, Noni’s queerness is both real and symbolic. It is both what we understand to be socially anti-normative, but also what makes possible desires of a diͿerent kind, namely, the desires whose aims are dangerous at a more primal level because they threaten our dependencies and vulnerabilities to one another. In this revision of the biblical myth, might Gal be suggesting (or encouraging) an ambivalence in Israel toward its own history, group identity, and religious tradition? Are Israel’s hard defensive strategies against the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust (and before that statelessness and anti-Semitism) being challenged by its own people’s queer aͿects? As I argued in my introduction, group identities, especially those that arise from traumatic histories, are invested in stories that resist queer aͿects and threaten the social bond. Noni’s response invites us to think about the emotional perils of group love...

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