The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  I was also flooded a bit with blood, but if it were not for you I would have nothing left but Kloom

  This is why we love you, General Boom, your blushy cheeks in the receptions

  and your upright chin in the evening papers

  Therefore we kiss your ass, General Boom

  If it were not for you we would have been left with Kloom.

  In this passage from You, Me and the Next War, the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin ridiculed the most revered group of people in Israel’s ethos and history: the combat generals. Levin was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv and staged this play at a small cabaret in the summer of 1968, when the Israeli public was engulfed by messianic euphoria after the June 1967 war.1

  From then on, scores of his plays displayed this unwillingness to accept the militarised, nationalistic, Zionist nature of the local culture, politics and human attitudes. He also masterfully brought to the stage the ordinary life of ordinary people, with all their miseries, cruelties and dreams. His play The Queen of the Bathtub, staged in 1970, was a series of sketches that left very little of the Israeli ethos intact. The bruised political élite reacted by censoring the play; years would pass before it would be allowed to be shown again. Other, no less biting plays followed suit in the 1980s and 1990s, always accompanied by public outcry and an attempt by the public censor to silence this highly original and gifted playwright, who died in 1999.

  Levin was not the only courageous Israeli playwright, though. Long before the 1990s, Yosef Mundi, Joshua Sobol and many others understood that the stage was a space where the worst could be said through the voices of others. When theatre became less popular, and hence less important in the eyes of the powers that be, these playwrights became even bolder and began to touch the rawest nerves of Zionism, as did the scholars and artists of the post-Zionist age.

  But they were only a handful. Israeli theatre, apart from these exceptional cases and the relatively open period of the 1990s, was not only loyal to Zionism, it was a blunt reflection of the idea of Israel. In his comprehensive 1996 book The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre, Dan Urian showed that in most plays, Arabs were portrayed as shallow, one-dimensional figures, the objects of the playwrights’ hatred, fear, and hostility.2 Directors generally embellished the racist texts on stage with ‘typical’ Arab traits such as sloppy clothing and slurred speech. These stereotypes were present in plays as early as 1936 and were not limited to the work of right-wing cultural producers alone.

  Self-criticism in the theatre, as in other artistic domains, was largely limited to post-1967 Israel and focused on the moral implications for Israeli Jewish society of the never-ending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This self-imposed limitation, namely, not to pry beyond 1967, was particularly clear in the plays written by liberal and left-leaning Zionists, which appeared in the wake of the First Lebanon War. Since the focus was the effect on the Jews, not the experiences of the Arab victims, in even the more seemingly subversive plays the Palestinians appear as cardboard figures playing secondary roles, while the fully developed Jewish heroes engage in shooting, killing, and torture, but then regret their actions.

  There was a non-Zionist approach in the theatre as well, but it was marginal in commercial terms and had no political impact on the society at large. This approach appeared both in translated Palestinian works and in original non-Zionist Israeli plays. One of the translated works was a Hebrew adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s story ‘Men in the Sun’.3 The play, which appeared on the local stage in the 1980s, was a commercial disaster but hinted at the potential of such a glimpse into Palestine cultural production. It is the story of three Palestinian refugees who are trying to escape from Iraq and go to Kuwait, a journey that reflects the despair of being a refugee because of the Nakba. Original Hebrew works, however, were more popular. For example, some of Sami Michael’s stories were adapted for the stage, becoming the first plays to humanise Palestinians by endowing the traditionally shadowy figures with names, histories, and ambitions.4 In this context, one might mention fringe theatre, where one was able to see plays written by Palestinian Israelis depicting the occupation and the lives of Palestinians in Israel through personal and individual stories. An example of this was the 1994 national co-production in Jerusalem, by Palestinian and Israeli theatre groups, of a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet.5

  Yitzhak Laor, although primarily a poet, was one of the few Israelis who created clearly non-Zionist work for the stage, incorporating his general critique of Israeli militarism. Unlike the extroverted liberal Zionists, Laor was less interested in what happened to Israeli society as a consequence of the occupation than in the suffering of the Palestinians themselves. His play Ephraim Hozer La-Tzava (Ephraim Returns to the Army) included realistic descriptions of Shin Bet interrogation and torture; when staged in the mid-1980s, it was censored for a time because of the connection it made between Nazi behaviour and Israeli occupation policies.6

  Joshua Sobol may have been less willing to tackle the essence of Zionism but he was very clear when it came to the evils of the occupation. In his 1985 play The Palestinian Girl, he provides a softer version of what Laor conveyed. A prolific playwright who was born in Palestine in 1939, he succeeded in covering in his sixty or so plays every aspect of life in Israel. More often than not, he did so critically, and occasionally even subversively. One of his recent plays, Darfur at Home, has one character shouting the following words, which capture very well the manipulation of Holocaust memory that was explored above:

  If you really believed there was a Holocaust, you would not have allowed the Israeli members of Knesset to pass a law that prohibits giving a glass of water to a refugee [referring to the African refugees who began to reach Israel in 2005]. You in your indifference, and the members of Knesset you have elected, who mete out a punishment of twenty years to anyone helping a refugee, you are the proof there was no Holocaust.7

  But this was the exception, not the rule. Mostly it was the horrors of the occupation that made their way into the more open-minded and, in a way, post-Zionist theatre of the 1990s. Those who produced these plays are still at it today, but the medium’s popularity has dimmed, and its share of ‘political’ plays has dropped dramatically.

  Post-Zionist Celluloid

  In the early 1970s, the Israeli film director Ram Levy decided to adapt to the screen S. Yizhar’s (Yizhar Smilansky’s) famous story on 1948, ‘Hirbet Hiza’. The story was unusual in that the ethnic cleansing, in this case of a fictional and eponymous village, was described in detail, and raised some moral questions about the criminality of this policy through poignant dialogues between the soldiers.8

  Levy went in search of a village, and in talking to Yizhar he discovered that the fictional village was based on a real one, in which similar events indeed did happen. But that village, like another five hundred or so, had been wiped out, and in its stead stood a Jewish colony. After touring the West Bank (in those days, Israelis could move quite easily in the occupied territory), he found a village that, according to Yizhar, resembled the one of 1948. Levy succeeded in persuading the mukhtar, the head of the village, to let him shoot the film there, but the mukhtar agreed on condition that the local villagers would not be used as extras. With the help of the area’s military governor, Levy then found a more cooperative village willing to supply the people for the film; as the director recalled later, they were transported in with trucks as if it were a military operation.9 The movie turned out to be a powerful fictional representation of the Israeli crime, which only one or two post-Zionist films of the 1990s succeeded in reproducing. The feature-film industry could have challenged the idea of Israel had its practitioners been willing to do so. We will return to it shortly.

  The Israeli film industry travelled in a somewhat similar trajectory to that of the theatre. But when it took a critical stance, it went further than any other medium in presenting fundamental challenges to the Zionist historical narrative and discourse. Moreover, any change in
approach to reality carried far more significance in cinema than in other forms of media. Film was one of the most popular pastimes in Israel, especially when one considers that the country already had an important and expanding cable system that broadcast commercial films on television about a year after they were shown in movie houses.

  The pioneering works of this kind were produced in a highly unlikely place: the studios of Israeli national television. It is possible that this took place because directors who worked for the national television service in the 1970s, unlike their colleagues in the commercial or private film industry, tended to be given funding and not be constrained by ratings (there was only one channel) or commercial consideration. As a result, if they had a radical idea, they could at least make an attempt to translate it into a film – unless they were stopped by politicians, which did happen every now and then. Moreover, as long as there was only one state-owned television channel, considerable effort was invested in creating local drama, much of which was highly politicised.

  Levy’s Hirbet Hiza was screened in 1976 on the national television channel, Channel 1, and not in the movie houses. In those days, television programming was supervised by a council of politicians, and when the film was prescreened, they banned it. In an unprecedented reaction, technicians and journalists in support of freedom of speech managed to darken the TV screen at the time that had originally been scheduled for the screening of the now-banned film. A public and legal campaign enabled its brief reappearance.

  Subsequently, still using the national television channel, Ram Levy became one of the more prolific contributors to a genre of docudrama that heralded a wave of post-Zionist productions in the 1990s. It began with Ani Ahmad (I Am Ahmad), produced in 1966 before television existed which criticised the state’s treatment of Israeli Palestinians, and continued with Bread (1986), a powerful exposure of Mizrachi life in Israel’s development towns.

  Outside the television channels, the film industry followed the nationalist agenda until the early 1970s more closely than any other cultural form except for children’s books. Arabs were depicted on the screen as stereotypical figures – evil, cruel, stupid, pathetic – who end up yielding to the superior Israeli hero. As mentioned above, a not uncommon plot involved Israeli schoolchildren single-handedly capturing armed Arab terrorists or invaders. In what I have been calling the post-Zionist cinema, that approach was radically transformed into a more complicated and humane representation of the Palestinians, in particular those who resisted Israeli aggression and occupation.

  The First Lebanon War of 1982 catalysed local cinema’s move in this new direction. Israeli film-makers began to give voice to underprivileged individuals and groups within Israel, though the transformation was of the ‘diet-Zionist’ variety. None of the films deviated from the Zionist metanarrative or from the major chapters in the mythical historiography taught in the schools; rather, they limited themselves to Israel’s post-1967 Palestinian dilemma. Even so, and despite the fact that the film-makers preferred to tell the story of the conflict through romance, this was an impressive development if compared with the 1960s. On screen, the Palestinians became real human beings and, at times, even heroes.

  Diet Zionism was replaced for a while during the 1990s with a bolder cinematic effort to engage directly with the essence of Zionism. In fact, film became the vanguard in the local Jewish attempt to reassess Zionism. The relative political openness of the early years after the signing of the Oslo Accords meant that critique and the representation of voices of the deprived could also sell well. Selling is the key factor for cinema, as it is for culture in general, and for a short while it transpired that a film with a radical message could be relatively profitable.

  Compared with the academics, the film-makers appeared to be more open about their own ethnic, national, or gender agendas, which they discussed in interviews and seminars that followed film screenings as well as in dialogue written into the scripts. Films for the first time represented the world of Israel’s Arab Jews, whose socio-economic status had only slightly improved since 1948. The films portrayed their growing frustration with the prospering Ashkenazi upper classes, their geographical and social marginality in the development towns and peripheral slums, their limited access to financial resources, and their distorted image in the national narrative. Some of the film-makers who portrayed Mizrachi life also dealt with the Palestinians. Ram Levy, for example, whose above-mentioned films Hirbet Hiza and Ani Ahmad addressed the Palestinians’ situation, dealt with the development towns in Lehem (Bread), a tale of the helplessness and hopelessness of a North African Jewish family pushed to the geographical and social margins of Israeli Jewish society with very little chance of extracting themselves from the dismal reality.

  Jad (Yehuda) Ne’eman, a film-maker and scholar who was a powerful voice in the 1990s, commented that those new films conveyed through their texts and subtexts a radical criticism of Zionism.10 Thus far, both fictional and documentary exposure of the abuses of Zionism or the problematic involved in the idea of Israel had had only limited impact on the society. The main reason had to do with the socio-economic background of the film-makers. For all its radicalism, there was still an Ashkenazi predominance in this new wave cinema: most of the films that could be classified as having a non- or even anti-Zionist stance depict the Arab–Jewish relationship in Israel from the perspective of yuppies in Tel Aviv. In the 1980s, Ashkenazi film-makers still dominated the film industry, and they were more interested in the conflict with the Palestinians than in the plight of the Mizrachim. A radical, leftist agenda was defined by one’s position on the Arab–Israeli conflict; not on social issues. Thus, because their agenda was political rather than social, these films could appeal to people living in relative comfort, who could afford to identify with the Other. They were, of course, accepted warmly by Israel’s Palesinians, and in that sense strengthened Arab–Jewish cooperation, but mass audiences in the more deprived areas may have received them differently.

  Nonetheless, the fact that some of the films that depicted the Israeli as occupier and coloniser and the Palestinian as victim were shown for several weeks was an indication that they were intriguing enough to create empathy, or at least interest. Indeed, it does seem that the critique genre, whether hidden or fairly overt, was quite popular for a while. This popularity was the result of the curious fusion of an aggressively free-market political economy with the rise of multiculturalism in Israeli society. The continued capitalisation of the Israeli economy also explains the success of, and even the drive for, a more critical response to the local cultural market, not just as a fulfilment of an ideological agenda. As Pierre Bourdieu commented so aptly, both academic and cultural products represent not only political and social transformations but also economic products that need to be marketed.11 This is clearer in the case of the cinema than in that of academia.

  In some instances, however, commercial considerations were secondary. What such film-makers wished to do was to connect, or reconnect, to the world they came from – and this was particularly true of Mizrachi and Palestinian film-makers. The Mizrachi film-makers were producing their more critical work at a time when the Mizrachi Jews’ overall economic, judicial and political conditions had improved. But improvement was not enough, at least in the eyes of these artists. They, like other members of their community, were in fact frustrated at the persistent social and economic polarisation within Jewish society in Israel and in particular with the marginal position of their own community in the national myth and narrative.

  Yet despite these impressive forays into other perspectives, the treatment of the Other in films and plays was inhibited by the projection of an Israeli image onto the Palestinian. It was as if the other side could be understood only if its heroes acted like Israelis or subscribed to an Israeli concept of reality. For instance, in the 1986 film Avanti Popolo, an Egyptian soldier, speaking in a Palestinian dialect (which Israeli Jewish viewers would not notice), conveys the message
of human values common to both sides by quoting Shakespeare’s Shylock. An Anglophile Egyptian common soldier must have been a very rare sight on the Sinai battlefield and yet he was invented to provoke sympathy from the Israeli audience.12

  Some of the bravest attempts to show the world through the eyes of Zionism’s victims, as suggested by the late Edward Said, were woven into fictional or real tales of impossible love.13 Romance and sex sell, and romance was the main sweetener for the new views offered to Israeli filmgoers. Most of these films were modelled on a Romeo-and-Juliet sort of plot: a Jewish woman falls in love with a Palestinian man against the wishes of their respective families and societies. In reality, this was and is an extremely rare occurrence – and one which indicates how exclusionary the project of Zionism was. More than a century of settlement did not produce any significant romantic, let alone familial, ties between the settlers and the native population. No other settler society has been that ‘pure’, apart from the whites in South Africa.

  The eroticisation of the conflict generates a sensual identification with the heroes. As with Hollywood films about African Americans, so in the ‘enlightened’ Israeli film industry the ‘Arabs’ were exceptionally handsome or beautiful. The focus on sex and beauty permits what psychologists call displacement: instead of identifying with the cause of the general suffering inflicted on the other side, the viewer identifies with the broken heart of an attractive hero. Also worth considering with regard to cooperation, friendship, and even romance across the divide is the interesting difference between the attitude of historians, especially in the new age of relativism and even postmodernism, and that of film-makers. While the historians may deduce an optimistic conclusion from such incidents in history, the cinema usually presents them through the lens of tragedy, as an indication of the unbridgeable abyss that separates the two sides and cannot be overcome. Thus, fiction is far more realistic in its depiction of relationships on the ground than the typical academic illusions about humanity and human beings.