Abstract

Retrospectivity as an Ethical Stance:

Revisiting the Zionist Dream in Israeli Fiction and Film

by

Hanna Tzuker Seltzer

Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union

in Jewish Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair

My dissertation engages with Israeli works of fiction and film whose plots return to the period from the pre-state Yishuv in Palestine till the first years of Israeli statehood. Through close reading and analysis of narrative strategies and cinematic techniques, I explore the ways in which this retrospective gaze presents an ethical critique of the Zionist enterprise. These works reexamine essential notions in Zionist ideology such as the ideal of the New Jew, the negation of the diaspora (shlilat ha-galut), the treatment of Middle-Eastern Jews, and the fate of the Palestinians. I argue that only through retrospective narration is it possible for these Israeli writers and filmmakers to propose a nuanced ethical critique that both depicts the experience of daily life in those heady ideological days and offers a historical reassessment of the values of that era. Throughout this dissertation, my theoretical framework remains grounded in narratology, as well as in conceptions of intertextuality as a bilateral cultural practice.

Part I of my dissertation is dedicated to S. Yizhar’s autobiographical novel Preliminaries (1992). The novel tells the story of a Jewish family that settles in Palestine during the period of the Yishuv, the New Jewish Settlement in the 1920s, and is narrated through the dual perspective of the youngest child in the family and of the adult some sixty years later. The co-existence of the two narrators enables the complex message of the novel; it places the events in their human and historical context, and yet, through the point of view of the adult narrator, also acknowledges the short-sighted conception of the New Jew in a New Land. My narratological analysis reveals the complex point of view of the narrator, whose child-like position defamiliarizes and literalizes key concepts, while his retrospective position as an adult simultaneously approves of and

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criticizes them. The intertextuality in Preliminaries serves as a critique of ideology while also revealing the return of the repressed Jewish cultural echo chamber of Talmud and Torah study.

In Part II I focus on the novel Infiltration by Yehoshua Kenaz (1986). It takes place in 1955 and depicts an IDF platoon whose soldiers have minor disabilities and are therefore deemed unfit for combat and subjected to their commanders’ contempt and abuse. The soldiers internalize the disdain they encounter and perceive themselves and their fellow platoon soldiers as defective and unworthy. Like Preliminaries, Infiltration is an autobiographical novel which employs a dual lens: that of the soldier narrator who tells of the events at the time they occur, and that of the adult narrator, who returns to these events 30 years later. I analyze the narratological articulations of the soldiers’ subjectification and loss of agency inherent in their submission to ideology. I show that the novel illustrates with exceptional precision all the features of interpellation discussed by Althusser. Intertextually, Infiltration models the death-like experience of the abject soldiers on Dante’s Inferno, while echoing Ben-Gurion’s account of the Israeli military experience as a purgatory of sorts.

In the epilogue to this dissertation, I examine the films Kedma (2002) by Amos Gitai and Homeland (2008) by Dani Rosenberg, whose cinematic projects enhance the retrospective point of view as a condition for ethical critique. Although different in plot and stylistics, both films tell the story of Holocaust survivors who immigrate to Palestine during the 1948 war and are recruited into the Israeli military. Gitai and Rosenberg give presence to the Palestinians and their catastrophe, the Nakba: In Kedma, this is done through their testimonials, while in Homeland it is done through an emphasis on their haunting absence. The two filmmakers produce an analogy between the Jewish refugees and the Palestinian refugees, portraying the experiences of loss and disaster as a common ground for both. Acknowledging the Palestinians’ catastrophe indeed requires the Israeli audience to admit responsibility; yet the very recognition of the tragic connection between the two peoples, with the return of one people from exile creating the exile of the other, opens up a channel for communication and future reconciliation. I show how Kedma’s radical intertextuality, by incorporating citations from the works of Palestinian writers Ghassan Kanafani and Tawfiq Zayyad, gives voice and presence to the Palestinian experience. I also argue that modeling Homeland on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot constructs the absurdity of mobilizing Holocaust survivors to the war against Palestinians. Both films—like the two novels—portray the catastrophic consequences of erasing Jewish and Palestinian cultural memory.