UC Berkeley

This dissertation inquires into the question of collectivity in texts written in and about Israel/Palestine from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In light of the current crisis in the configuration of both Israeli and Palestinian national collectivities, it explores the articulation of non-national collective formations in literary and cinematic texts. I read these texts not as sealed works that represent historically realized collectivities, but as creative projects whose very language and modalities speculatively constitute potential collectivities. Rejecting the progression of teleological history ruled by actualized facts, these projects compose a textual counter-history of Israel/Palestine. I therefore propose reading them outside of the national and state-centered paradigm that governs most political and cultural inquiries into Israel/Palestine, and suggest instead that they amount to an anti-colonial trajectory. The Hebrew and French texts discussed in the dissertation challenge their own fixed political positioning within the colonial matrix and offer a critique of European political dictates and artistic forms.

In Chapter One, I discuss S. Yizhar's constant return to the events of the 1948 war and his refusal to move beyond it and narrate post-1948 sovereign, statist time; I consider the different literary procedures he employs throughout his work to potentially (re)constitute - after the establishment of the Israeli state - a pre-1948, non-national collective formation in Israel/Palestine. I then move, in Chapter Two, to follow the revolutionary collective enunciation fashioned by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga-Vertov collective, a group of politically-active filmmakers formed in 1968. I investigate the collectivity they attempted to develop together with Palestinian fighters in 1969-1970, the project's collapse after what is known as Black September, and finally its reflective afterlife in the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs. Chapter Three delves into the texts Jean Genet dedicated to the Palestinian struggle in the 1970s and -80s. I discuss how, in addressing his writing to a non-historical Palestinian collectivity which by then had already disappeared, Genet defies the boundaries of liberal politics of representation, and calls for a different notion of a gestural, "scripted" anti-colonial struggle. In Chapter Four I read contemporary Hebrew writer Haviva Pedaya's liturgical piyyut poetry, and ascertain how it may generate an oppositional history of Hebrew letters formulated from and towards Oriental collectivities, as a challenge to the modernist and secularist underpinnings of "modern Hebrew literature." Taken together, the projects I study recast Israel/Palestine as a political space in which both Palestinian and Jewish collectivities potentially emerge as anti-colonial, exilic, Eastern ones, formed in struggle and embedded in text.