Eitan Bar-Yosef

The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18:

Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lions failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917–18 Palestine campaign as the ‘Last’ or the ‘New’ Crusade. This representation, in turn, with its anti-Moslem overtones, introduced complicated problems for the British propaganda apparatus, to the point (demonstrated here through an array of official documentation, press accounts and popular works) of becoming enmeshed in a hopeless web of contradictory directives. This article argues that the ambiguity underlying the representation of the Palestine campaign in British wartime propaganda was not a coincidence, but rather an inevitable result of the complex, often incompatible, historical and religious images associated with this particular front. By exploring the cultural currency of the Crusading motif and its multiple significations, the article suggests that the almost instinctive evocation of the Crusade in this context exposed inherent faultlines and tensions which normally remained obscured within the self-assured ethos of imperial order. This applied not only to the relationship between Britain and its Moslem subjects abroad, but also to rifts within metropolitan British society, where the resonance of the Crusading theme depended on class position, thus vitiating its projected propagandistic effects even among the British soldiers themselves.

Let me die with the philistines: Gissing's suicidal realism

Eitan Bar-Yosef Eitan Bar-Yosef, lecturer at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has published articles on Victorian culture and literature in Journal of Contemporary History, Dickens Quarterly, and English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. His book, Images of the Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

‘The Horror’ in Hebrew

Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israels intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novellas relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the works fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israels colonial violence.

NEW CITIES FOR NEW JEWS: HAIFA AS FUTURISTIC URBAN FANTASY IN THEODOR HERZL'S ALTNEULAND AND VIOLET GUTTENBERG'S A MODERN EXODUS

This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two fin-de-siècle futuristic tales: Theodor Herzls Altneuland (1902) and Violet Guttenbergs A Modern Exodus (1904). Focusing on the northern port city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the citys spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different views concerning the national Jewish rejuvenation: for Herzl, it becomes a utopian triumph; for Guttenberg, a deplorable failure. Notwithstanding their different assessments of the Zionist vision, both authors share certain anti-Semitic assumptions about the nature of “the Jew” (greedy, intolerant, vulgar), which are inscribed into the urban space. Herzls ideal Haifa is designed precisely to reform the diaspora Jew by introducing such modern urban measures that would render these detestable Jewish traits obsolete. Guttenbergs disordered city, in comparison, reflects an inability to alter the Jewish character: no wonder that London, not Haifa, becomes the final destination of her “Modern Exodus.”