Hannan Hever

‘Arab Jews’ after structuralism: Zionist discourse and the (de)formation of an ethnic identity

We revisit the term ‘Arab Jews’, which has been widely used in the past to depict Jews living in Arab countries, but was extirpated from the political lexicon upon their arrival in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. We follow first the demise of this discourse and then its political reawakening in the 1990s, which was carried out mostly by second-generation Mizrahi intellectuals and activists. We review this surge of the 1990s, distinguishing between structural and post-structural interpretations of the concept, although we also show that they are often interwoven. According to the structural interpretation, the term ‘Arab Jew’ was founded on a binary logic wherein Jews and Arabs are posed as cultural and political antagonisms. The post-structural interpretation rejects the bifurcated form in lieu of a hybrid epistemology, which tolerates and enables a dynamic movement between the two facets of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’. We spell out the differences between these two heuristic modes of interpretation and speculate about their relevance to the political conditions in the Middle East today.

The Post-Zionist Condition

1 In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Ubikoret (Theory and Criticism) published an essay of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot (Arabesques).1 In this essay I traced Shammas’s subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas’s novel reveals how the Hebrew canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew language as the common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued, sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev (Tuvya the Dairyman), Dan Miron’s Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem’s novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron’s Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem’s Yiddish, it also moves in the opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3 These essays span two decades. The first article was nourished by the utopian assumption that the existence of the Israeli state meant that its national identity would be Israeli, while the second was written after this hope had been smashed to smithereens. And so, instead of the reterritori-

THE KINNERET: The sanctity of place and nation

At the time of the Second Aliyah, 1903–1914, the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) was perceived—and functioned—as a sacred place. A major component in the Kinneret’s sacred status was its constitution as a continuing object of desire. The religious aspect of Kinneret is a crucial element in Zionist discourse; the commonly accepted historical narrative about the relationship between religion and secularity in Zionist discourse assumes a dialectical form: the transformation to secularism while still retaining the continuity of the presence of religion. Yet in many texts of the era, instead of depoliticisation that harmonises the relationship between secular and religious, one can see the effects of the sublime, which reaffirms the nationalist agenda through mythifying and materialising the desire for territory.

The Zionist sea: symbolism and nationalism in modernist Hebrew poetry

The paper follows the conflicted stances towards the sea between the Zionist right wing and the socialist-Zionist majority. While the hegemonic labour Zionist movement dismissed the sea, the Zionist right embraced it. Again and again in labour Zionist discourse, the sea is represented through the mythological voyage from Eastern Europe by way of Trieste in Italy to the port of Jaffa in Palestine, a voyage whose goal of reaching land mitigates any of the troubles of the journey itself. In 1934, Avraham Shlonsky published his book of poetry Avnei bohu (Stones of chaos), and in it a completely new conception of the sea emerges: instead of the sea as vehicle to Eretz Israel, the sea now moves in the opposite direction – as a path for exiting Eretz Israel for Europe. The sea, which filled such a central role in the construction of the notion of national immigration, appears now as its opposite.