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Post-Zionism and Violence: Case Studies from Two Israeli Television Dramas
Abstract
Post-Zionist thought defines a broad agenda for critique by exploring the erosion of Israel’s founding hegemony across society. This hegemony is variously identified as Ashkenazi, secular, socialist, militarist, and/or hyper-masculine. My paper will argue, firstly, that in post-Zionist analyses of Israeli popular culture, there is a general tendency to view the disintegration of a Labor-style hegemony as the optimal path toward redressing the coercive and exclusionary aspects of the Jewish nation-state project. In this view, critique serves as both evidence and aspiration, pointing toward an egalitarian horizon – a state of equitable political and cultural representation for those victimized by Israel’s founding elite, such as the Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern origin), women, the ultra-Orthodox, the far Left, and, above all, Palestinians. But through my study of recent portrayals of political violence in Israeli television, I will argue that this post-Zionist “consensus” has become outmoded, ill-equipped to critique present conditions. I suggest that the dissolution of the Labor Zionist hegemony has not led to a deconstruction of Jewish hierarchy and exclusivity. My close readings of the television dramas Our Boys (2019) and Fauda (2015-) focus on the ways that ascendant narratives of identity – those that aim to replace the collectivist statism of the Labor hegemony – have produced a new Israeli subject that is at least as chauvinistic, paranoid, and resentful as anything that came before. In these dramas, individuals from once-marginalized groups pointedly exit the bounds of Israeli state sovereignty in order to perpetrate violence on Palestinians in a manner the characters explicitly intend to be “unprecedented.” These television programs dramatize a shift from violence as an expression of hierarchical military strategy (with its rationales of state power, “deterrence,” etc.) to violence as an anarchistic expression of kinship (i.e. blood vengeance). This parallels a transformation in the bonds defining group affiliation: from a collective identified with the state to an individual who identifies with smaller units of belonging, such as family or religious cohort. Our Boys and Fauda, both based on real events and personas, issue awful warnings about the nature of Israeli violence in a post-hegemonic reality. They depict nihilistic subjects who reject the norms of the state – even at the cost of their own life – in order to release the full power of asymmetric violence onto a Palestinian figure. Accordingly, my readings suggest the need for revision to certain mainstays of post-Zionist cultural analysis regarding ethnicity, religion, and ideology.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
None