Introduction
The Jewish Heartland
Nimrod: Imagining the ‘Heartland’
Shas: Contemporary Populism
The Palestine Question
Part-ition’: Negotiating Space
Space: The Object of Love
Likud: Deepening Israeli Roots
Conclusion
The creation of the modern State of Israel was a spectacular feat of nation-making. The demands for a nation-state for the Jews had been articulated well before the secular-modernist Zionist movement succeeded in 1948.
Through various conjunctures in their history, the Jewish people had passed through cycles of persecution, expulsion and migration which fueled their longing for a return to the ‘homeland’. For most Jews around the world the making of Israel was thus, an event of Biblical proportions.
Close to 75 years after the creation of Israel as a secular democracy, religious populism is on the rise. This zine looks at the rise of right-wing populism in Israel by looking at cultural artefacts produced in the region, with a focus on the politics of land.
It’s evident that the political boundaries of Israel represents the Jewish ‘homeland’—this notion has sacred assent through biblical stories and political backing through the Zionist movement. But what makes the Jewish ‘heartland’? Where is that imagined place where the ‘pure’ and more importantly ‘authentic’ Jewish people live, as opposed to the ‘out-of-touch’ elites.
A seminal (and controversial) Israeli sculpture by Yitzhak Danziger named *Nimrod* might provide some insight into the cultural underpinnings of the ‘heartland’.
Danziger’s art grew out of a counter-Zionist movement called the Canaanites *Movement* which advocated for a sharp shift away from Judaism and towards a modernized, secular Jewishness. Although Zionism advocated for these as well, the Canaanites had much stronger views. Their conception of how ‘Young Hebrews’ of the Israeli nation must bee solely rooted in the geographical history of the whole Near East.
Nimrod has incredibly direct influences from Egyptian and other Middle Eastern sculptures. In religious literature, Nimrod is the idolater who tried to overthrow god, and he features in all Abrahamic faiths. Moreover, it shows prominent markers of sexuality and looks like an unearthed ancient figurine. The sculpture wears its rebellion against the Orthodox hegemony in constructing a new Israeli identity very visibly.
Nimrod has served as the image of the native, authentic incarnation of the ‘New Jew’—a representation of the modern Israeli. To be sure, the land represented by the Nimrod is morally infused. This sculpture speaks of what an Israeli looks like and connects it to where they come from, i.e. the heartland.
Though the Canaanites never grew into a major political movement, cultural artifacts produced by them—like the *Nimrod—*become cornerstones of defining Israeli identity. Thus, notions of ‘authenticity’ connected to the land are deeply entrenched in the imagination of the heartland.
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Aryeh Dari, an influential populist leader in contemporary Israel.
Vandalism in Abu Ghosh, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem.
The Nimrod (1939) is a sculpture of a naked hunter. The material used is sandstone imported from Jordan and the bird on his shoulder is taken directly from ancient Egyptian sculptures.
The Jewish heartland thus, is a superset of the political boundaries of Israel. It includes the larger ethnic and geographical context. It is inclusionary in this sense and contemporary populism of Shas employs similar thinking.
Shas is a political party started as an ethno-religious movement by the ultra-orthodox Sephardic and Mizrahi community, and grew to be the third largest in Israel’s parliament. It frames an out-group around a dissidence towards the separation between religion and state as well as secular-liberalists. Hate is often directed towards internal schisms within the Jewish religion rather than the presence of Israeli Muslims and Arabs unlike the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing party.
Aryeh Deri was the founder and long-leader of Shas, dubbed the “kingmaker” of Israeli politics. He claimed in an interview that the secular Ashkenazis have taken over ‘Israeliness’.
“They [Secular Ashkenazis] want to decide what an Israeli has to look like, and anyone who does not adhere to their style and standards is not a ‘true’ Israeli; he is a fanatic, a Mizrahi, a fool”
The bipolar rhetoric and a construction of the evil, hegemonic ‘other’ is evident in the above quote, so is the attachment to ‘authenticity’. To provide some more context, the Sephardic and Mizrahi communities are ones that have immigrated from neighboring Arab and Islamic countries. On the other hand, Ashkenazi Jews are from the Christian-majority European diaspora.
At a site of anti-Arab vandalism which read “Racism or assimilation” and “Arabs out”, Deri criticized the act by drawing a moral equivalence to “Jews out”.
“the people at whom this was directed have lived with us for centuries. They even fought in our ranks”
Deri’s words echo a sense of solidarity based on physical proximity. Moreover, the reference to war is also interesting since it signifies a willingness to protect collective borders.
The Manichean dichotomy for Shas are hence the Europeanized Ashkenazi’s versus the ‘authentic’ Middle Eastern orthodox Jews and Arab Muslims. The latter are the ‘authentic’ people and they come from the heartland, which is the Middle East. A religious version of the Canaanites vision of the true people of Israel. **
In the populist logic, the annihilation of the heartland is an extraordinary threat to the people and thus sanctions extraordinary measures to protect it. So has manifested in the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict which has passed through very disparate measures, accords, agreements and parties involved. What seems to have remained emblematic of this conflict is the image of the in-flux Palestinian—displaced, immobile and stateless.
Using Sara Ahmed’s understanding of emotions as an economy, we can look at maps as capturing the Palestinian experience of spatiality and the Israeli right-wing populist’s colonial-settler impulse.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi
The video component of the installation shows a dismembered map of Palestine in 72 cards. Each card flips between the front and the back side—never showing two contiguous territories.
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A brown Formica table with two chairs is placed in front of the video screen. The 72 placards of the dismembered map are placed on the table with instructions for a memory card game.
If we look at the map as a materialization of ‘Palestine’ as a collective body, we can see that it embodies a threat of loss for Israel. Through metonymic slides, the map becomes readable as a direct offense towards loved Israeli spaces. Hence, the constant conquest of erasure against Palestinian spaces works by removing objects of hate, i.e. signs of Palestinian-ness and replacing them with objects of love, Israeli spaces.
For Palestinians like al-Zobaidi, neither the nation of Palestine nor the memories of such a place are contiguous wholes. The first two instructions of the card game represent this spatial experience well. The last three instructions mimics the dishonest colonial logic of Israeli settlements that have resulted in this incoherence.
Though, since emotions do not positively reside in any one subject or object, i.e. hate is distributed across many things, this colonial conquest of dividing and replacing never stops. The Palestinian lines on the map keep shrinking and fragmenting via expanding settlements, while the the Israeli lines expand and become more cohesive.
Buildings in the Kiryat Arba settlement on the outskirts of the city of Hebron in the West Bank. (Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images)
A poster promoting tourism in the Kiryat Arba region. The accompying text reads: “Many of the communities that today fall under the Palestinian Authority, have Jewish roots, such as the ancient synagogue in Idhna and archaeological finds in Halhul and Dura."
A newsreel by British Movietone from 1956 showing an Egyptian refugee camp for Palestinians. The accompanied text reads “…Egyptian kept the Palastinian refugees in primitive dwellings, not permitting them to go to Egypt or mingle with there countryfolk...”
Sobhi al-Zobaidi started making independent films in the post Oslo accords geography of Palestine as a ‘refugee’ within his own land. Based on his experiences, al-Zobaidi’s artistic work centers around the map as a sign of the changing spaces of Palestine and how that works to constitute and re-constitute Palestinian identity. Part-ition (2008) literally takes the map apart.
It is a public art installation displaying a dismembered map of Palestine. The installation has a video component as well as a memory card like game with 72 cut-outs of the map placed on a table. Viewers are encouraged to try out the game—the instructions read:
An accompanying statement by the artist narrates the story of the specific map used in the installation. Al-Zobaidi had inherited the map from a generous Palestinian refugee named Hasan. He’d met the young refugee as a 13 year old while working in the voluntary work committee of his own refugee camp. Hasan’s largely empty room adorned an old Formica table and a large map of Palestine.
Al-Zobaidi recalled his fascination with the map. He’d never seen a map of Palestine, or at least one that represented all the villages and did not make any reference to Israel. He wrote about his decision to dismember the map after having kept it for years:
I wonder what would Hasan think if he found out I have kept his map for over 30 years and now I come to the conclusion that the only way to keep it is to tear it apart.
I would explain to him that instead of showing me the way, this map shows me how disorientated and lost I have become. I’d tell him that the gap between the map and the geography it represents, has become so vast that I need to reconcile the two.
What this installation articulates is the result of deep Israeli ontological insecurity which manifests itself through settler-colonial impulses. Ultimately dividing Palestine into unrecognizable, unconnected pockets.
The pockets of Palestinian control in Israel.
In 2016, Israel’s Prime Minister and populist leader Benjamin Netanyahu announced the building of 42 new housing units in the Kiryat Arba settlement of the West Bank.
At a time when the murder of a 13-year-old Israeli girl by a Palestinian gunman from the area was on top of the news cycle, by announcing the new projects at the time, he temporally pushed these events together.
Consequently, the emotional aura surrounding the settlements and the murder of the girl get intermingled. The figure of a Palestinian gets read as the murder and any spaces inhabited by Palestinians get read as accessories to murder. Everything, from staircases to walls to roads and shops with Arabic names become stand-in’s for murder of the helpless Israeli girl.
In *Remember to be Jewish: Religious Populism in Israel* by Guy Ben Porat and Dani Filc demonstrate the kind of chain of equivalence built by Netanyahu’s discourse previously:
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant (ISIS) is like Iran, Iran is like Hezbollah, Hezbollah is like Hamas, Hamas is like Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority and all the Palestinians in the OT, the Palestinians in the OT are like the Israeli Arab citizens, and the Israeli Arab citizens are like the Israeli left, their loyalty to state and nation suspected (14).
While visiting the grieving family, Netanyahu made this metonymic slide is apparent. He remarked:
It reminds us again of who we are facing. They want to uproot what has been planted, but we will deepen the roots. They will not make us leave here.
The murder of an Israeli girl becomes the premise and justification for planting ‘Israeli roots’ in the land even further. Hence, Israeli spaces here are the object of love that animates the never-ending desire to erase Palestinian spaces.
What Nicole Curato described as a cyclical relationship between ‘politics of hope’ and ‘politics of anxiety’ in the populist logic might provide some insights into how the Israeli public responds to the populism employed by Shas and Likud as described above. A politics of hope is future-oriented and animates democratic agency—it motivates ‘the people’ to take in charge their democratic destiny. On the other hand, politics of anxiety is a politics of latent anxieties—little everyday fears that are visible and problematic but aren’t large enough to warrant major attention.
The inclusionary populism employed by Shas certainly makes efforts to bind Arab Muslims and Mizrahi Jews together and encourages political participation based on shared economic distress. The stress on the revival of a pan-Middle Eastern Orthodox hegemony sets a certain vision of Israel. While the Likud’s exclusionary populism expresses the fear of lurking Palestinian presence in the heartland and motivates the public to support settlement expansion plans.
Given the historicity attached to the geographical land on which Israel stands on and the youth of the nation as a political concept make it ripe for both the kinds of politics to play well with the public. There has been a long tradition of active imagination about how the ‘holy land’ must look like by various groups which provides a fertile ground for the Shas’s pragmatic rhetoric. The raison de etre of Israel was to provide a safe haven for the Jews of the world and hence the ontological insecurity generated by having Palestine occupy space on the ground and on the map express the end point of Likud’s politics of anxiety.