ABSTRACT
Despite its lack of immediate bearing and only slight influence upon the Zionist project, the theatre has none the less lavishly endowed the Zionist discourse with a convenient terminology for its historiographical endeavors. Tragedy in particular figures as a ready trope accounting for various conjunctions within ancient and recent Jewish history, as well as their apparent convergence into contemporary contingencies. Predictably, this rhetorical profusion varies in cogency and viability. It ranges from candid (if not necessarily sound) figurative readings of insoluble moral crises to common platitudes, such as aestheticizing the political in recruiting Hegelian notions of colliding rights to account for the Intifada as allegedly inhabiting equal moral claims: a fearful symmetry, which could be appropriately countered by recalling Hegel’s own fable of the Master and Slave, whose context, one may be reminded, is self-consciousness (Hegel, 1977 pp. 111-19). Ignoring the latter case in its blatant hypocrisy, the candid approach merits a closer scrutiny. The practice of applying the tragic to a political concept, particularly such whose charged embodied presence in the realm of institutionalized politics still governs the lives of millions, implicates its agent of some measure of bias, for fear of which it will be shunned by cautious academics, lest their claim to professional objectivity be put in jeopardy; but it will also be avoided by both champions of Zionism and its radical foes, neither of whom would find it advantageous for their respective projects. Thus more often than not it will be implied rather than expressly articulated. Gilbert invokes the term “tragic” in his title to designate the holocaust experience (Gilbert, 1986): in that he follows many, some of whom would share no other ideological conviction with him except the actual use of the term:
The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives…Perhaps a modern Aeschylus and Sophocles could cope with this theme: but they would do so on a level different from that of historical interpretation and explanation. (Deutscher, 1968 pp. 163-64)
When it comes to the narrative of Zionism, however, tragedy is often applied without such fine (though unspecified) distinction between its metaphorical and direct use. Whereas Avishai
relates the term to Zionism in general (Avishai, 1985), Kohn appropriates it solely to designate the “tragic historical coincidence” whereby “the Arabs were…awakening to national consciousness and undergoing a process of profound psychological change” (Selzer, 1970 p. 198), while Arendt views the construction of an “insoluble ‘tragic conflict’” (inverted commas in the original) as a deliberate, manipulative ploy on the part of Zionist leadership after the holocaust (Selzer, 1970 p. 214). Most writers on the subject, however, tend to go only as far as Elon (1971), who figuratively entitles one of his chapters on the history of Zionist settlement in Palestine ‘A Chekhov Play by Dürrenmatt’, while investing his narrative throughout with tragic sentiments of pity and fear without addressing the actual term: “The sins of the Zionists”, he would typically quote historian J.L. Talmon in a side phrase, “call for censure, but also for compassion” (Elon, 1971, p. 83). This, on the face of it, sounds like a reasoned and conscientious liberal approach, for the maintaining of which its upholders will still have to engage in exhausting and futile ideological debates with partisans of crude nationalism (as did Talmon with former Israeli prime minister Begin). The question remains, however, whether the invocation of the tragic in this context is a laudable act of moral codification manifesting a sane intellectual trajectory in thematizing problematically, and exposing the ideological fallacies of an accepted narrative; or is it rather a manipulative ruse designed to exonerate one’s own complicity with the corrupting consequences of such a narrative? Does it bear the moral resonance of, say, Adorno and Horkheimer’s desperate caveat against the self-destructive potential of Western enlightenment half a century ago? It is not intended here to explore meticulously the ideological function and rhetorical validity of the tragic imagery furnishing Israeli historical and political writing, though such an enterprise is indeed called for. Rather, a further step will be attempted to scrutinize the consequences of that project in attending the resonance of such a rhetoric in the halls of its original surroundings; namely, to ponder what one can make of the dim presence, or rather the virtual absence of the tragic as a theatrical genre from the large repertoire of Israeli drama as opposed to the abundant use of the term as a figurative device in the context of Israeli political discourse, which has been known to provide Hebrew drama with much of its vitality and popularity. Surely much more is involved here than a plain one-to-one relation, since modern tragedy forms a special and complex case in theatrical history: whereas some, from Nietzsche to Steiner, have bluntly proclaimed its death, others have detected its return “like the repressed…in strange and often deforming guises”(Kuhns, 1991 p. 6), and Raymond Williams, for one, has warned us against reading the term too rigorously (or “academically”) in the light of much too unified traditional connotations. Yet it will be argued here that raising the question in this context is not necessarily an exercise in encoding reality and its representation in cultural production merely for the pleasures of taxonomy. Rather, it will be attempted to deploy the charged interrelations between patterns of meaning and forms of subjectivity in the tragic domain-whereby an experiential rehearsal of the action of an exemplary subject betrays the presence of a universal law which, paradoxically, cannot in turn be read as separate from the human contingencies evoked by the narrative-in order to illuminate the core of Zionist discourse as represented through the perspective of its solemn dramatic production. Complex and possibly unrigorous as modern tragedy may be, modern Jewish history equally constitutes a special case which defies conventional historiographical formulae, and whose binding principles, to the extent such may be inferred, ask for irregular modes of explication. Our quest, therefore, is double-edged: if indeed the Zionist saga, whether in its very foundations or its current phase, lends itself to fundamental tragic qualifications extending
beyond dilettante formalization, it may be instructive to enquire how is it that the genre itself, for all its formidable complexity, has failed so far to emerge as a significant constituent of Zionism’s prolific theatrical crop; and what is it, in terms of historical understanding, that this failure may signify as regarding the nature of narrative that Zionist discourse has been able to promote as well as the moral fibre of those active in its reproduction.
