ABSTRACT
The theme of blood runs as a material and metaphorical thread through Zionist political discourse in the immediate pre-and post-State period. Its appearance is more prominent among the so-called “dissident” groups who were expelled from mainstream Zionism in the 1930s and who sought, through the rhetorical suasion of the “blood theme,” to re-integrate their movement with mainstream Zionism and the Jewish State-in-the-making. Thus, this chapter focuses upon the role of blood in the struggle for political recognition by political outsiders, taking into account the exclusionary strategy and tactics of the sovereign powers who determined which “blood” would be recognized as legitimate in the formation of the new state of Israel. The politics of recognition is, in effect, a demarche on the part of those seeking inclusion in a political entity. It embodies issues of personal and collective identity that touch the core of the social self and the historical collectivity. Within the confines of this chapter, the politics of recognition and identity play themselves out among a number of practices associated with remembrance and commemoration. What is recalled and memorialized are the efforts of those who participated in the armed struggle for independence. Above all, supreme place is given to those who fell, who shed their blood, in the cause of national regeneration. No better symbiosis of blood, commemoration, and rebirth can be found than in Menachem Begin’s account of the fate of an Irgun comrade who was shot by the British as he was putting up Underground wall posters. “Many pasting-up operations were therefore accompanied by shooting. There were leaflet-stickers who sealed the message of revolt with their blood.” In one such incident, the Irgun member
was not seen by a doctor nor sent to a hospital. He was dispatched, his wound open and bleeding, to the Acre jail. The wound festered. His jailors
tied him to the bed. The boy had to wipe the blood and pus from his wound with strips torn from his shirt. . . . When at last the prison doctor was brought he diagnosed severe blood-poisoning. . . . After weeks of suffering . . . he died.
