Jewish Heroism

The empowerment of the Jewish identity through the victories of wars in the script is another controversial subject. Scene 5 shows an affirmative tone of the adults who are not hesitant to tell about the triumph over the adversities in narrating the history of Israel:

Tell her we won

Tell her her brother’s a hero Tell her how big their armies are Tell her we turned them back Tell her we’re fighters Tell her we’ve got new land.

To create an image of the powerful Jews is a strategy for Jewish people to regain confidence and reclaim identity. Before the founding of Israel, the wandering Jews represent a frail, victimized group of people whose identity as the powerless reaches its darkest moment during the Holocaust. As Neil R. Davidson points out, fin de siècle anti-Semitic narrative characterizes racial and religious assumptions of Jewish

effeminacy, inferiority, and weakness (5). Therefore, the victory of the Jews after the shift from Europe to the Middle East, namely, to defeat the enemies and to build the

country, can reverse the inferior, feminized image of Jewish male body and strengthens the Jewish valor.

In view of Israeli history, the glorification of militant figures serves not only as the memorization of heroes but also the making of Israeli collective memory. In

Perfect Heroes, Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz traces the heroism back to the seven

parachutists who were deployed on the Zionist mission to contact the European Jews during World War II. “For as soon as the parachutist died, the hero was created, and as soon as the person dies, the symbol is born” (Baumel-Schwartz 44). Baumel-Schwartz further explains the significance of commemoration:

Commemoration is a very important mechanism in strengthening and cementing every society’s identity. It is even more crucial in a nascent society, which uses the rituals of commemoration to shape its self-image and sketch the contours of its national consciousness-in-formation. (46) Thus, political parties in Israel and the Jewish community worldwide seek legitimacy in the image of war heroes. The symbol of heroes serves to counteract the anti-Zionist discourses created by the adversaries, i.e., the long persecution of the Jews in Europe and the Arab hostility toward Israel. The commemoration of heroes is therefore perpetuated in Israeli society for it heralds the conquest of the Arabs, the possession of the land, and the hardship of building a country. After all, despite the fact that the Jewish state has already become a reality, the legitimacy of the nation is still

questioned in anti-Israel stream of discussions.

However, in the context of the military invasion, the heroism of Jewish people runs in tandem with the violence caused to the other side—the neighboring nations and the Palestinians. The Jewish heroism seems always followed by the

delegitimization of the Israeli narratives in view of the violence caused and the

continuous conflicts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Therefore, the image of the perfect heroes as Jewish empowerment is dual when it also crystalizes Israeli nationalist, right-wing agenda of Zionism in a spirit of self-justification. In Exodus, the 1958 historical novel written by Jewish American novelist Leon Uris, Zionist heroism solidifies and glorifies the State of Israel after the devastation of the

Holocaust. The novel achieved great success and, according to the late Edward Said, has been a dominant narrative for Americans to think of the State of Israel and the Middle East issues.

Significantly, what lacks in the story of heroes conquering difficulties in

establishing a country is the Palestinian narrative. As Matthew M. Silver observes, the coexistence of “Other Exodus” is neglected by Leon Uris, the like-minded readers, and Israel supporters (6). As a result, “Other Exodus,” signifying the transfer of Palestinians, discredits the rectitude of “Our Exodus” for the unfair proportion in depicting the tragedy of the other side. From this viewpoint, Churchill’s script presents a sort of forthright criticism of Israel—the Jewish claim of Promised Land led to the displacement of Palestinians and other conflicts in the area. The script in this sense uses the heroic image of Jews to reveal the self-serving mentality of the Israeli people. The Jewish heroism, conveying the only affirmative message in the play’s script to tell the child about “that we won” and “we’ve got new land,” is used to delegitimize the State of Israel due to the pernicious results of conflicts. Furthermore, showing the Israeli adults’ argument about telling or hiding the truth about “the bulldozer knocking the house down, bombs in café” in the following scene, the heroic narrative is transformed to a post-war reflection. The tone of uncertainty followed by the heroic victory indicates that the Israeli adults in the scene are conscious of the inglorious chapter of encroachment.

As a result, the valor of Jewish people embodied in the building of the State of Israel is deconstructed because of the ongoing complex territorial feuds. As Silver points out, in the progress of Jewish empowerment, the images of superhuman Israeli soldiers become morally problematic in narratives showing affirmative tone to assert the legitimacy of the land. Moreover, highlighting military heroism and impregnable nationalist agenda to claim the land, the narrative could otherwise reveal the innate weakness and insecurity of Israelis. It ultimately makes the heroes defeatable. As the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun demonstrates,¹⁵ “they[Jews] are saying the opposite and unwittingly expressing their fundamental insecurity” when asserting their attachment to the land through narratives like Exodus (qtd. in Silver 184).

Israelis, when celebrating Jewish courage, are like the Palestinians with the

traumatized experiences of expulsive transfer, behave with uncertainties because of

“the psychological effects of powerlessness” (Silver 214). In this respect, Churchill’s reference to the powerful Jewish soldiers in wars disarms the Jewish heroes and invalidates the commemoration of Israeli military exploitation.

1.1.3 Jewcentricity

Starting from the shift to the Middle East, the triumph over the Arabs, the settlement project, and the current military conflicts, the play runs in line with the unfolding of Jewcentricity. In Scene 6, lines like “Tell her we’re making new farms in the desert/don’t tell her about the olive trees/Tell her we’re building new towns in the wilderness/don’t tell her they throw stones/Tell her they’re not much good against tanks” write about the construction on the land. The expansion of settlement on the territories pertains to the economic prosperity of Israel. It signals the celebration of

15 Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun tells about Palestinian displacement after 1948.

the military exploits as the previous scene implies. Nevertheless, it also discloses the development of modern technologies bringing economic, capitalist development on the soil while jeopardizing the daily life of the residents in the incessant wars in the other aspect. The lines “tell her they don’t understand anything except violence/tell her we want peace” present an attempt to cover a rather impartial fact so as to view the Palestinians as primitive, pugnacious radicals. In this respective, Israel’s conflict with Palestine is presented as a one-sided violence, serving to demonize the other side—the Palestinians. Reviewing the events from the viewpoint of the Israeli people, the narration could otherwise be alienated from the Israelis. This narration seems to consciously expose unfavorable attributes of Israelis and designate the negative characteristic of a Jew-centered point of view regarding the long-standing conflict.

This approach to the script again leads to a condemnation of the founding of Israel, if not a challenge about the legitimacy of Israel, by revealing its occupation,

deprivation, and casualty of the Other.

The monologue in the last scene therefore makes a conclusion of the previous presentation of Israeli self-serving mentality, showing that the Israelis exterminate the other without any sympathy. It is worthy of quoting in full:

Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army.

Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk

suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.

This long statement explicitly shows the critique of Israel through exposing the mind of an unreservedly self-interest Israeli. The Jewish-centered conceptualization seems converged on the trope of “chosen people.” To this end, it constructs an ideology that the Israelis exert power to persecute the Palestinians because Jews are “the chosen one.”

Adam Garfinkle, a Jewish American political scientist, proposes that anti-Semitism as form of Jewcentricity intertwined with the concept of chosenness can be divided into three major stages of development. The original Jewcentricity was the Jewish self-perception in philosophical and religious sense which was replaced by the second one with racial tropes, that is, “the modern anti-Semitism of the sort that gave rise to the Holocaust” (Garfinkle 63). The postmodern one, he argues, is the current focus on the Jewish material and political power, designating an “ideological selectivity” that associates Jews, Jewish nationalism, and Israel with racism

(Garfinkle 64). The establishment of Israel as an achievement of Zionism is thereby blamed for its racism against the other ethnic groups, mainly the Palestinians.

To understand the use of the “chosen people” rhetoric in this way, Churchill’s script, weaving together the historical lens on Jewish/Israeli voice, could be elided

into what Kushner and Solomon called “misunderstanding of Judaism and

obliviousness to the stereotyping of Jews” (qtd. in Kritzer 615-16). The “chosen one”

as an idea of difference is easily blended into presumptions of snobbery and supremacy (Garfinkle 11). Accordingly, the “we/they” phrasing as a viewpoint of differentiating self from the other in the script presupposes that the Israelis are insensitive toward Palestinian suffering as an extreme expression of self-perceiving chosenness. The final speech in the script, underlying the survival of the Israeli child, explains the Israeli Jewcentricity which dehumanizes the Palestinians. It consequently suffuses the whole play with condemnation of the chosen people mentality which is interpreted as an anti-Semitic connotation. As Howard Jacobson argues, “once you venture on ‘chosen people’ territory, an ancient prejudice tantamount to a blood-libel of Jews,” you perform hatred toward Jews as a whole (qtd. in Kritzer 615).

As an exemplification of Jewcentricity, the idea of “chosen people” could inevitably be read as a negative signifier that is predisposed to the controversy over anti-Semitism. The use of the chosen people rhetoric even disturbs Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon who justify and praise Churchill’s writing of the play. Even though Kushner and Solomon still hold that this reference does not amount to anti-Semitism since what the characters say does not stand for the playwright’s ideology, the “chosen one” trope still bears the weight of the history of discriminative violence and could always confront challenges from Jewish critics like Jacobson et al. Consequently, appealing to protest against Israel’s military policy and drawing public attention to Gaza crisis in the spectacle of Jewcentricity, Churchill otherwise makes the play vulnerable to the Jewcentric investigation of anti-Semitism in terms of the content of the playtext.

在文檔中 《七個猶太小孩》的論述與戲劇奇觀 (頁 29-36)