After Israel

Towards Cultural Transformation

Marcelo Svirsky

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780326153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this unique new contribution, Marcelo Svirsky asserts that no political solution currently on offer can provide the cultural marrow necessary to effect a transformation of modes of being and ways of life in the State of Israel. Controversially, Svirsky argues that the Zionist political project cannot be fixed - it is one that negatively affects the lives of its beneficiaries as well as of its victims. Instead, the book aims to generate a reflective attitude, allowing Jewish-Israelis to explore how they may divest themselves of Zionist identities by engaging with dissident rationalities, practices and institutions. Ultimately, the production of military hardware and technology that helps Israel control the lives of Palestinians, of separate policies, laws and spaces for Jews and Palestinians, are all linked with the production of Zionist subjectivities and modes of being. Overcoming these modes of being is to after Israel.

1 | THE HIKER

It’s hard to remember exactly when I began to renounce going out on tiyulim (hiking trips) in Israel.¹ Probably about twenty years ago. I needed the long trip to South America with my family in 2007 and then our relocation to Wales a year later as a chance to re-encounter nature with joy – even if thousands of miles away Zionist ghosts still haunted my walks. From the Israeli familial point of view, the tiyul is the obvious option for all leisure weekend activities. Other activities, such as having a barbecue or visiting places or people, are addenda to the tiyul. This is not surprising, as hiking has an almost mythological status in Israeli society (Avishar 2011: 59). People hike individually, or just with their nuclear family, but in Jewish-Israeli society hiking is essentially a collective practice, with a strong gregarious force; it is the way many spend time with friends and relatives. Institutionally, hiking has a strong presence in the school curriculum and youth movement activities as well as in the army – hence, it has a normalising character. Apart from one’s own circle of friends with whom to hike, there are myriad hiking societies and as many experts as there are households. ‘These hikes,’ explains Ben-David, ‘are very popular in Israel; they are rooted in Israeli culture and began long before the creation of the state; every year many youngsters and families join in this activity throughout the country’ (1997: 143). This outdoors lifestyle is substantiated by an array of civil society-based organisations (most notably the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel) and state-funded bodies whose area of expertise is hiking and the preservation of nature. A healthy and nature-loving people, one may presume.

But at some point it became no longer healthy for me. Perhaps because the hikes had an overly gregarious appeal, they were excessively organised, and were too predictable. The meticulous preparations for each hike, the sophisticated use of maps, the well-versed talks during the walks, the signposts on the stones along the trail, the well-fitted rucksacks, the obsessive concern with a sufficient supply of water, the intolerable folk songs religiously repeated by the most committed hikers, the planned stops at strategic points – they all flooded me with the uncomfortable sensation that we were not just going out for a saunter in the wildness à la Thoreau, but rather we were part of something sticky, sharing a commitment, even a mission. I could not stand the obsessive deliberations around botanic classification and depictions of every bit of vegetation we encountered; my only escape was to parody their learned conversations by inventing my own, non-existent terms, as I always suspected they did too. Couldn’t we enjoy and appreciate nature without cataloguing its sights, or just be immersed in thought as we walked? The more knowledgeable chatterers cited the alleged biblical roots of these names, implying – perhaps compelling – a bond between the distant past and the present. Of the plants’ medicinal uses these erudite fellows showed little knowledge. In contrast, my family hikes in the Bolivian Amazon were all about learning what nature offers us and how to respect that gift, rather than how to define it for ideological purposes.

Nor was I ever at ease with the three-strip coloured guiding path marks along the way. Although trail signs are there to provide a sense of orientation and to safely channel the walk, they are also there as active evidence that that very bit of soil has been tracked, appropriated, registered and catalogued – as the signs of an archive. For me, then, they expressed a sort of social contract with those who had been there before us in a bid to affirm yet again a sense of belonging. As Rela Mazali put it: ‘Our paces measured and mapped onto the ground our unfolding, forming beliefs’ (2011: 187). But it was precisely this exigency to commit ourselves that alarmed and pushed me away from all that. Have we walked this trail before? It seems we have done. Was it with my students, or my family, or perhaps with friends? One more time, and again, and yet again – walking these tracks, repeatedly, certainly felt as if we were singing a monotonous refrain with our own bodies. It took me a while to realise what others were explicitly calling for: ‘the land can be conquered not only by settlement but also by treading it repeatedly’ (Avishar 2011: 63, my translation).

Once on the trail, the experts cannot resist temptation. A supreme power guides them to intervene, to imbue the hike with sense and reason, without which it would remain meaningless. The experts do not miss any opportunity, particularly if some stranger comes along with the group – and especially if that stranger is a Jewish visitor from overseas. For the experts – and perhaps not just for them – these visitors provide a golden opportunity to make the voice of Israel heard. And then, once on the trail, the expert is eager to exhibit his rich repertoire of gestures and articulations to which we all respond – trained as we are – with respect and admiration. Bless the guide – our sole interpreter of scenes and meanings! Hands on hips, one foot forward and his gaze riveted on the horizon, bearing the burden of historical responsibility. He turns to us eager to convey his knowledge and his confident smile finally engulfs us. So we listen. Not only can the experts not resist the temptation, they seem to feel blessed with a mandate bestowed upon them, anchored in a century-old genealogy. It would have been simply irresponsible of them to miss the chance to portray that landscape properly for us, and particularly for our overseas visitors who could give the message wings in the diaspora. ‘On some occasions … [he] will take upon himself … the role of the typical youth movement leader and will assume various responsibilities such as looking after the group’s cohesion, maintaining its social life, and, at times, even cooking a scout’s meal for the group’ (Katz 1985: 51). It always starts with navigation skills: he uses his arms to position the piece of mud we are standing on in relation to the four corners of the earth. As far as the eye can see, every hill, road and town is identified and plotted. One already senses that, more than simple geography, this seemingly innocent spatial orientation involves the possession of territory, with ‘us’ and ‘them’. I always wondered, rhetorically, why we needed to be aware of our coordinates just to smell flowers, digest our packed lunch, enjoy our time in nature, and rest from the pressures of urban living. Besides, what is it about their expert education that makes their annoying cartographic skills so easily unravel the natural landscape into discrete units – units to which we intuitively assign value according to ethnic divisions with which we were not necessarily concerned a moment before this cartographic ritual?

Once we are geographically and sentimentally positioned (remember: we just went for a walk), a brief exposition follows that might focus on some sort of modern Israeli achievement to be contextualised there in the open. ‘Our’ sophisticated irrigation system is frequently a good candidate. Then, if the expert is sure that his flock is submissive enough, he intensifies his speech; clearing his throat, inflecting his voice to adopt that monotone but authoritative rhythm we all recognise at once, he gravely expounds on the strategic significance of that hill over there, not forgetting the battles and the heroes thanks to whom we are now privileged to be standing where we are. That’s it; the glue has worked on each and every one present, and eventually one of us exhales, ‘Eyin kemo baaretz’ (‘No place like Israel’). By the time the group has rested and leaves one spot to advance to the next (we don’t walk or hike, we advance!), camaraderie has grown palpably to the point where someone actually shouts: ‘Close ranks. We are too dispersed!’ (In my days as a high school teacher, I was that idiot myself.) Someone else, consciously or not, conscientiously closes up the column as if we need to watch our fellow hikers’ backs (was I that idiot too?) – as if we were performing an ancient indigenous rite and not just projecting military conduct. After all, we are not just having a relaxed stroll on a sunny Saturday. I could not stand any of this. It was suffocating. But it was also intoxicating in its magnetic attraction. More than anything, I could not stand the pleasure my body felt as part of that regimented bunch of hikers.

‘No doubt walking practices could be categorized in many different ways,’ asserts Edensor in his study of walking techniques in rural Britain (2000: 88). Yet Ori Schwarz’s sonic model, which is based on an ethnographic study of Israeli hikers (2013), may prove helpful in giving a preliminary framing of our Zionist hiker. In his model, Schwarz identifies four modes of engagement of walkers or hikers with nature. The first category corresponds to nature ‘absorbers’, formed by those attentive, noise-hostile, silent and spiritual hikers who absorb nature in order to let it transform their interiority (ibid.: 388–91). Another type of hiker comprises those who use nature as a mediator, not to transform but to explore their given interiority through reflective self-expression (ibid.: 391). In the third category nature is used as an active locus for talkative social interaction (ibid.: 391–3), while the ‘fourth way to engage with nature is through its physical properties, the challenges it poses to the user’s body’ (ibid.: 393). In this last category, hikers ‘employ masculinised consumption techniques, which in Israel are strongly associated with hegemonic masculinity’ and militarism (ibid.: 393). As we shall see, the Zionist hiker who is the focus of this chapter synthesises Schwarz’s third and fourth type. In his use of nature, he takes advantage of nature to forge a nation, often by applying militarist techniques. Therefore, it is more exact to see our Zionist hiker not as a ‘nature user’, as in Schwarz’s model, but as an appropriator of nature.

Schwarz adds a further level of analysis that unveils ‘the contribution of sonic preferences to the reproduction of social hierarchies’ between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim as consumers of nature (ibid.: 398); at first sight, this analysis appears to have the potential to contribute to a more nuanced characterisation of the Zionist hiker. Unsurprisingly, Schwarz found that his middle-class Ashkenazi interviewees showed an aversion to ‘loud’ hiking modes, shouting and having barbecues in nature – behaviours stereotypically attributed in Jewish-Israeli society to lower-class Mizrahim (ibid.: 395–9). But despite Schwarz’s critical efforts to lean on his working-class interviewees to transvalue Ashkenazi hierarchisation of modes of hiking, the stereotypical dichotomy associated with the correlation between race/class and sonic preferences remains in place, but with inverted polarity (a standard consequence of identitarian analyses). So loudness, for instance, obtains a positive value in Schwarz’s transvaluation but remains stereotypically attributed to Mizrahim.

In addition, when looking into both the genealogy and the current educational practices of Zionist hiking, the stereotypical racial dichotomy of sonic preferences seems to have no explanatory role. As the following sections show, this genealogy is rooted in a primarily white Ashkenazi history, one that largely evolved through an engagement with nature as a site of intensive socialisation and militant nation building rather than through ascetic or self-reflecting modes. Official educational practices of hiking in Jewish-Israeli schools continue to maintain these patterns, whether in middle-class or lower-class neighbourhoods. This does not mean that the distinction between silent and loud modes of engagement with nature does not exist in Jewish-Israeli hiking; rather, this distinction may yield stronger critical outcomes if operationalised not in terms of signifiers of ascribed racial identities and social positionings that serve only to reassert social differentiations, but instead conceived as a multiplicity that lacks the authority of a single referent. Traditional Zionist hiking, for instance, in the family circle or otherwise, requires normalising moments through lecturing and active participation as well as silent passages of military simulation. In this respect, ‘out of place’ acts of loudness or quietness may be disruptive or positively profanatory. Schwarz’s ideal sonic types omit the profanatory potential of these combinations. In other words, rather than simply being conceived as signs of identity, sonic preferences in hiking can also be interpreted and activated as productive mechanisms of withdrawal or disengagement. Unconsciously or not, having a noisy barbecue gathering where my hegemonic adversaries prefer to saunter or abstaining from the joy of their all too expected conversations and spatial preaching can both be seen as expressions of counter-hegemonic disengagement. Therefore, the study of sonic preferences in hiking may have more to offer than just moulding a continuum stretched between antithetical poles.

§ One cannot comprehend the nature-appropriator mode of hiking – which might appear bizarre outside the Jewish-Israeli milieu – and its role in everyday culture in Israel without analysing the presence and significance of hiking in the history of white hegemonic Zionism. Studies have established that since the early days of Zionist Eastern European immigration to Palestine in the beginning of the twentieth century, theoretical knowledge of the geography of Eretz Yisrael and hiking throughout that geography evolved as inseparable core elements in the ideological indoctrination and the physical preparation of the Jewish immigrant-settler (see, for example, Almog 2000; Avishar 2011; Benvenisti 2002; Stein 2009). Familiarising oneself with the landscapes of Palestine through one’s feet helped the former diasporic Jews of Europe to recapture the land, Judaising it anew. In other words, a particular practice of hiking became part of the nation-building process.

The historical fabrication of a nation should be sought in the changing and intricate material, discursive and emotional ways by which encounters and events turn into opportunities and choices. Chief among these nation-building processes are ‘existential territories’, which, according to Félix Guattari (1996), are spaces of life that become defined, stable and habitable through the cultivation of subjectivities – our identities, habits, traits, gestures and dispositions. The political mobilisation of the tiyul, I argue, involved the constitution of two types of interconnected existential territories, one being the body of the Zionist Ashkenazi pioneer and the other the land itself. Zionist national ideology that called on people to re-encounter the ancestral homeland and reclaim it in order to build a Jewish national home cannot in itself explain the hiking narrative in the Zionist annals of Palestine, or how the hiking narrative helped European pioneers sprout and take root in their desired old-new land. Unlike the native Palestinians and the Sephardi² families who lived in the country, the Eastern European pioneers did not know the land, so practical goals such as acquiring knowledge of the land’s physical and human geographies were a significant inspiration for these Jewish settlers to go out into the open, to explore, study and physically experience the terrain. As Neumann explains, ‘the halutzim [pioneers] thirsted for knowledge of the land … one way they slaked this thirst was by travelling and hiking its length and breadth’ (2011: 98).

Education in the growing Zionist enclave played a decisive role in promoting the practices and ideologies associated with hiking and landscape. As Avishar describes:

this educational approach aspired to implant the meaning of being connected to the land of Israel as it was settled anew after 2,000 years of diaspora. The hike was recruited to this end as treading the paths, taking in the views and finding shards of the distant past while Judaising the landscape; all deepened the bond of the hikers to their homeland (2011: 62, my translation).

This sense of historical remoteness was not shared by Sephardi Jews who lived in Muslim countries and up until the 1930s practised ‘religious pilgrimages or business trips to Palestine’ (Shohat 1988: 10). But it was precisely that sense of ‘remoteness’ and the desire to end the diaspora – exogenous to Sephardi Jews (ibid.: 10) – that formed the background from which European Zionism articulated an ideology of reconnection, rebirth and Jewish regeneration.

In 1905, the first Hebrew school, founded in Rishon LeZion in 1886, led the way. Its headmaster inaugurated what was to become a tradition, that of the annual school field trip (Almog 2000: 166–8; Avishar 2011: 61). ‘According to its practitioners, knowledge of the (home)land was to be transmitted to the Jewish pupil through both intellectual and sensory means … [and] the tiyul was considered among the most important of such sensory means’ (Stein 2009: 337). As Mayer expla...