Suicide Social Dramas

Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

Haim Hazan, Raquel Romberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000411591
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere, it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim's thought on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society's self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival mechanism of communal 'life giving'. A rekindling of the Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide's shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.

1 Heroic and nonheroic shame: nation-state building and betrayal

The categories of heroic shame and nonheroic shame emerged in suicide media-events in the 1950s and 1960s that address, respectively, the Israeli emerging nation and its developing State-bureaucracy. In the early decades after independence, fatal shame was associated with the impossibility of fully realizing the collective values of ideally committed citizenship and thus can be seen as tied to an a priori nation-building process whereby individual citizens are construed as hologram-like instances of a morally bound collective. Suicide is thus but one option for citizens who fail to withhold that high standard position of being a moral embodiment of the nation. Such were the cases of Uri Ilan (1935–1955), who committed suicide in the Syrian military jail after being captured together with other four soldiers without showing any resistance, and of public figure Nehemia Argov (1914–1957), who killed himself out of utter shame, as his suicide note read, after accidentally hitting a bicycle rider with his car. Both the suicide media-events of Uri Ilan and Nehemia Argov illustrate fatal moral breakdowns of individuals who lived as the accomplished incarnation of the individual subject in and of the new nation, where each citizen is engulfed and incorporated into the moral collective persona of the nation in all its entirety and totality. In contrast, the discussion of “nonheroic shame” addresses suicide media-events of citizens who failed to live up to the ethical-practical aspirations of the new nation. Such were the suicide media-events of Israel Sinai (DOD 1954), a “Jerusalem confectioner and alleged tax evader,” and the failed suicide media-event of Rudolf Melamed (DOD 1966), a factory owner, which put into evidence modes of individual and public shame at a period of evolving State bureaucratic law enforcement. The first case points to the yet-unfinished bureaucratic tax-related normalization of the new State and the failure and shame of some citizens, not only for not obeying its laws, as they were evolving before a fully fledged system of legal sanctions were in place, but also for not being able to withstand the collective shame that these infractions entailed. And in the second case, the lack of public and media discussion attests to the process of normalization that the tax system and enforcement underwent in the 1960s. Almost at the same time, as part of the consolidation of State and nation building, a unique merging of State and public media forces gave birth to the “Self-Censorship Act” of all media in 1960. Not coincidentally, the 1960s had the highest rate of suicides so far recorded since the founding of the State. Oded Heilbronner notes (2018) that the alleged “normal” decade of the State of Israel was characterized by a suicide epidemic that challenged both doctors and journalists. Indeed, in an attempt to preserve the continuing collective endorsement of the social compact in the “normalization” decades of the State, the publicity of a wave of suicides hitting the nation would have inevitably questioned the social fabric and individuals’ “natural” place within it, as well as the legitimacy of the State to assure the well-being of its citizens; and thus, such publicity had to be controlled and tempered from within, following Ben-Gurion’s advice. These are the “intrinsic” reasons promoted by Ben-Gurion, which were voluntarily enacted by public media gatekeepers. Following the distinction made by Nets-Zehngut, Pliskin, and Bar-Tal (2015) between intrinsic and extrinsic censorship, the Self-Censorship Act of 1960 aimed at shaping the collective memory of a nation for its preservation.¹ It can explain the unusual lack of suicide events reported in the media during the sixties, in comparison to the ensuing decades and the statistical reality during this time. Not coincidentally, the old Self-Censorship Act reappears in a refurbished form almost half a century later, in 2009, with its basic principles updated, following the establishment of the National Program for Suicide Prevention, in order to avoid the propagation and romanticization of suicide among youngsters (according to the well-known Werther Effect), rather than shape the collective national consciousness, as in the past.²

Heroic suicide media-events

“I Killed Myself—I Didn’t Betray”

The nationalist-moral identity of generations of soldiers and young people in Israel has been shaped by several heroism narratives, among them the heroic suicide story of Uri Ilan, which has been inscribed succinctly in the minds and bodies of Israelis in just a two-word mantra: “Lo bagadeti”(“I didn’t betray [my country]”). Uri Ilan (February 17, 1935—January 13, 1955) was an Israeli soldier who committed suicide while he was being held as a prisoner of war in Syria. The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports on January 1955 that “One of five Israel soldiers captured by Syrian troops last month committed suicide in prison.” Immediately after the release of this news,

A UN observer was immediately dispatched to the prison where he had been held. Efforts are being made to arrange for the Israel delegate to the Israel-Syrian Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) and an Israel doctor to visit the prison, too, and learn the circumstances of the soldier’s death. The other four men held by Syria were: Lt. Meir Moses, Sgt, Meir Yaakobi, Pvt. Yaacov Lind and Pvt. Gad Kastelantz. Whereas the MAC condemned Israel for sending the five-man patrol into-Syrian-held territory in violation of the armistice agreement, it also granted them the label of “prisoners of war,” which protected them under the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war and assured their release.

(Jewish Telegraph Agency 1955)

Fifty years after the event, on the occasion of an exhibition at Bar Ilan University of the pages hidden within Uri Ilan’s clothes, fuller accounts of the circumstances leading to Ilan’s suicide were narrated as follows:

On the night of December 8, 1954, a force of five IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers—three from the Paratroops and two from the Infantry—crossed the armistice line between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights and were entrusted with a secret mission: changing the batteries of a wiretapping device…. The mission was never accomplished. The men were surrounded by Syrian troops. Outnumbered and under fire, the commander of the force ordered them to surrender. They were taken prisoner by the Syrians and incarcerated at Al-Mazza prison on the outskirts of Damascus.

(Rom and Ehrlich 2005)

This newspaper review of the exhibition by Rom and Ehrlich (2005) adds that

on March 29, 1956, after 475 days of imprisonment and excruciating torture, Israel’s diplomatic and military efforts secured the prisoners’ release. But one had already come home in a box: Uri Ilan of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a soldier in the Golani brigade, who committed suicide in his jail cell on January 13, 1955. That same evening, his body was handed over to representatives of the State. The following day, January 14, 1955, he was laid to rest in Gan Shmuel.

Revealing the source of the famous mantra “lo bagadeti,” Rom and Ehrlich (2005) note that before Uri Ilan was laid to rest, his remains were examined.

Upon removing his shoes, a little scrap of folded paper fell out. Head of Northern Command, Major General Moshe Zadok noticed it. Reading it, the doctors and military officials realized that other notes were hidden in his clothes. They found ten notes in all.

One of the them, bearing the message ‘Lo bagadeti, hitabadeti’ (“I didn’t betray, I committed suicide”), became famous after Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan read aloud the first half of the message at the funeral, thereby inaugurating the public circulation of the mantra “lo bagadeti” for years to come. Equally for political reasons, “The contents of several other notes were published later, but the note in which Uri calls for revenge on representatives of the United Nations was kept under wraps for years” (Rom and Ehrlich 2005).³

Nationalist messages from the otherworld

The passing of the years allowed for new disclosures of Uri Ilan’s messages, some of them, as shown earlier, were recruited for nationalist purposes and others censured for political reasons. Fifty years after Uri Ilan’s suicide, the pages hidden within his clothes were gathered and exhibited at Bar Ilan University, raising mesmerizing questions as to the underlying messages they were meant to convey to his co-citizens and future citizens, as well as to the repercussions these hidden, encoded messages might have in the present. The review article by Rom and Ehrlich (2005) published in Haaretz⁴ implies that these messages need still to be interpreted to assess their full significance, asking: “was it pure coincidence that particular pages of the book Revenge of the Patriarchs were used by Uri Ilan to convey messages from his Syrian jail cell, where he ended his life 50 years ago?”⁵ Following a surreptitious mode of encoding messages within an existing apparently innocuous published text, Uri Ilan pricked certain letters to form his own text out of the existing one, as secret messages addressed to those who would find them after his death. The original notes torn from Yitzhak Shemi’s book Nikmat Avot (The Revenge of the Patriarchs) were created by Ilan by pricking the paper with a sharp object to form the letters of the message. The notes he had hidden in his body and clothes were recovered and archived by the IDF, with the exception of the one that received the most coverage, “I didn’t betray my country,” which was kept by the Intelligence Agency; photocopies of the notes were given to his parents (Rom and Ehrlich 2005). The archive contains a profusion of materials on loan to the university from the Ilan family about Uri, his parents Shlomo and KM (Knesset Member) Faige Ilanit and his great grandfather Rabbi Simeon Shkop, the head of the Grodno and Telse Yeshiva. It is telling that David Melamed (2018), a writer and researcher of the history of Israel, has chosen to highlight the importance of Uri Ilan’s archive at Bar Ilan for its crisscrossing of genealogical roots connecting a national hero with the complex history of the State of Israel. He notes: “The family archives were given to Bar-Ilan University by Uri’s brother, Shimon Ilan, a member of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, who is named after his great grandfather,” an ultraorthodox Rabbi,

and here is where the various ends of the Jewish people meet: a soldier from the Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutz Gan Shmuel—a kibbutz named after Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, one of the founders of Hibbat Zion and a member of the religious Zionist movement—whose mother is a Knesset member representing Mapam—a left-wing socialist party—and whose great grandfather was a leading rabbi of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

In tying all these biographical curiosities together, Melamed is reasserting geographical and genealogical strings composing the blood-ethnic source of a veritable representative of Israel’s “Salt of the Earth.”

Honor recovered: revenge encoded in a book

Following the opening of the new archive, it was discovered that the original notes were not in the general IDF archive after all. Only after the intervention of journalists and public figures did the defense minister order an intensive search which unraveled that the missing notes were kept in the Military Intelligence archive of the MALAM.⁶ The fact that the famous note was on a page from Shemi’s Revenge of the Patriarchs is mentioned by senior journalist Dan Margalit in his book Paratroopers in a Syrian Jail (1968). Was it pure coincidence that this specific page of Revenge of the Patriarchs was used by Uri Ilan to convey a message from his Syrian jail cell (Rom and Ehrlich 2005)?

The message “I didn’t betray” was inscribed on page 103 of Revenge of the Patriarchs (in the 1928 edition published by Mitzpe, Jerusalem). The memorial booklet published by Kibbutz Gan Shmuel in Uri Ilan’s memory includes the note inscribed on page 40 of Shemi’s book that reads: “Farewell, Uri Ilan, revenge!” The note punched on page 72 of Revenge of the Patriarchs, which reads “Search clothing for my will, Uri,” was apparently hidden between his toes.⁷ Sometimes Uri’s demands for revenge are directed at specific people—the Syrian delegate at the cease-fire conference, the people accompanying the UN officers on December 15—and sometimes they are general quests. Interestingly, the last note only consists of one word, “or” (“light,” and also the initials of his name), located next to the title of the book, Rev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1 Heroic and nonheroic shame: nation-state building and betrayal
• 2 Civic and private shame of betrayed and betraying buddies
• 3 Systemic shaming or catch-22 suicides
• 4 Shaming the State
• 5 Cyber shaming
• 6 Shaming the nation
• Epilogue: a genealogy of Israeli shame and shaming
• Index