Changing Conceptions: The Shift In Israeli Ideas of the 

Relations Between the Individual and the Collective

Gadi Taub

For Israelis the fall from the age of ideologies to a postmodern world, from a seemingly coherent world to one that appeared to be fragmented and broken, was especially sudden. The slope was so steep because Zionism as an ideology, as a unifying social ethos, was such an immense success. Not only did it live to fulfill its main goals, it also retained vitality into a much later period than other 19^th century ideologies. When the whole of the industrial world was experiencing a wave of student uprising - a manifest expression of disappointment with the existing social systems and the ideologies they professed - Israel was still in the high-noon of its post Six Days War euphoria. But by the late 80’s we had already caught up with the rest of the West in its sense of fragmentation. We moved from one extreme to another with breath-taking speed: from a state of suffocating collectivity, from an excessively ideological society, to a feeling of collapse and disillusionment.

In the mid 50’s the literary avant-garde known as “Young Poetry” fought to carve forcefully a private space where one could say “I” not only “we”. When the poet Natan Zah wrote, in 1955, “One moment of silence, please. Please, I want to say something”, he tried to erect a new opposing stance to what might be called the excessive recruiting force of Israeli society. And people then, under the suffocating collectivity of Israel, were craving such a voice.

But it was not even at a generation’s distance, that the kind of anxiety from which Israelis suffered had completely changed. By the mid 80’s the dominant anxiety became, for many, a sense of lack of purpose and meaning generated by the collapse of the collective sphere as a unifying force.

Yaakov Shabtai was among the first to sense the change and gave it a brilliant expression, in his celebrated novel Past Continuous (1977). His protagonist, Goldman, grew up under the crushing weight of the ideologised Israel. His father, a fanatically devoted Zionist and socialist, a construction worker who saw his profession as a calling, would not put up with any deed or personal characteristic that did not conform with collective needs and ideology. For us, after the disillusionment with communist utopia, after the right monopolized the national sentiment, it is difficult to imagine this form of ardently patriotic leftism. But for Israelis in the late 40’s and early 50’s, it seemed natural. Goldman’s father was not a stranger to our landscape.

Those who read the novel will not easily forget the powerful scene of the murder of Nuit Sombre, the neighbor’s dog. It is worth quoting in some length, because it isn’t just the portrait of a tyrant, but also an example, although extreme and horrifying, of something important with which Shabtai characterizes the generation of Goldman’s parents. Its a vivid testimony to the power of a unifying all-embracing Ideology: 

...Goldman's fater....Goldman’s father refused to forgive [Kaminskaya, the neighbor], and he hated her and her ways and the songs she sang and the clothes she wore and her black dog, which she called Nuit Sombre and which stood quietly tied to the water pipe looking at Goldman’s father, whose face was white as a sheet and tense with fright and wickedness.

Nuit Sombre even wagged his tail, because of course he couldn’t have guessed that Goldman’s father was going to kill him in a couple of seconds, but Goldman’s father approached him and suddenly pulled a builder’s hammer out of his shirt and brought it down swiftly and furiously on his head, and Nuit Sombre made a queer moaning sound and swayed, and Goldman’s father yelled at the top of his voice, “Let him die! Let him die! He has to die!” and went on hitting the dog like a madman until he sank to the ground with his head all shattered and crushed. Nuit Sombre went on twitching for a little longer, making a feeble rattling sound in his throat, until he lay still, and the earth and leaves of the verbena and hibiscus bushes which were still in flower and the water pipe and walls of the house were spattered with splinters of bone and blood and bits of brain, which remained there until the first rains fell and washed them away.

...there is no doubt that Goldman’s father passed a sentence on Nuit Sombre for what seemed to him compelling reasons and killed him only after it had become clear that he had to die, and even if it had been his own dog he wouldn’t have behaved any differently, because he was a Zionist and a Socialist and believed in plain living, hard work, morality and progress, in the most elementary sense of the words, and hated right-wing nationalists, people who got rich or wasted money on luxuries, and people who [slandered] Eretz Yisrael, and all this as part of a system of clear, fixed, uncompromising principles embracing every area of life and action, which he never doubted for an instant despite all the external changes and difficulties, and from which he saw no reason to deviate in the slightest degree.

He knew what was right and good, not only for himself but also for others, and could not tolerate error or sin, and for him every error... was a sin, and despite his own inherent generosity and even sentimentality he could not bring himself to forgive anyone, even his own family and friends, because his integrity verged on insanity and his sense of justice was dark and murky, and above all because he had a tyrannical, uncontrollable desire to impose his principles on the whole world, which went heedlessly along its different, lawless ways, leaving Goldman’s father battling between disappointment and rage. There were always people who didn’t know what was good for them and people made mistakes, [not to mention] those who actually sinned, often consciously, and in the end everyone violated the proper order of things, everyone, that is, except him, since he was the representative of this order, and accordingly he never knew a single hour of peace of mind, and his whole life, which was full of hostility and humiliation, passed in denunciations and accusations and arguments. Because of his principles he succeeded in quarreling with almost all his friends and acquaintances, and those he did not quarrel with he ostracized and drove from the house - all except Joseph Leviatan, Avinoam and Sonia and Hanoch’s father - surrounding himself with a protective wall of loneliness, but by virtue of these same principles he also succeeded in overcoming his loneliness and his disappointments and his despair when his daughter Naomi, Goldman’s older sister, was killed in a traffic accident - according to one version - or committed suicide - according to another version. [1]

It is hard to avoid the impression of the immense power ideology can command as a force unifying the whole of human experience and molding it under a pattern of meaning. It is important to stress, however, that as Shabtai saw it, ideology does not necessarily assume the tyrannical character it had with Goldman’s father. It does not necessarily turn into a frozen, rigid, system of principles, and notwithstanding the fact that it is capable of arranging all details of life into a pattern of meaning, like a magnetic force-field, it does not lead necessarily to tyranny or lack of freedom. The high spirit that the ethos of the Zionist labor movement created in its adherents did not evade Shabtai’s eye. Not in Past Continuous and not elsewhere. Even this book, which depicts Zionist socialism from the view point of its decline, does not lack characters for whom idealism and the love of Zion were able to fill life with light and creativity. But an ideologically charged atmosphere does invite the Goldman’s father types. Its decline, however, invites the Goldman-the-son types. When the unifying force of meaning recedes and shrinks, when life is confined to the private and loses the wider context, there may be an abundance of liberty, a freedom from the pressure of the collective, but another form of anxiety comes about. And it is no less grave. A sense of void, meaninglessness, a life that seems to loose all internal value.

Past Continuous is such an interesting example because it bears testimony to the rapid change Israel experienced in moving from one extreme to the other. From one form of anxiety to its opposite. In the transition from the world of one generation to that of its sons and daughters, a whole society moved from a suffocating ideological excess that threatened to erase the private sphere, to a void where individuals float with hardly any collective attachment.

One can not fail to notice the generational division in the book. For the older generation most hardships stem from an excess of ideology, while their sons suffer from something very different. An anxiety we can call, I think, postmodern: for Goldman the son, the world is fragmented and crumbled. Unlike his father who attached meaning to every single segment of human life, nothing in Goldman’s life seams meaningful to him. He searches for a sense of meaning incessantly, frantically, but cannot evade a despairing feeling of banality: he translates an ancient book of astronomy, tries to repent and adopt religious belief, decides to devote himself to health and fitness, marries (and divorces three weeks later), but whatever he does, he can’t escape his sense of inner emptiness.

This inner emptiness is clearly related to lack of external convictions, the lack of a meaningful collective sphere and a unifying pattern of meaning. Goldman, like his peers, lives in the isolated bubble of the private. For him there is no bedrock of a collective realm on which meaningful ties to anything outside the self can be built. He has no link to anything larger than himself, to anything that unites human beings or ties them to a sense of order beyond the immediate. Shabtai points in this direction rather clearly: almost everything Goldman ever talks about are philosophical questions regarding death, meaning, mans place in the cosmos, his despair in the face of chaos and arbitrariness. His sense of meaninglessness is so troubling he is finally drawn to the only certainty he knows: death. He commits suicide.

*     *     *

It hardly needs much deciphering to see that the collapse of frameworks - not least the traditional formats of storytelling and that of language itself - is a central theme in the literature young Israelis write today. From the structural tricks employed by Etgar Keret, some of which are parodies of common literary genres, to the fuzzy hysteria that brakes all boundaries in Orly Kastelblum’s stories. From Josef El-dror’s nonsense humor, all the way to the other side of the spectrum in Gafi Amir’s careful, hurtful, minimalism. The structure of story itself - as a frame that seeks to shed light on a segment of reality, to arrange a sequence in a meaningful order - seems to have turned into an instrument we cannot trust. In a reality that is seen as chaotic and arbitrary,  the literary narrative cannot - does not even want to pretend to - force the real into a pattern that gives the elusion of order.

Such is the case in the explicit ars-poetic stories that take the mechanism of the story as their overt subject, and, no less, in those writers for whom the weakening of narrative authority is a given state to work with, not an interest in itself. In most of these writers the all-knowing narrator employed by Amos Oz, A. B. Yehushua or Meir Shalev, was replaced by something much more modest. This new narrator does not claim any higher authority than that of his characters and seldom indulges in an explicit attempt to explain or illuminate reality from a higher perspective. Accordingly, the language these writers use is what became known in Israel under the title “thin language”. Everyday speech, simple syntax, few metaphors, a tendency to refrain from what we would commonly associate with high literature. There are hardly any adornments and there is a stubborn ignoring of the majestic tone and sophisticated multi-layered Hebrew associated with the writers of previous generations.

Literary criticism in Israel often depicts the deliberate destruction of frameworks in these writings as a form of liberation, or, as it is commonly referred to now, “subversion”. Orly Kastel-Blum, we are told, releases us from the tyranny of hegemonic discourse. She deconstructs, such critics claim, the Zionist narrative of colonialism, the discourse of male chauvinism or the tyranny of enlightenment and rationalism. She demolishes “binary” world-views and disturbs the slumbers of bourgeoisie society.

But such an interpretation seems to me somewhat contrived. Because Kastel-Blum’s horror world, far from being a merry liberation, is more of a lament to the loss of coherence. It is a frightening place, because it is fractured, violent, arbitrary and unpredictable. Because it lacks organizing patterns to support a sense of security. Fear, as Kastel-Bloom herself said, is the driving force of her writing. A fear that the world would spin into chaos, lose its meaning and direction, a fear that even the minimum stability that enables one to make modest plans for the future, to construct an approximate path into the void that lies ahead in time, does not exist.

The type of anxiety that led Goldman to suicide, the collapse of the sense of meaning and purpose, is probably the most pervasive theme in the works of young writers. Keret and Amir, Yoav Katz, Uzi Wiel, Yosef El-Dror and many others, all mourn in one way or another the loss of coherence. I will confine myself here to a single example - the story “Ninety” from Keret’s collection Pipes.

Ninety

They said on TV that the court-martial sentenced the Arab that killed the female soldier to death, and they brought some people to talk about this, and that’s why the news ended only at ten thirty and they canceled “Moonlighting”. Dad got mad at them and lit his stinking pipe at home, although its forbidden because it stops my growth. He shouted at mom that because of nuts like her, who voted Tehia*, the country is turning into another Iran, which is the country from which all the Persians came. And dad said that it will cost us dearly and that apart from the damage to our moral standing - I’m not sure I understood what that means - the Americans too will not overlook this.

 

The day after, they talked to us about it at school, and Tziyon Shemesh said that if you hang a man he gets a hard-on like in blue movies, so Tzila, the teacher threw him out, and she explained to us that on the subject of death sentence people have different views and that it is a matter of the heart. And Tzahi, the dork, who already had to repeat a school year, and twice not once, laughed and said that it is a matter for the heart of the Arabs, that have to stop fucking or we’ll hang them all by the neck, so the teacher threw him out too. And the teacher said that she will have no more stupid comments, and that she will go on with the lesson as usual and also punished us and gave us a lot of homework.

 

After school, the older kids argued about whether when you hang someone he dies of suffocation, or because his neck is broken. And then they made a bet for a carton of chocolate milk, caught a cat and hanged him off the basket-ball post, and the cat screamed a lot till at the end his neck really broke. But Miki, the miser, refused to buy the chocolate milk, because he said that Gabi pulled the cats body hard on purpose, and that’s why it happened and that he wants to see it again with a new cat. But everybody knew it was because he was such a miser, and they took his money by force. And then Nissim and Ziv wanted to beat Tziyon Shemesh, because that cat didn’t even have a hard-on. And Michelle, who is maybe the prettiest girl in school, happened to pass by and she said we are all disgusting, and like animals, and I went over to the side and vomited, but not because of her.

It does not require an exhaustive interpretation to see that Keret’s kid lives in a world that has spun out of control and lost all order, limit and norm, which is to say, it lost all sense of coherent meaning. So much so that a feeling of vertigo makes him, finaly, vomit. But Keret’s kid does not vomit until the prettiest girl in school arrives on the scene. He does not vomit “because of her”, he tells us, and indeed it is not her that gives him a direct feeling of disgust. But in a sense, it is she who causes him to vomit. Because she introduces a scale. Because her very presence - so contrary to the savagery all around - introduces a criterion alongside which all the rest is measured. From that view point Keret’s kid himself sees that “we are all disgusting, and like animals”.

But I think the story provokes a larger question. In the absence of a meaningful collective sphere what do these young writers turn to in the hope of filling the void? The narrow answer is, I believe, in almost all of these writers, love. And this, it could be said without exaggeration, is true for Gafi Amir, Uzi Weil, Yosi Avni, Ronit Libermench and many others. However love here is not what it was for the counter-culture of the American Sixties. For the young student rebels of 30 years ago love was a weapon with which to challenge the social order and eventually change it. In these young writers love is not a instrument of change, it is a sanctuary. Not an attempt to change the world, but an attempt to find shelter from it. Gafi Amir’s characters, in the international republic of soap opera viewers, seek redemption from the idleness of lying in bed in front of a TV screen, in sweat pants with a cigarette and a coke, through man to woman relationships. Like many of her peers it is finding a soul-mate, a lover, a partner,  that constitutes the only hope they deem feasible. For them a sense of meaning, of a life worth living, is dependent on love.

By love, I do not mean only the breath-taking sensation of falling in love. Predominantly in women writers of this generation (Orly Kastel-Bloom, Efrat Shtiglitz, Libermensh, Mizrahi, Amir) parenthood and marriage or at least a steady relationship is the main object of yearning. This deviates enormously from both the Romantic ideal and that of the 60’s. It is the bourgeoisie ideal itself - nuclear family, child rearing, a steady job - that is perceived as a “haven in a heartless world”, an escape from a world that is both banal and cruel. What Amir’s female characters (usually in their 20’s) long for is love that will transform into the stability and comfort of a family home. In Libermench, Mizrahi, Irit Linur or Shtiglitz, stability turns central enough to marginelize its origin in romantic love, and in Kastel-Bloom such an origin is altogether missing. Family is not portrayed as an indoctrinative arm of an oppressive bourgeoisie-capitalist order in the fashion of the Sixties’ rebellion. It is, for those writers, not an institution whose demolition is a precondition for a happy life. Rather it is a vulnerable and precious arrangement, a small island of relative happiness that needs protection in a world that threatens constantly to destroy it.

But notwithstanding the differences between the Romantic and the Bourgeois ideal, there is a common denominator to these writers at a deeper level. If love is the narrow answer to the question of their common denominator, the more general answer is the belief that a sense of meaning should be sought in the private sphere of life. If grand narratives have collapsed, if large frameworks of meaning have lost their ability to give value and purpose to life, we are to try and look for what we lost in the realm of the private. Meaning has been replaced by “self-fulfillment”. Whether we look at Irit Linur’s Yuppies, Amir’s hurt bimbos, Keret’s eternal “Catcher in the Rye”, Kastel-Bloom’s neurotic mothers, or Libermench’s aerobic instructors - they all pursue happiness in the private sphere. The pursuit of carrier, love, relationship or parenthood, all lead to the private. The collective sphere, if it appears in these stories at all, only throws dangerously sharp splinters into private worlds. It is not an arena of coherence capable of anchoring individual lives in a larger context. It is a threat to the private. “The Arab that killed the [female] soldier” (in Keret’s “Ninety”), the map of Israel that Doli carves on her child’s skin (in Kastel-Bloom’s  Doli City), the assassination of the Prime Minister in Uzi Weil’s book (written long before the assassination of Rabin), the municipal draft drill in Yoav Katz’s “Daniel Goes to the Army”, the Minister of Police in Kastel-Bloom’s Where I Am or the son of the Head of the Mosad in Keret’s Pipes - all of these bring the public into the private as a distant echo, devoid of context and significance.

There is of course nothing new in such literary strategy. Literature as an instrument of political critique has often used the private perspective to portray the political as a vanity fair, that loses its moral coherence when we come to evaluate the actual price individual participants pay. But it is hard, I think, to understand young Israeli authors solely through this perspective. This generation of writers does not depict ideology, politics, national symbols or mobilizing myths as a fraud. First and foremost, because all these have largely lost their force to mobilize. They have lost their power to signify or give meaning to life, even a fraudulent meaning. Fraudulent meaning presupposes at least a measure of inner coherence. We may agree or disagree about the coherence and force of Israel’s collective symbolics, but as they appear in the work of young Israeli writers, they look more like a collection of fragmented historical debris than a dangerous disciplining apparatus. The ideological, the collective and social, appear in these works more like broken pieces of old souvenirs which no one can remember the use of. Goldman’s father is a total stranger in this world.

All this does not mean that the political has ceased to threaten the private. Symbols may have been rendered useless, but the political world itself can still be dangerous and violent. The head of the Mosad in Keret’s “The Head of the Mosad’s Son” and the ritual examination of bullets in his Barreta gun; the Arab that was castrated by a Shabak interrogator in Keret’s “Gaza Blues”; the Scud missiles of the Gulf War in Irit Linur’s Song of the Siren; the memorial day following the Maalot bus hijacking in Amir’s “The Most Handsome Soldier in the IDF”. All these point at the menace of the collective that always looms in the background. There is always this unpredictable danger that threatens to burst into the private.

But there is a very important difference between the kind of threat the collective poses to the private in this generation’s world, and the kind of threat it posed to the Young Poetry generation in the fifties and sixties. In both cases the individual was placed at the center, and the collective was what threatened him. But the Young Poetry rebels rose against an ideology that was too strong in it’s recruiting powers, against a collective sphere that crushed the private because it was so potent in harnessing individuals to collective purposes. The new prose writers point, I believe, at a very different threat. Not only is the collective sphere unable to draw the private into larger patterns of meaning, it is, in itself, so devoid of meaning and coherence, that it threatens to disintegrate what coherence that may still survive in the private sphere. It is a disintegrating force, not an integrating one. The political world is a place where terrorists learn from the Syrians “to shoot in the direction of the mobile radio antenna, because that’s where the officer would be”. But the purpose of the war does not appear to be any clearer to the young soldier-narrator than “some vague political interest” (Keret, “Kohi”). Keret’s Head of the Mosad is frightening not because he is an oppressive ideologue, but precisely because it is never clear whether he has any moral commitments at all. What he does with his Berreta gun, remains a mystery: “There were days when the head of the Mosad would never leave home, and there were other days when he would come back really late. In those days when he arrived he would smile a weary smile to the son of the Head of the Mosad and his mother, and say ‘don’t ask what a day I had today’. And they wouldn’t ask, just keep watching TV or doing homework for school. At any rate, if they did ask, he wouldn’t answer”.

In the harsh reality of Israel - a reality of occupation, of endless, seemingly pointless war in Lebanon, of terrorist attacks, Intifada and violent nationalist cults - the private sphere has to erect a shielding barrier from the collective, from the brutality that surrounds it, in order to create a living space for the self. But this barrier does not protect the self from an excess of disciplining ideology, but from the fragmenting force of chaos. The collapse of grand narratives threatens this self no less than over-powerful ideologies threatened it. This rallying around “self-realization” or “self-fulfillment” is therefore not an expression of hope, a source of new optimism. Rather it is an ad-hoc solution, a default strategy stemming from the lack of other alternatives.

It is hard to say of these young writers that they portray the philosophy of “self-fulfillment” in a very faltering light. On the contrary, they see it as a cul-de-sac. Taken together, the frightening chaotic world of Kastel-Bloom’s fiction, Keret’s ironic world of parodies, the sad and moving world of Amir’s characters, all form a universe in which the search for meaning or for a sense of meaning is bound to fail. The people they write about are lonely, usually frightened and covered by an invisible film of quite desperation. I think one could say without risk of exaggerating that for this generation of writers it is almost taken for granted that fulfillment in the private sphere is a project doomed to failure. Because a world without a meaningful collective sphere, a common ground upon which webs of significance are woven to connect individuals, is, in the last analysis, a sad and confused world, often a brutal one. A world in which a sense of meaning is virtually impossible to achieve.

        This should not be, of course, a surprising conclusion. When identity, meaning, ethos and culture are reduced to mere “personal preference” as some current moral ideologies would have it, no wonder they loose their force as anchors for a sense of purpose and meaning. Their very power is exclusively dependent on their being a common enterprise for the many. But self-realization, understood as an opposition to the very existence of the collective sphere, as a rebellion against it, undercuts the possibility of such unifying forces. This dichotomy between the individual and the collective, a sensibility that has become pervasive in Israel, turned out to be an obstacle to our sense of meaning and propose, not a way to promote it.

Part of the hostility to collectivity is surely a result of the pendulum swing from over collectivizing to over individualization. But such an observation should not obscure other influences. And the major source of influence, I believe, is American culture. We see it all around us, whether it is “The American Dream” as it is reflected, say, in commercials and television game shows, or the shift from the work ethic of socialist Zionism to the no less stern, but very different in content, Yuppie careerism. But American influence does not stop at commercialization, or Hollywood glitter and moralism, or the counterculture revolution, that arrived in Israel somewhat late. In addition to all these we are witnessing a change in the form of moral argument within the elites. This form draws closer to the traditional moral rational of conservativism in America, and rests on the idea of negative liberty. Contrary to mainstream Zionist socialism, we tend to see the individual as naturally in opposition to the collective. The collective is seen less and less as an arena for answering individual needs and more and more as an entity whose very existence threatens his autonomy. These assumptions are the bedrock for such works as Idit Zartal’s or Yosef Grodzinsky’s attack on institutional Zionism, Tom Segev’s criticism of Israeli identity, the opposition to the idea of the “melting pot”, or recently the hypothesis of oppression-through-discourse the like of which is ubiquitous in postmodern thought.

We tend to view such criticism as a form of left wing ideology aimed at right-wing nationalism. But this may be a misleading view. What motivates these critics is more a rebellion against the forces on which Israeli society was founded: Zionist socialism, and its belief that social solidarity is a necessary dimension for a meaningful individual life. Radical autonomy, which serves as a basis for the criticism of the very idea of social solidarity, is an American creed. It is the form of individualism that is intimately tied not just to the free market economy, but to the free market society. The portrait of the individual as free chooser - chooser of lifestyle and identity, values and ethos - is part of a consumer-based conception of citizenship. What passes for postmodern and post-Zionist “radicalism” is, in fact, part of the more general process of privatization. Privatizing culture is a major force in dismantling the collective sphere, in removing the moral obstacle of solidarity from the path of economic privatization. The left, in short, has adopted the moral world of the right, and mistakes it for its own. If it is to regain its own moral ground, it should rethink its attitude toward the legitimacy of a collective sphere.