A belated link to the Kafka Diaries, now on the blogroll.
Jacqueline Rose's new book, The Question of Zion was reviewed in this Satruday's Guardian. It looks worthy of serious attention. Anyway, there's a chapter available online here. Here is an excerpt:
In May 2004 Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and take out the settlements was defeated in a poll of his party, Likud. "If, God forbid, there is a disengagement," states Nissim Bracha of Gush Katif, one of the key settlements in Gaza designated by the plan, "I am going to destroy everything."22 For Hagi Ben Artzi, religious Zionist and member of Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful), a national disaster is approaching: "And not an ordinary disaster, but in monstrous proportions--the collapse of the process of Jewish redemption."23 To remove one settlement is to destroy not just the spiritual foundations of Zionism, not just the State of Israel, but the whole world. A minimal return of land--enacted unilaterally, without negotiation with the Palestinians, and promising nothing even vaguely close to a viable Palestinian statehood--is a violation of the Torah. Ben Artzi will commit himself to mesirut nevesh, or total devotion (when asked, he does not object to the analogy with the Islamic concept of martyrdom).
Catastrophe will be met with catastrophe. The word of God transcends the laws of state. "We have another partner in these decisions," Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party explained, as he threatened to withdraw from the coalition in response to Sharon's plan, "the master of the universe. We must show the master of the universe that we are willing to sacrifice our souls for the land."24 According to one strand of Jewish thought, God's personal dignity requires the redemption of Israel. Without it, his name is profaned.25 Ariel Sharon is guilty of defilement. Behind the rhetoric we can recognize the signs of more prosaic forms of disgust. "That this beautiful place will become the home of Arabs," states Ofra Shoat of Bdolah (another threatened settlement in Gaza), "This is something I can't digest."26
These voices are not representative of the whole of Israel--far from it; more than half of the nation supported Sharon's disengagement plan. But today in Israel, catastrophe has become an identity. Ha'aretz feature writer Doron Rosenblum entitles a recent article "Cashing In on Catastrophe," or "how it comes about that every event and/or terrorist attack 'only proves', and even reinforces, what we already thought anyway."27 In a cruel twist, horror, however genuinely feared, redeems Israel's view of itself.
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