Zionism: The limits of it as moral discourse.
Item
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Title
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Zionism: The limits of it as moral discourse.
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Identifier
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AAI9304671
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identifier
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9304671
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Creator
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Gover, Yerach.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michael E. Brown
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, General | Anthropology, Cultural | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Religion, General
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Abstract
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This study attempts to establish a critical base at the intersection of literature and sociology for exploring some limitations of Zionist ideology in regard to its capacity to support moral and cognitive reform. The analysis of Israeli Hebrew fictional texts reveals the following: (1) There is a pervasive distinction that qualifies depictions of Arabs and Jews, between moral and juridical citizenship, and an identification of the former with a moral subjectivity denied "the Arab," and the latter with objects of judgment. (2) This distinction expresses a certain "structure of feeling," in which the Jewish conscience articulates morality from the perspective of a subjectivity beyond history and validated as such by the Holocaust. (3) The distinction, the identification, and the structure of feeling determine an irreducible dependence of Jewish identity (therefore of moral subjectivity) on relations of exclusion and inclusion, hence on the need constantly to reiterate the negative identity of an other. (4) This "other" is embodied in the figure of "the Arab," and humanized by a distinction between "good Arabs" and "the Arab." (5) The identity-driven articulation of that figure constitutes a barrier beyond which consciousness cannot penetrate, thereby eliminating at each last moment the possibility for Jewish recognition of Arab subjectivity necessary for the completion of any morally substantial auto-critique of the role of Zionist nationalism in "Arab-Israeli relations." (6) The general problematic constituted by these tropes accounts for the ways in which Israeli literary criticism organizes itself in the function of a policing of culture. This is itself a genre, therefore a strategic formation. As such, it aims to diminish the force of the moral paradoxes of Israeli culture. What is threatening about those paradoxes derives from the same pressure for explication and utopian politics that makes Israeli culture intensively ideological to its "imagined community.".;Israeli Hebrew literature provides the quintessential object for a critique of Israeli political discourse precisely because of its highly spiritualized yet embodied referents, an historical people and a living utopia beyond which lies an unanalyzable but concrete, hence dangerous, otherness of being. Through the literary heightening of the symbolic and allegorical aspects of this myth, Israeli Jewish culture presents itself as an historical force that can be taken as an object of critique.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
