Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (30 page)

Though the Orthodox right makes up only a small minority of Israel’s Jewish population, it wields enormous influence, not least because it has fre- quently given the Likud Party the votes it needs to form a government. Sec- ular Israelis—the vast majority of the citizenry—increasingly resent that power. They object to the high government subsidies for religious schools, to the right’s control of marriage and other institutions, and, most of all perhaps, to the draft exemption enjoyed by religious young men, who thereby avoid the three years of basic service, which starts at age eighteen for other men, and the more than thirty years of reserve duty that follow.

In Israel, then, the right’s attack on homosexuality is widely regarded as only one element of a strategy for establishing a theocratic state, a strategy that must be resisted if life is to remain supportable for secular Israelis (at least for the Jewish ones). Thus in today’s Israeli culture war, queerness—or at least the tolerance of queerness—has acquired a new rhetorical value for main- stream Zionism: standing against the imposition of fundamentalist religious law, it has come to stand for democratic liberalism.

That notion itself has critical consequences for any Zionism, of course, and the emergence of a gay rights discourse is helping to force a reexamina- tion of how far democracy can go in Israel, as long as it remains the Jewish state. (About a fifth of the citizenry is Arab.)
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Indeed, the achievements and strategies of the gay movement signal perhaps most starkly the stakes in Is- rael’s current identity crisis. Gay visibility and political enfranchisement are both a consequence of what scholars have begun to call “post-Zionism” and one of its sharpest instruments.

The term
post-Zionism
is being used in several contradictory ways in con- temporary Israel, and different wings of the gay movement line up under one or another of these competing definitions. All of them open up space for a discourse of individual rights.

In one sense—Yitzhak Rabin’s sense—the term asserts that Zionism ful- filled its revolutionary objectives, and that they should be sustained and cele- brated. Further, it acknowledges that now that Jews have secured their home- land they can go about tidying it up. Thus the old promise—nationalism now; women’s (or Mizrachi or even gay or Arab) rights later—has come due. The second use of post-Zionism describes, with a sneer, a decline from a col- lective ethos of solidarity to an everybody-for-themselves notion of society. This version rues the young generation’s lack of ideological commitment and

wags a finger as they go off to party in India or to make a bundle in the he- donistic States. Yet even this post-Zionism admits that through its exaltation of the individual such materialistic self-centeredness might help let in some rays of liberal rights. Only a small group of leftist intellectuals asserts a radi- cal post-Zionism, one that argues that Israel cannot solve its domestic prob- lems nor integrate itself into the Middle East without true de-Zionization— Israel becoming a state for all its citizens, abolishing the Law of Return and overturning laws that discriminate against Arabs. This view holds onto the idea that there is a social good, but says it can no longer be based on Judaism. Instead it posits a truly multiethnic and multicultural society whose contours will be shaped by a new discussion that, this time, will include women, queers, Mizrachi Jews, Palestinians, and so on.
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What all formulations of post-Zionism share is a recognition that Israel’s famous national consensus is coming unglued and moving away from what the political historian Yaron Ezrahi calls “the elevating [of ] the spiritual and moral significance of the collective narrative”
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that converged in religious, nationalist, and socialist Zionisms. Rifts between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular, as well as between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, and between men and women, long-time fissures in the collective Zionist ground, are fracturing into deep and dangerous chasms. And that’s not even to mention divisions be- tween Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, this last never being part of the con- sensus to begin with.

Scholars offer competing explanations of this monumental change in Is- raeli consciousness. At one end of the spectrum Ezrahi ascribes it almost en- tirely to the disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the first Israeli war to lack widespread public support and the first in which the Jewish citizenry did not accept their sons’ loss of life because they did not perceive it to serve any greater good. While no one disputes that the Lebanon War was a turning point, deeper critics of Zionism see earlier cracks in collectivism. Zeev Stern- hell, for one, questions the very idea that socialism ever underpinned Israeli ideology, arguing in his book,
The Founding Myths of Israel,
that socialist rhet- oric was deployed in the service of a much more nationalistic collectivism.
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David Ben-Gurion and the state’s other founding fathers were bourgeois au- tocrats, not committed socialists, he argues. (No wonder, Sternhell notes, that the country’s Labor Party has always been the party of the upper middle class and not of the workers.) Further, Sternhell suggests that the main function of the kibbutzim—which were never home to more than 6 percent of the pop- ulation—was propagandistic: by holding up the kibbutzim as the state’s es- sential means of social organization, founders promoted ideals of self-sacrifice, voluntarism, camaraderie, and patriotism (among Jews only, of course) with-

out living up to those principles in political, economic, or civic institutions. Thus the very foundation for the national consensus was purely symbolic. That’s why it was only a generation before it broke apart.

Now that the disjunction between rhetoric and reality has roared to the surface—a result not only of the Lebanon War but also of the first intifada and the opening of classified documents from the founding years that has pro- duced a spate of new historiography debunking the hoary myths—Jewish Is- raelis are increasingly regarding themselves not primarily as actors in the Zionist drama of Return but as distinct citizens deserving of privacy and lib- eral rights. (The global economy is no small factor either; the old social ethos of collective responsibility is being eclipsed most of all by a theology of con- sumerist individualism. Israel is rapidly privatizing its healthcare and other public services as its leaps headlong into free-market mania.)

The importance of this change for the gay and lesbian movement is obvi- ous: the discourse of gay rights, especially in the legal arena, could not have sprouted without a seedbed of privacy principles. Thus, for example, recent Supreme Court rulings allowing families who have lost sons in military oper- ations to write words of their own choosing on their sons’ gravestones, instead of an undifferentiated state-scripted epitaph that extols all fallen soldiers, both reflects and feeds gay victories. (The name
Society for the Protection of Person- al Rights
was no accident; only this year did the group change its name to the
Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, and Bisexuals in Israel
.)

Another result of this mass psychic shift, Ezrahi argues, is that it has made autobiography an acceptable genre for the first time in Israeli letters. For sev- eral decades only hardcore pioneers published memoirs, and then they were all about their heroic efforts to help build the nation. Now the country has caught the confessional craze; personal stories are being published—and bought. Thus, that narrative so essential—indeed, so taken for granted—in Western lesbian and gay movements now finds welcome expression in Israel: the coming-out story. (To be sure, the globalization of the publishing market and the international broadcast of American talk shows has influenced this trend, too. More important, perhaps, is that many gay Israelis have spent time amid the gay subcultures of Europe and North America and that the move- ment in Israel includes many post-Stonewall North American immigrants. Some Tel Aviv meetings of gay groups include so many members from abroad that they are conducted in English.)

The coming-out story forms the core of one of the first gay theater per- formances in Israel (which toured the U.S. in 1998 as part of country’s fifti- eth anniversary celebrations, under the auspices of the consulate general.) In the hour-long piece, called
Words of His Own
, three charming self-described

fags tell about coming to terms with their sexuality, lusting after unavailable men, consummating thrilling affairs, adjusting to the demands of relation- ships. Based on fiction and memoirs by gay Israeli writers, the performance is a series of autobiographical monologues.

But if the out personal histories in this piece participate in the post- Zionist enterprise of divulging individual narratives, it remains at the same time thoroughly within a Zionist clasp: this is Rabin-style post-Zionism, which moves beyond ideology without looking back to reopen such questions as what it means to be a Jewish state. For example, it is offered as a given in the play that all the characters are Jewish. The one in five Israeli citizens who is Arab does not figure in these stories (except in one instance, as the object of one man’s Orientalist sexual fantasies). And not surprisingly, given the re- quirement that Jewish Israeli men do army reserve service until age fifty-five, the military is a frequent setting for the heroes’ encounters. In all, the piece presents sweet, adorable, Jewish Israelis whose foibles and predicaments any- one can identify with, assuring audiences that even queers can take part in the Zionist project of the “normalization of the Jews.”

Indeed, the simple fact of a gay movement represents an exemplary in- stance of liberal Zionism’s definition of normalization: being just like Euro- pean nations. As gays are increasingly visible and accepted in Western soci- eties, Israel assures that it is keeping up with “normality” by having its own out gays. As one gay activist tellingly remarked, explaining to an American journalist how far the Israeli movement has come in the last decade, “We were in the Middle Ages in 1988. Now we’re at the same level as about any other country in Europe.”
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(The supposition that Israel is, somehow,
in
Europe, also reveals the extent to which the mainstream gay movement falls in step with the Ashkenazic hegemony of mainstream Zionism.)
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Out of the Closets and Into the State

Even as the assertion of gay rights pries open the cracks in the consensus, the gay movement itself, like the society at large, is seeing old fault lines widen as an essentially assimilationist effort that would see gays welcomed into the Zionist embrace develops parallel to a more radical vision that imagines gay equality in a state of all its citizens. Generally, this division breaks most neatly along gender lines, which is no surprise given the masculinist imperatives of Herzlian Zionism and their saturation of the culture through its militarization. For gay Jewish men, who serve in the military whether or not they ask or tell, queerness is not an exogenous stance. It might be a lonely, tortured,

teased, or barren place, but Jewishness and maleness assure that even gay men can enter—really must enter—the patriotic fold. (Of course there are men who resist. Reservists in Yesh Gvul, for example, started refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories during the first intifada.) It’s femaleness, not homo- sexuality per se, that Zionist nationalism cannot abide.

To be sure, all nationalisms are masculinist, and modern movements to become “new men” were always about beefing up. But in its peculiar admix- ture of blood-and-soil ardor dressed in messianic armor, of the despised dias- poric “degenerate” pumping up into the robust promised land pioneer, Zion- ism exaggerated the tendency. This was the “new man” on steroids.

Indeed, Zionism has fulfilled one promise at least: Muskeljuden run amok in the Holy Land. But the sissy has not been buried, cannot be buried. The hard exterior conceals—but doesn’t entirely obliterate—the feeble ori- gins. On the contrary. Israel has always been invested in sustaining the mem- ory of Jewish vulnerability. Early Zionist propaganda distributed in America and Europe nicknamed the Israeli-born Jew the
sabra
, after the prickly local cactus whose fruit is tough on the outside and sweet on the inside, to promote the image of a strong but never thoroughly defended Israeli. Other propa- ganda materials featured gun-wielding, orange-toting, tanned young women, though such state-sanctioned power girls barely existed. As Simona Sharoni forcefully argues, the pictures of girls with guns for consumption abroad served two nationalistic purposes. First, they suggested that Israel was so threatened, so embattled, that it even had to send its women into combat. And second, they advertised a view of Israel as enlightened democracy in a land of barbarians by depicting Israeli women as active, equal partners in na- tion building, unlike those veiled and suppressed wives of Arabs.
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In reality, with rare exceptions during the war of independence, women did not carry guns, and in the military today at least 70 percent of them are confined to care-taking posts such as parachute-folding and typing. During basic training they receive instruction in the application of cosmetics. Posters of fierce women in uniforms tacked up in Hebrew schools all over America notwithstanding, the IDF is a thoroughly masculinist and homosocial realm. If false images of women are employed to appeal to external audiences, the soft core must remain available internally in another way, as a reference point to a past that is frequently called upon to do rhetorical, troop-rousing, mission- justifying duty. Despite having one of the most extensive, high-tech, and pow- erful armies in the world, Israel also finds an advantage in being seen as the ul- timate victim—surrounded by irredeemably hostile, congenitally Jew-hating enemies. Indeed, being the eternal victim renders the IDF unassailable: if Arabs are born to hate Jews, Israeli state policies—as enforced by the powerful

army—cannot be recognized as enflaming Arab enmity. What is worse, Israel uses the Holocaust shamelessly to assert its own perpetual vicitimization, con- stantly calling forth the very image of itself that it claims to want to erase.
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