After the Fact: Potential Collectivities in Israel/Palestine By Shaul Setter A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Michael Lucey Professor Stefania Pandolfo Fall 2012 After the Fact: Potential Collectivities in Israel/Palestine ©2012 by Shaul Setter 1 Abstract After the Fact: Potential Collectivities in Israel/Palestine by Shaul Setter Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair This dissertation inquires into the question of collectivity in texts written in and about Israel/Palestine from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In light of the current crisis in the configuration of both Israeli and Palestinian national collectivities, it explores the articulation of non-national collective formations in literary and cinematic texts. I read these texts not as sealed works that represent historically realized collectivities, but as creative projects whose very language and modalities speculatively constitute potential collectivities. Rejecting the progression of teleological history ruled by actualized facts, these projects compose a textual counter-history of Israel/Palestine. I therefore propose reading them outside of the national and state-centered paradigm that governs most political and cultural inquiries into Israel/Palestine, and suggest instead that they amount to an anti-colonial trajectory. The Hebrew and French texts discussed in the dissertation challenge their own fixed political positioning within the colonial matrix and offer a critique of European political dictates and artistic forms. In Chapter One, I discuss S. Yizhar's constant return to the events of the 1948 war and his refusal to move beyond it and narrate post-1948 sovereign, statist time; I consider the different literary procedures he employs throughout his work to potentially (re)constitute – after the establishment of the Israeli state – a pre-1948, non-national collective formation in Israel/Palestine. I then move, in Chapter Two, to follow the revolutionary collective enunciation fashioned by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga- Vertov collective, a group of politically-active filmmakers formed in 1968. I investigate the collectivity they attempted to develop together with Palestinian fighters in 1969- 1970, the project’s collapse after what is known as Black September, and finally its reflective afterlife in the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs. Chapter Three delves into the texts Jean Genet dedicated to the Palestinian struggle in the 1970s and -80s. I discuss how, in addressing his writing to a non-historical Palestinian collectivity which by then had already disappeared, Genet defies the boundaries of liberal politics of representation, and calls for a different notion of a gestural, “scripted” anti-colonial struggle. In Chapter 2 Four I read contemporary Hebrew writer Haviva Pedaya's liturgical piyyut poetry, and ascertain how it may generate an oppositional history of Hebrew letters formulated from and towards Oriental collectivities, as a challenge to the modernist and secularist underpinnings of “modern Hebrew literature.” Taken together, the projects I study recast Israel/Palestine as a political space in which both Palestinian and Jewish collectivities potentially emerge as anti-colonial, exilic, Eastern ones, formed in struggle and embedded in text. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 From Imagined Communities to Potential Collectivities Chapter One 26 The Outcry of Collectivity: S. Yizhar's Non-Israeli Writing Chapter Two 70 Collective Enunciation and Its Afterlife: Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestinian Struggle Chapter Three 109 The Scripted Revolution: Jean Genet's Address to a Collectivity-in-Struggle Chapter Four 151 Modes of Transmission: Haviva Pedaya and the Future-Past of Exilic Collectivities Bibliography 183 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the product of intellectual stimulation and political agitation spanning between Berkeley and Tel Aviv. The seeds of the project were planted while growing up in Israel and that is also where the final stages of writing took place. In between, five years in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley inducted me into new worlds of literature and theory, continuously challenging my thinking and helping me formulate a project I couldn't even imagine before coming to Berkeley. I was privileged to have the guidance of a diverse dissertation committee who offered me not only their scholarly insights, but also their intellectual vision as well as their friendship; the dialogue with their own work and thinking shaped this project. Chana Kronfeld, the dissertation's chair, meticulously read multiple drafts of each chapter, commenting on almost every word; a unique model of mentoring and an advocate and provider of collaborative work, she has formed over the years a collectivity of scholars to which I am honored to belong. Her support and generosity throughout my years in Berkeley were limitless, incalculable. Anne-Lise François instructed me in various uncounted experiences; our impassioned conversations, on line or in nature, permeate this project. Michael Lucey imparted upon me his expertise in the body of literature we both enthusiastically study; his seminars were an important point of reference for this dissertation. Stefania Pandolfo inspired this project in unforeseen ways; her conceptual framework helped me in the struggle this project, and others, entailed. I also owe deep thanks to other scholars in Berkeley: to Robert Alter, who guided me in the stylistic paths of Hebrew literature; to D.A. Miller with whom I shared the pleasure of discussing narratology and sexuality; and to Judith Butler, in whose footsteps we all follow. Michael Gluzman, Orly Lubin, and Aïm Deuelle Luski consistently gave me good advice from Tel Aviv both in my absence and presence. The department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley housed this project in many ways. The classes in which I participated and the many talks I attended expanded my horizons; the conversations I had with colleagues and friends enriched my life. Erica Roberts helped me in matters small and large; it would have been much harder to get through graduate school without her. The Berkeley Fellowship and the Dean's Normative Time Fellowship allowed me four years of intensive studies, and grants from the Helen Diller Foundation, the Jewish Studies program and the department of Comparative Literature funded my many research travels and summer studies. The students I taught in my classes at UC Berkeley and Davis allowed me to experience the significance of transmission and the joy of collective learning. Many friends contributed to this dissertation, offering invaluable support in times of contemplation and crisis. Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Yosefa Raz, Ella Ben Hagai, Ana Minian, Katrina Dodson, Michelle Ty, Thea Gold, Ramsey McGlazer, Damon Young, Saleem Al-Bahloly, Maya Barzilai, and Lital Levy spent with me numerous hours of silent writing, passionate scholarly discussion, and garrulous intellectual gossiping at various cafés in Berkeley and San Francisco. Keren Dotan, Uri Ganani, Dani Issler, Daphna Rosenbluth, Oded Wolkstein, Tami Israeli, and Merav Manoach were at my side during the last year of writing in Tel Aviv. Ishai Mishori helped clarify my claims in written English, only to further complicate them in the long conversations we had. Finally, many thanks to the friends who contributed to my emotional sustenance in times of writing and non-writing, to my family that saw all my goings and stayings, and to Hagai, whose table became my desk. 1 Introduction From Imagined Communities to Potential Collectivities Hebrew poet Sami Shalom Chetrit opens his 2003 collection of poems, Poems in Ashdodian, with the following lines: א^נPי Yכותב TלVכם Pש Pירים בdלVשון bא Pשדודית כוס Tאם Tאם Tאמf dכם כdלVה bדאר fבוכם Tשלא תP Vבינו PמלVה I am writing to you poems in an Ashdodian language Kus em em emkum Khla dar bukum So that you won't understand a word.1 This poem seems to be written in Hebrew; yet its third and forth lines are curses in spoken Arabic, transliterated into the Hebrew in the original poem. Even more so, the poet declares, in this meta-poetic enunciation inaugurating the poem and the book, that he is actually writing in “an Ashdodian language.” Having emigrated as a child from Morocco to Ashdod (a southern Israeli city on the Mediterranean shore near the Gaza strip) and grown up there during the 1960s, Chetrit may be signifying “Ashdodian” as a local dialect of the immigrants’ city in opposition to formal, proper Hebrew. Far away from Israel’s geographical-cultural center, the newly-arrived immigrants of Ashdod (most of them from Morocco), speak “Ashdodian,” perhaps a sort of a Hebrew-Arabic fusion. But “Ashdodian” is also another language: in biblical Hebrew, “Ashdodit” signifies the language spoken by the residents of the major Philistine city of the same name.2 Later on, from the medieval Hebrew poetry written in al-Andalus on, “Ashdodian” (together with “Ashkelonian”) would come to signify more generally languages different from Hebrew, foreign tongues. So Chetrit may actually be declaring that he is writing his poem in a “foreign” language. Moreover, bearing in mind that in the Zionist discourse,