James
E.
Young
ANTI-WAR POETRY IN ISRAEL
Of the centuries of historical archetypes for suffering ac–
cumulated in Hebrew, those generated during the period of the
Holocaust have begun to overwhelm all others. Even the names for
this era in Hebrew and Yiddish ,
Sho'ah
and
Churbn,
which previously
designated other catastrophes, are in themselves now reinformed by
the last and greatest disaster . Due partly to the sheer enormity of
events, partly to the great proportion of Holocaust survivors in
Israel (nearly half the population in 1948), and partly to the central
place of the Holocaust in Zionist ideology, images and figures from
the
Sho'ah
have all but displaced their historical precedents. Not only
has the
Sho'ah
begun to represent retroactively all pre-Holocaust
catastrophes -lending them a significance they would not otherwise
have had - but it has also become the standard in Jewish literature
by which all kinds of post-Holocaust calamities, Jewish or not , are
now measured. Thus , whether Israeli writers turn around to repre–
sent other victims' suffering or their own, their remembrance of past
suffering necessarily informs both their language and figures. In the
reflections on Arab-Israeli wars by soldiers and in recent poems and
plays by Tzvi Atzmon , Efraim Sidon , Dalia Ravikovitch, Natan
Zach, Alex Lee , and Hanoch Levine, among others, it is rarely a
matter of the soldier-poets finding concrete historical correspon–
dences between their Arab enemies and the Nazis, or between Pales–
tinians and Jews. Rather, these Israeli writers draw automatically
from their own lexicon of suffering to represent the present.
In reflections of writers and soldiers at Kibbutz Ein Ha-horesh
after the Six Day War in 1967, Israelis explored the extremely com–
plicated relationship between collective Holocaust memory , their
reasons for fighting in the War, and their understanding of the
enemy. Twenty-two years after World War II , their proud Zionist
education notwithstanding, Israeli soldiers came inevitably to see
themselves as little more than another generation of Jews on the
brink of a second great massacre - and responded in battle as if the
life of an entire people depended on every firefight. As Muki Tzur
describes waiting for the beginning of this war, in fact, it grows clear
that his inherited memory of the Holocaust constituted his primary
reason for fighting, the impetus driving him and his comrades-all
