JAMES E. YOUNG
597
after the war was precisely this repudiation of Holocaust imagery as
justification for the war, even as the poets simultaneously embraced
such imagery as the primary means for representing victims of this
war - especially the children.
During this protracted war and even after the Israeli with–
drawal from Lebanon, poetry and essays, handbills and posters thus
appeared throughout Israel responding to the war with both explicit
and oblique references to the Holocaust. Two collections, in par–
ticular,
Border Crossing: Poems from the Lebanon War
and
Fighting and
Killing without End: Political Poetry in the Lebanon War,3
illustrate the
sheer impossibility of representing or reading about contemporary
destruction and suffering without recourse to both the most tradi–
tional figures in the liturgy as well as to those more recently acquired
during the Holocaust. But as dominant as the Holocaust had been
before 1982 as an image of survival, it was now handled ironically in
reference to the Israelis' situation in Lebanon. For the first time,
Jewish suffering was not the principal object of Israel's war poetry.
Instead of recalling traditional Jewish archetypes to represent the
deaths of Israeli soldiers or the condition of bereaved families at
home, Israel's poets used such imagery more often than not to depict
the death and suffering of others, especially that of Arab children.
The Holocaust was now being used not as an image for Jewish suf–
fering , but as an anti-trope for it.
In
a poem that was distributed widely during the war, Efraim
Sidon thus conjures remembrance of the Holocaust explicitly to
discard it as justification for the war in Lebanon. He begins with a
mock pronouncement of guilt on the heads of the children for their
own fate:
I accuse the children in Sidon and Tyre
Whose numbers are still uncounted
Three-year olds, seven-year olds, and others of all ages,
Of the crime of residing in the vicinity of terrorists .
If
you hadn't lived near them, children,
You could have been students today .
Now you will be punished.
(from
Fighting and Killing)
3. Ve0m tichla lakeravot velahereg: Shirah po/itit berni/chernet Levanon
[Fighting and Killing
without End: Political Poetry in the Lebanon War], edited with an Afterword by
Hannan Hever and Moshe Ron . Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame'uchad , 1984.
