Tales of the Israeli Diaspora

In her short-story collection entitled The Best Place on Earth, recently published in the U.S., Ayelet Tsabari writes about Israelis who have left their native land, Israelis who have returned there from abroad, and Israelis who have stayed home. Adam Kirsch writes in his review:

[E]ach story in the book comes at the question of Israeliness from a slightly different angle. Several of the characters we meet are, like the author, expats in Canada; others are spiritual seekers trying to find themselves in India. But even the ones who stay in Israel are haunted by a sense of belonging elsewhere. Tsabari writes about Yemenite immigrants who cherish the old customs (her own background is Yemenite), a Filipina nurse who sends money home to her daughter, and a girl who is homesick for the Sinai settlement where she grew up, now part of Egypt. To be Israeli, she suggests, is to feel the tug of war between Israel and abroad, no matter where you live. In such a young country, virtually everyone can call somewhere else home. . . .

In each case, Tsabari shows that Israeliness is not an answer but a question, one that must be continually posed even when it seems to have been left behind. In this sense, Tsabari’s stories are in the main tradition of Jewish literature, which is similarly obsessed with the meaning of identity, the way it is inherited, and how it shapes and misshapes the soul. To read Tsabari is to see Israeliness, which was intended as a remedy for the ills of Diasporic Jewishness, turn into a new kind of Diasporic identity. It is a fascinating transformation, and The Best Place on Earth may be the herald of a whole new genre of Jewish literature.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Canadian Jewry, Israel, Israeli literature, Jewish literature, Yeridah

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF