The privatising of the Israeli mind

Poet Aharon Shabtai discusses the influence of the Occupation on Israeli culture with Nir Nader (NN)

 

In this interview poet Aharon Shabtai discussesthe influence of the Occupation on civil society

and on artists, this includes the privatisationof social issues and the co-option of artists.

NN: How would you describe the relationshipbetween today’s Israeli culture and theOccupation?

Shabtai: Israel is a country whose options for change are shutting down one by one. In the past it

had the chance to become a healthy nation-state by settling its relationships with the Palestinians

and the neighbouring countries. Yet the longer it persists with the Occupation, and the more it relies on force,

the narrower are its political options. Israel is turning into a colony under American control, like the former Rhodesia or South Africa

under Britain. Oligarchs and the army rule this colony. The land is a prison. It contains three and

a half million native inmates, who are penned up in territorial cells, in camps and ghettoes, while

Israel implements a racist policy aimed at ethnic cleansing. The prison has special facilities for the

Israeli jailers. These live in bubbles, cut off from the reality of the inmates. We have golf courses,

coffee shops, residences, and cultural institutions for the families of the rulers. In the colony, political

conversation is limited to the economy and security, to questions of how to accumulate capital and how

to eliminate the natives. Today, in a period of global imperialism, politics is privatised. The tools of politics—the media, the

parties, and the unions—whose function is to bring about change, to heal, to repair solidarity, have been

emptied of content and sold into private hands. Culture and higher education are privatised, “free

of politics” – you go along with the consensus. This

is a nationalistic society whose heroes are Ariel

Sharon or Ehud Barak.

The ancient Greeks had a term for the citizen

who cares only for his personal interests and stays

out of political life. The term was idiotes. People

here are idiotai, not politai, citizens in the true

sense. They have no part in political organisation or

in political struggles.

One scholar accused me of debasing the great

love poet, Sappho, who wrote that the most beautiful

thing is not battalions of soldiers, or cavalries or a

navy, but the person one loves. In my poem (below) I

update the theme, offering (with humour) something

that suits our time and Israel: to view working-class

solidarity and freedom as beautiful.

No, Sappho

The most beautiful thing, Sappho said, is the one

you love.

No, Sappho, I say. The one you love will not be

beautiful

As long as a contractor or a corporation or a

manpower company sucks his blood-

For 15 shekels (R25) an hour there’s no future for

beauty.

Let me get the crap they’ve fed you out of your

head.

Anaktoria (a woman) will not be beautiful if

forced to work as a call girl,

Attis will not braid flowers if the plant is shut

down and transferred to Cairo.

Therefore, the most beautiful thing, the

precondition for beauty, is the class struggle.

You were right. Not horsemen or armed forces,

not battle ships,

But the workers’ solidarity, cooperation and

equality

When these will prevail

Then the skies and the earth shall kiss in my

lover’s eyes.

Therefore, also not amongst writers, not in the

university, not in a concert

Will you find beauty today, but in the workers’

union -?

The garbage workers, the garbage trucks,

Sappho, are the most beautiful thing.

(Translated by Adva Levin)

By the way, all ancient Greek poetry is political;

it is the poetry of citizens. In the poem Archilochos’

“Some Saian mountaineer…,” talks, without a blush,

how the poet threw his shield away in the midst

of battle when the fighting got hot. This is a poem

that defines the ethical and civic function of poetry.

Here, the poet overrules accepted heroic values

and exemplifies the right to exercise judgment

and formulate a new principle: the refusal to die a

pointless death is presented as a proper value for a

free citizen.

In today’s Israel, literature and culture have

nothing to do with a civic ethos. It’s a culture of

idiotai, everyone is out for himself, and all problems

wind up on the back of the individual. Privatised

art, deals with the lives of idiotai, and becomes a

branch of psychology. This happened in the United

States too where poetry used to be involved and

activist, especially during the Vietnam War. In a

few short years, after the Johnson Administration

founded the National Endowment for the Arts, it

became poetry of campus writing workshops.

In Israel too, writing workshops are encouraged.

They make up a thriving economic nook in art

therapy, guiding people to adapt themselves.

Psychology has become an ideology. All the

traumas of a society characterised by military

murder and exploitation are internalised,

resurfacing as the problems of the isolated

individual in a nationalistic mass. These problems

are always private; the person becomes a patient.

In this way individuals receive their privatisation

as a gift and everything goes to the clinic. Art as

psychotherapy serves an ideology in which all are

individuals, without a political space: without a

space where personal problems that are political by

nature reach consciousness as such, finding their

true solutions. Art without political space is like

clay that is given to mental patients and children

– those who have no responsibility in relation to

political space are slaves and children. The political

belongs to the citizens, that is, to adults. Nowadays

art and literature keep those who do not want to

grow up, or can not, in kindergarten.

NN: That strikes me, though, as a generalisation.

After all, the Occupation is recognised as a major

issue by the entire Israeli mainstream, including

establishment writers.

Shabtai: You’re referring to intellectuals and

mainstream writers that Nimrod Kamer, calls “the

soft Left”: Amos Oz and David Grossman, for

instance. In their case, the principle of co-option has

applied.

The establishment adopts, co-opts them—that’s

its method. They oppose the Occupation generally,

and this gives them credibility when they support

the regime on every issue of any importance. For

example, they backed the Oslo Accords, the Camp

David deceit of July 2000, the measures taken

against the Intifada, and the second Lebanon War.

The writers of the soft Left do not give literature a

political content: instead of pushing for decision

or action, they sublimate the political into culture.

Even Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert said they’re

against the Occupation. The Occupation has

been normalised, a branch of culture, material

for endless narcissistic self-flagellation, for films,

readings, doctorates and academic careers. The

Occupation has been expropriated from the realm

of struggle and squished into a psychotherapeutic

kindergarten. People are fed up of hearing about

the Occupation. For this reason no important

Poet Aharon Shabtai* discusses the influence

of the Occupation on Israeli culture with Nir

Nader (NN)

KHANYA: a journal for activists No. 17: March 2008

— 46 —

KHANYA: a journal for activists No. 17: March 2008

— 47 —

literature has developed in Israel since Oslo.

For literature does have an ethical and political

task. The test of literature is the extent to which

it does or does not cooperate with the regime in

forging a consensus. Culture is an ideological

laboratory, which uses agreed narratives to create

a picture of reality; it invents definitions and

partitions (Jewish/Arab, for instance) that supply

the individual with an identity. What distinguishes

the great writers and poets is the fact that they

create resistance and offer an alternative ethos. In

times of emergency, such writers relate directly to

the political.

Resistance belongs to the essence of life.

Everyone feels the force of gravity, inertia and

friction when he moves forward or acts as an

individual. On the other hand, there is enormous

pressure, open and concealed, to be “a good boy,”

to conform.

A true poet has the courage and judgment to

create resistance in the broad ethical sphere, precisely

where it presses the individual to adapt to the norm.

This puts pressure on his taste, on his standards, on

the language he uses. Under the present barbaric

conditions, which are reminiscent of those that once

prevailed in Germany, Russia, France and America,

writers are required to open their mouths, take a

clear and moral political stance, resist.

NN: Give me examples of some who did this, who

resisted.

Shabtai: Socrates. He stood against his society,

ready to die. The dominant ethical commandment

in Athens was to harm your enemy and benefit

your friend. Socrates does not agree. He gives

priority to what is right: it is better to suffer evil

than do it. After the fall of the Athenian democracy,

the dictators made it their practice to send citizens

to arrest those they identified as opponents or

whose property they wanted to confiscate. Socrates

and four others got an order to bring them a man

named Leon. He refused, endangering his life. He

was saved only because of a change in regime. Later

he was accused of blasphemy and of corrupting the

young, and sentenced to death.

Most of the major writers were oppositionaries

in one sense or other. There are quiet periods when

the opposition is not overt. But in special cases – like

oppression, trampling of human rights, Fascism –

writers must take their stand.

In Israel, they toe the line with the regime. Amos

Oz, Yehoshua Sobol, A.B. Yehoshua and David

Grossman supported the Lebanon War, in which

the air force killed more than a thousand civilians,

destroyed villages, destroyed neighbourhoods in

Beirut. Moments like that test the writer and artist.

One can bring many examples of great writers, and

not necessarily leftists, who refused to cooperate

with their regimes.

NN: Can Israeli Hebrew culture survive in

a region that is Arab, a region so completely

different?

Shabtai: That is of course the main problem.

The Occupation, the army and capitalism are

destroying the country, both the landscape itself

and the human landscape, part of which consists

of the Palestinians, who are rooted here. The

monument that best represents Israeli culture today

is the separation wall, wedged into the nation’s

consciousness and into Hebrew literature. The wall

is the fixation that the literature keeps recycling.

This literature does not function as a means for

creating opposition, as a means for changing life. So

there is no change in life, rather only in lifestyle.

NN: Among the dark clouds you describe, can you

see any light?

Shabtai: If the society has an instinct for selfpreservation,

then change will take place. There will

be revolution. It will happen sooner or later. In this

regard, Israel’s failure in the second Lebanon War

is an encouraging sign. It may sound odd, but the

cries of defeat we hear today are preferable to the

triumphant exultation of 1967. Israeli militarism is

destined to fail in a society of growing exploitation

and poverty.

The revolt of today is not yet political, because

consciousness and solidarity are limited. A few

exceptions exist – for example; some young poets

opposed the Lebanon War. But for now, most of

the young pose no threat to the establishment.

Chauvinism and hatred for Arabs still make it

possible to exploit the young and the poor.

As a writer I work in a system. Poetry is no

private correspondence. It is done within a system

that relates to other systems. Only in this way does

poetry have a function and a place within the public

domain. Within these political and cultural systems,

a debate is underway, thinking is underway, and a

struggle is underway for change and renewal. In the

present situation, the political and cultural systems

do not function. Either you’re a good little boy who

sits in the clinic with everyone else, or you become

a dissident, active from the margins.

* Aharon Shabtai published 18 books of poetry in

Hebrew and prize-winning translations of Greek drama.

Edited and Syndicated from Challenge, Issue 104, July/

August 2007.

Challenge is a leftist magazine focussing on the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict – www.challenge-mag.com.