Sanctities,
blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation: Commemorative Inscriptions in a
National Memorial Site in Israel
Prologue 1
Introduction 2
Israeli Civil religion inscribed 2
Method: Ethnography of (inscribed)
commemoration 4
Institutional (top-down) construction:
The visitor book as a sacred Jewish stage 5
Inscribed performances: Sanctities and
blasphemies 8
Conclusions 10
References 11
גוף
המאמר:
להראות
שהמקום קדוש
בקדושה המשלבת
קדושה יהודית
(דתית)
וקדושה
לאומית:
כתיבה
– וספר, כל
המכתבים
מבנה
ספר המבקרים
בלב האתר.
להתייחס
למלחמת 67 כאירוע
קריטי בנרטיב
של הקדושה החילונית
הישראלית.
ראשית,
להראות שיש
חולין באתר
ובספר המבקרים:
רוב רובם
של האנשים אינם
רושמים ולכן
אינם נרשמים
בשרשרת ההנצחה
שהקים האתר.
כאן לא מדובר
על חילול קודש
אלא פשוט יחס
קליל, חולי,
סתמי ו"לא
קדוש" לאתר
– סתמי או מקרי
או מאולץ או
משהו כזה.
זה
מעניין כי היחס
תמיד היה של
"top-down", הקנייה
מוסדית של "דת
חילונית-לאומית".
וכאן ניתן
לראות מה אנשים—bottom
up—עושים
באתר קדושה
חילונית-לאומית.
שנית,
להראות שיש
התמודדות
והתגוששות
מפורשות ומעורבות
במישור דתי,
הקשורה בהבנת
הצומת "קדושה
חילונית-לאומית"
בהקשר הישראלי
בהווה:
ע"י
קדושה דתית
אנטי-ציונית
(ה-Xים
שעליהם דיברתי
וההשחתה)
ע"י
קדושה דתית
ציונית (למה
אין פה..)
Prologue
In
a recent annual meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, I
was discussing my last research project with a senior colleague. I
was sharing my ethnographic experiences from and contemplation of the
Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site, which is a commemoration
complex located in (West) Jerusalem, where I conducted a month of
observations and informal interviews at the, focusing on the
impressive commemorative VB therein.
dedicated
to the memory of soldiers who died in Jerusalem during the 1967 war.
Some time before the conference I conducted a month of observations
and informal interviews at the, focusing especially on the impressive
commemorative VB therein . The senior Anthropologist heatedly argued
that the “heydays of the Ammunition Hill site are long gone,”
and that the place is run down and ill-kempt. With specific regards
to the commemorative VB, he argued that, “delinquent youths
from nearby neighborhoods and school they “masturbate on the
book,” with an expression of disgust. While I understand that,
at least since Mary Douglas' famous work, bodily excursions?? are
considered as impure and taboo, the symbolism in this case was not
completely coherent; nor did I know whether my counterpart was well
familiar with the urban history of the place of the Ammunition Hill,
which, prior to the building of the Site and due to the marginal
urban location between East (Palestinian) and West (Israeli) parts of
the city, prostitutes were offering their service there. The point is
that it was clear that my colleague was describing acts of
desecration, which represented the decline in the state of an revered
site of commemoration, that he was bothered by it, and that in this
regard the practice of masturbation, and bodily fluids such as “cum”
(which he also mentioned), were used as stark illustration of the
steep degradation of the national commemoration site had undergone in
the last years.
It
what follows, no further reverence to autoerotic practices or bodily
fluids will be made whatsoever. I chose to open with this vignette
because it reveals some of the (symbolic) tensions that surround
issues of sacredness of places and spaces, and particularly spaces of
national(ist) ritual and sanctity in Israel. In the sections that
follow, I will briefly describe the theoretical background concerning
works on the holiness and nationalism, succinctly tied up in Robert
Bellah's (??“Civil Religion in America,”
Deadalus) famous notion of “civil religion,”
coined in the late 1960’s. After a short methodological
account, I will characterize the ways that the institutionally
construct a sense of sacredness of the place of national
commemoration, and then I will supply rich empirical details I will
descive abd discuss a number of activities, predominantly in the form
ov VB entries, where different VB entries
two
aspects that
Introduction
--
the site as “Jewish space” and so is the VB – from
Jewish spaces to Jewish media.
--the
Six day war a crucial junction in the weights of available
interpretation of the national Zionist project.
--Bellah's
concept is spicy because it puts critical mirror in front of the face
of national projects, suggesting that these are (but) substituted of
hegemony, which use similar means for arriving at not too different
goals. … Bellah's concept is productive also because it
transcends the realm o high (sociological) theory, and it is in
highly intuitive. Of my autobiographical impressions I have a clear
recollection of sitting on my Sabra (native Israel) wide uncle’s
shoulders (my material uncle was a combat soldiers in the Israeli
army, with many combat stories), waving to a variety of military
troops and vehicles marching and riding through the center of the
city of (West) Jerusalem, during the early 1970s.
Israeli
Civil religion inscribed
National
ideologies of commemoration have several recurrent motifs, prominent
among them sacrifice. W. Lloyd Warner (1959: 249) has written in his
classic ethnography of Yankee City that its Memorial Day's principal
theme is sacrifice: "the sacrifice of the soldier for the living
and the obligation of the living to sacrifice their individual
purposes for the good of the group." This is true also of the
themes of the Israeli Memorial Day. However, whereas the "cult
of the fallen" officially assembles in Yankee City during only
one weekend in springtime, in Israel it has much more presence and
power. In addition to the national Remembrance Day, annual rites of
commemoration are also held in Israel by each of the underground
(pre-state) military organizations and by various units of the
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Further regular meetings and ceremonies
are conducted in Yad Labanim centers in every Israeli community. To
understand the ideological form of this institutionalized cult of the
fallen in Israel, we need to locate the discourse of bereavement
within the larger political structure of Israeli society. The
ethnography presented above reveals the conflictual nature of
bereavement as ideology in Israel. The texts of the Ministry of
Education presented the collective pole of standardization; by
attacking such standardization, the art exhibits tried to turn the
paradigm of uniqueness into a counter-ideology. The semi-official
texts of Yad Labanim stand in between. Here we found a remarkable and
seemingly schizophrenic melange of uniqueness and standardization.
All of these texts, however, portray the profound engagement of
Israeli society with commemoration: an engagement so extensive as to
be recently termed a "national obsession" (Weingrod 1995)
and a "national cult of memorializing the dead" (Aronoff
1993: 54).
The Israeli
"obsession" with commemoration, besides being factually
grounded in the sheer number and frequency of war and terror
casualties in Israel, is arguably rooted in two major sources: ( 1)
the political use of commemoration as a symbolic mediator between
past and present and ( 2)
the use of commemoration for social mobility. Zionist ideology has
been continuously preoccupied with creating a national mythology that
would link its present project of nation-building with the remote
Jewish history in the Land of Israel (Zion). The problem faced by
Zionism was how to construct a historical bridge to a land from which
the Jewish people had been exiled for nearly two millennia. "Perhaps
the primary goal of Israeli political culture," argues Aronoff
(1993: 48), "has been to make the continuity of the ancient past
with the contemporary context a taken-for-granted reality." This
was no doubt all the more important since the Jews' right to
statehood has been challenged by many, both Jews and Arabs. "The
fallen" thus became visible, unquestioned evidence for this
right to statehood.
Furthermore,
the sacrifice of the fallen--often identified in American culture
with the sacred sacrifice of Jesus Christ (Warner 1959: 279)--was
connected in Israel with ancient Biblical heroes as well as newer
heroes among the pioneers (chalutzim). Two prominent Biblical myths
that are often mentioned in conjunction with the commemoration of
Israeli soldiers are the story of Massada and of David and Goliath.
Massada, the ultimate story of Jewish sacrifice in the face of a
superior enemy (Ben-Yehuda 1995), is told so that "Massada shall
not fall again" (Schwartz, Zerubavel, and Barnett 1986: 86). The
induction ceremony for new army recruits, who are given a Bible to
hold in one hand and a gun in the other, was traditionally held at
Massada or at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The story of David and
Goliath, again a myth of the few versus the many, is similarly used
to mobilize citizens into a state of perpetual conscription and a
feeling of siege (Gertz 1984). Another prominent story is the legend
of Tel-Hai, where six Jewish settlers died on March 1, 1920, while
defending a small northern settlement against Arab forces. The
reputed dying statement of Yoseph Trumpeldor, leader of Tel-Hai, was
"never mind, it is good to die for our country" (see
Zerubavel 1990, 1991, for an analysis of the Tel-Hai narrative).
Tel-Hai Day has become institutionalized as an official part of the
Israeli culture of commemoration.
The
second political use of the Israeli cult of the dead is for social
mobility. It should be noted that in Israel, the military is arguably
the most important social network. Despite the events of the last
decade--especially the war in Lebanon--for most Israeli men,
participation in the army is still considered a reward in itself,
which defines the extent to which an individual is in the
"social-evaluative" system of Israel (Horowitz and
Kimmerling 1974; Gal 1986). The fact that Kibbutz members
disproportionately serve(d) as officers and in elite units that
suffered high casualties was often cited as evidence for their
vanguard role in society. Conversely, Israeli-Arabs and Orthodox
Jews--who do not serve in the army--are marginalized. "This is
to a lesser extent also true in regard to women, who serve in
noncombatant roles (see Weiss 1996). Recently, Aronoff (1989: 132)
reported that in interviews conducted during the War of Lebanon,
leaders of nationalist religious Jews and of Eastern Jews told him
that the higher rates of casualties suffered by their respective
groups were "evidence of their having moved to the forefront of
the national struggle." The death of family members in military
service, as a close reading of ethnography of individual bereaved
families should illustrate, is also used as a means for personal
mobility--for individual gains in the form of financial benefits and
a social license to change one's course of life (see Weiss 1978,
1989). The art exhibitions are in themselves a means of professional
mobility--"making a living of my father's death," as the
title of one of the exhibit's catalogues proclaims.
A
particularly important example of the use of commemoration as a
political lever for social mobility is the recent appearance of new
shrines for Moroccan saints (zaddikim) whose bones were transported
from Morocco to various outlying Israeli towns where the majority of
the population is of Moroccan origin. Members of this and other
North-African ethnic groups then take part in large-scale pilgrimages
to the new "memorials" (Weingrod 1995; Bilu and Ben-Ari
1992). Taking part in the Israeli cult of the dead, these ethnic
groups stake a claim for "legitimacy and status as equal
Israelis" (Weingrod 1995: 16).
The
Israeli culture of commemoration, or cult of the dead, thus
ultimately presents itself as a key symbol that cuts across
historical periodizations and ethnic divisions. In that sense it
belongs to what Bellah and his colleagues (1985: 152) call "the
language of commitment," a language characterizing communities
that are "in an important sense constituted by their past"
(p. 153). These communities are "communities of memory"
which "carry a context of meaning" that "turns us
towards the future" (see also Middleton and Edwards 1990: 5).
This language of commitment has long dominated Israeli society, while
the opposite language of the "self-reliant individual" has
only recently emerged during the 1980s (Eisenstadt 1985; Lissak and
Horowitz 1989). As the Israeli routine of military conflict (see
Kimmerling 1974, 1985) created both collectivism and bereaved
families, these two became interdependent. The collectivity glorified
its fallen soldiers and financed their bereaved relatives, while
bereaved families committed themselves to the collectivity and to the
ethos of sacrifice and the standardization of bereavement entailed by
its ideology. For the bereaved families as well as Israeli citizens
in general, collectivism was perceived not as threatening the
autonomy of the individual but rather as an emancipatory force (see
also Zerubavel 1980; Katriel 1991). The Jewish-Israeli experience in
the twentieth century encompasses the transition from a state of
dependency and dispersion in the diaspora to a state of sovereignty
based on the existence of a military and national power, which is
therefore perceived as emancipatory. The ongoing interplay of the
language of commitment and the language of individualism--in
different words, the discourse of standardization versus the
discourse of uniqueness--is currently changing the Israeli culture of
commemoration as it is changing other forms of Israeli life.
--“I
employ the notion of sacredness to politico-national sphere after
Durkheim (see Gephart 1998)”
--אופני
מסגורו של הספר,
המעלים
אסוציאציות
של "קדושה
לאומית"
וכן התרומה
של הספר עצמו
לחוויית הקדושה
במקום,
מהווים
דוגמה להיבטים
הכמו-דתיים
של טקסי ההשתתפות
בתרבויות
חילוניות-לאומיות
בכלל, ובצורתה
מודגשת בהקשר
הצברי בפרט.
את המושג
"קדושה
חילונית"
אני קושר
לעבודותיו של
רוברט בלה,
ובעיקר
לרעיון הדת
האזרחית (Bellah
& Tipton, 2006). בלה
מגדיר "דת
אזרחית"
כְּ-
“The religious dimension that exists in the life of every
nation through which it interprets its historic experiences in the
light of its transcendental reality.” (Bellah, 1975, p. 3).
רעיון
זה הוכח כרעיון
פורה במיוחד
בבחינתם מיתוסים,
טקסים,
ואתרים
ממלכתיים בהקשר
של הלאומיות
הציונית,
ומחקרים
רבים בחנו את
הזיקה שבין
המורשת והדת
היהודית,
מכאן,
ומערכת
המיתוסים,
הטקסים
והסמלים הלאומיים-ישראליים,
מכאן.
בפרט,
נבחנו
האופנים בהם
עשתה ועושה
הממלכתיות
הישראלית שימוש
במערכת המשמעויות
היהודית,
הטקסית-סמלית,
בכינונו
של מערך חוויתי
של זהות לאומ(נ)ית
משותפת.
כפי שציינו
ליבמן ודון יחיה
(Liebman & Don-Yihya, 1983), “The
major symbols of Zionist-Socialism, its myths and ceremonies, were
laden with traditional motifs and representations” , ונראה
כי ספר המבקרים
באתר ההנצחה,
הממוסגר
בתוך היכל קדושה
לאומית ובו בזמן
גם ממסגר אותו
ככזה, מהווה
דוגמה מובהקת
לענין זה (ר'
גם ליבמן
ודון-יחיא,
1984. קימרלינג,
2001 Handelman, 1998; Katriel, 1995; Zerubavel, 1995).
The
concept is powerful because it put a critical mirror in the face of
republican nationalism,
The
concept has also been relatively widely used in relation to Israeli
nationalism, i.e. Zionism. Critical observers of Zionist ideology
argue that from the start, that is from sometime in the first half of
the twentieth century, “[t]he major symbols of
Zionist-Socialism, its myths and ceremonies, were laden with
traditional motifs and representations.” This is nowhere more
evident or accentuated . than in the multidinious/numerous ??
national rituals, days of commemoration, and sites of memorials,
celebrating the partnership/conjoin of nationhood and militarism
evident in Israel.
-
“national cult of memorializing the dead”
Weingrod,
A. 1995. Dry bones: Nationalism and symbolism in contemporary Israel.
Anthropology Today,
See
also , ,
Method:
Ethnography of (inscribed) commemoration
Mantion tha many ceremonial and
commemorative activities tnat take place there thuotrhogut the uera,
and notable in the High Day of Commeoration, around the Independence
Day, the Day of the Unification of Jerusalem, etc. ת.ז.
של
סט המבטאות
בלבול וערבוב
של צבאי עם אזרחי
--such sites of
national-patriotic commemoration sites have studied in such works as
. These works confirmed the symbolic and iconic nature of
commemoration sites, as well as the tight relations they hold with
religious beliefs, perceptions and practices. However, I am presently
less interested in the icons themselves than in the overall
aesthetics of ethno-national commemoration in Israel.
This study took place at the Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site
(AHNMS), which is a war commemoration complex located in the northern
parts of West Jerusalem. Inaugurated in 1975, the site honors Israeli
soldiers who died in the battle on Ammunition Hill during the 1967
War. The site also celebrates the victory of the Israeli Army over
the Jordanian Legion, and the “liberation” of East
Jerusalem and the “unification” of the city. The complex
comprises a number of spaces and structures, including an outdoor
site that includes commemorative monuments and the original trenches
in which the fighting took place, as well as an indoor museum.
The museum is a typical site that embodied, materially and ideology
the Israeli “cult of commemoration” . It presents
exhibits and information about the battle on Ammunition Hill and the
overall campaign for Jerusalem, that is surrounded by a venerated
atmosphere changed with a perfusion of symbols and icons: the museum
is a half sunken dimly lighten building, of which halls and corridors
are build of local stones, so as to produce an authentic impression
of war trenches, such as those located at the outdoor space nearby.
Most of the features are commemorative devices, such as the Golden
Wall of Commemoration, engraved with the names of the 182 soldiers
who fell in the battle for Jerusalem and a short film about the
Ammunition Hill Battle. In addition, many maps and pictures are
employed to illustrate the battles for Jerusalem, and a variety of
discursive artifacts, such as the soldiers’ letters and
personal journals, serve to enhance the display’s authenticity
and to personalize the soldiers.
The research at the AH site was conducted mainly over four weeks of
ethnography, which took place during the summer and autumn of 2006
(repeated visitors to the sites were —conducted for follow-up
purposes). During this period I conducted observations and informal
(unstructured) interviews with visitors, which addressed their
impressions of and activities in the site, and specifically their
views of the commemorative visitor book therein and their
interactions with it. These observations and interviews indicated
that the majority of the visitors were either (local) Jewish
Israelis, or Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish tourists-pilgrims,
mostly from North America. These were usually on organized trips to
Israel, usually organized by the Jewish Agency, the Taglit Project
and similar organizations that promote Zionist ideology. Both
populations of visitors expressed their general support of Israel’s
national militaristic-Zionist ideology. Additionally, interviews were
also conducted with the site’s staff in order to learn about
the ideological approaches to national commemoration and how
commemoration is effectively exhibited.
In
addition, a study of visitor book entries was conducted. Two volumes
supply the case study of this examination. These volumes were chosen
because they were the most recent ones to be completed, and because
they are typical of the AH visitor books in all respects (cf. Noy,
2008). Each of these books contains 100 pages, took about one year to
fill (the first volume between ?? 200?? and May 2005, and the second
between June 2005 and June 2006), and includes over 1,000 entries.
Given this considerable number, and the fact that these entries were
written over a long period of time, and is located at a National
Commemoration Site, the books arguably provide a representative
sample of inscribers’ actions at a symbolic site. The entries
in the book vary in length, ranging from one-word inscriptions to
short paragraphs, with the majority written in Hebrew (50%) and the
rest written mostly in English (45%, but also in French, Spanish,
Russian and more). The entries were examined in light of the
performative appreciation of the book and its function, whereby it is
viewed as a stage for visitors (inscribed) performances (more on that
see below). In their analysis I avoided employing rigorous and
systematic procedures (“content/discourse/text analyses”
of sorts), and preferred a context sensitive reading, that enjoys
sensitivities promoted by the fields of (critical) discourse analysis
and multimodality studies .
Institutional
(top-down) construction: The visitor book as a sacred Jewish stage
--Because
the museum is located with Jewish spaces (of West Jerusalem), and
because its visitors are solely Jewish, we may fruitfully think of
the site and of the stage that the visitor book affords therein in
terms of Jewish spaces and stages.
--Jewish
ethno-nationalism and ethno-militarism
--Second,
because of the socialized nature of these visits, that is that
visitors are typically accompanied by members of groups and family,
most of these decisive moments are not embodied by individuals.
Instead, they are a somewhat spontaneous and haphazard consequence of
a number of interactions among visitors, which might (or might not)
lead to attending the VB. As a result of this type of non-lineal
social decision-making (arrived at the level of the group), visitors'
behaviors hardly evince any signs of the solemn-ness or of the
sacredness that this densely symbolic site is supposed to bestow. In
other words, already here (and this will be much clearer later in the
inquiry) we can observe that the social dynamics are such that little
room is left of the type of aura that is typical of rituals of
national religion and sanctity .
--Jewish
spaces/Jewish Media.
--all
these spatial and material features amount to a symbolic statement
which establishes connections between traditional Jewish spaces and
practices and national-Israeli-militaristic ones.
In
this section I argue that the commemorative VB at the AH serves as a
sacred stage that invites inscriptions, or inscribed
performances of participation in the Zionist ethno-national civil
religion. While I argued elsewhere for a performative view of this
visitor book , my present claim is that the book functions as a stage
insofar as it functions as a holly apparatus in a national shrine of
militaristic commemoration. In other words, the dialectics of
performance, on the one hand, and national sacredness and
commemoration, on the other, are brought to the fore as the notions
of “scared” and of “stage” are mutually
confirming. This condition is created by the following framing cues
by which the sacred and the performative functions of the visitor
book are joined, both materially and symbolically.
First,
while visitor books are typically located near the exit of sites and
attractions, where they allow visitors to recapitulate their
experiences and comment on their overall visit, this commemorative VB
is located in one of the museum’s innermost halls. It is
positioned near the Golden Wall of Commemoration
and the eternal flame, where a low and solemn voice of a male
narrator is continuously heard, reciting the names of all the fallen
soldiers and their military affiliation and rank.
This
unique location, inside the museum’s commemorative “holy
of holies,” endows the book with the semiotic status of a
sacred device that is an organic part of the museum’s authentic
commemorative exhibit . Conceptually, the book’s unique
location is the complete opposite or reverse of the typical places
where VBs are positioned, because it invites acts of ideological and
emotional participation, rather than reflections on a visit that has
been completed. The book’s position in the heart of the
commemorative space suggests that it is metonymic to the museum. As
will be demonstrated below, the practices of interacting with it
(basically reading and writing), are essential elements of the ritual
of the visit to a commemoration site, and not a reflection or
commentary about it.
Second,
the book’s unique framing as a scared stage is further
augmented by the structure on which it rests. It is installed on a
large and impressive structure, consisting of two columns of black
steel, each of them about one meter thick (Figure 1 below). The
shorter column, approximately one meter tall, functions as a kind of
pedestal on which the book rests, and beside it is another pillar
some four meters tall. The pedestal is made of thick and impressive
wood, giving the platform on which the book rests a particularly
impressive and respected appearance. The entire structure rests on a
base that is slightly elevated from the floor, so that those wishing
to read (or write) in the book must step up and enter a specially
designated zone.
Figure
1: Book and Hall: Ethno-national solemn spaces
Here,
again, the sacred function of the book is cued. The special
construction suggests that it is not a bureaucratic document that is
meant to capture information about visitors (names, dates, etc.), nor
impressions regarding the visit, but a cherished medium that invites
ritualistic acts in which visitors may engage in situ as part of
their adherence to and embodying of national commemoration. This
framing is further augmented by the fact that the VB is the central
exhibit in the hall where it is located. This arrangement, too,
frames the book as a unique medium, which demands special attention
on behalf of the visitors.
Located
as a notable exhibit in a special public space in the museum, it can
be easily realized that the inscriptions visitor write therein
immediately become parts of the commemorative and authentic
display at the site. Here is a transformative medium, where
individual inscriptions (of the genre of visitor book entries), are
instantaneously granted a public nature, and become collective acts
of embodiment of the commemorative ideology at the site.
Third,
the metonymic association between the tangible device and the
intangible ideology of ethno-national commemoration is established
not only through the spatial positioning of the book, but is also
reiterated from “within”: through the material and the
design of the book’s pages (or inner spaces). In terms of
materiality, the book is a heavy and sizable volume that includes 100
thick pages made not of paper but of parchment. In terms of
(inscribed) performance, the size and material of its pages are a
point of interface between text and texture, or the embodied acts of
writing and reading in the book. Ostensibly, the parchment material
indexes authentic and esteemed scriptures and holly inscription,
echoing the views in both Islam and Judaism of the sacred nature of
scripture as such.
In
terms of visual design, each of the pages in the book is printed with
a vertical line of four symbols (Figure 2, below), specifically (in
descending order) the symbol of the State of Israel (the Menorah or
candelabrum), the symbol of the City of Jerusalem (a lion), the
symbol of the Israeli army (a sword and olive branch in a Star of
David), and the logo of AHNMS (three arches). These symbols are
repeated on large flags that hang near the installation, and
correspond with other ethno-national and military emblems that are
profusely exhibited throughout the site. They reiterate the
connection between the ethno-sanctity of the spaces/stages of the
museum as a whole, and the same with regards to the spaces/stages of
the visitor book, stressing the tripartite bond between Zionism,
Judaism and militarism.
Figure
2 also evinces that fact that the book’s pages actually have no
dividing lines or any other directions as to where visitors should
inscribe their entries. This is highly consequential in terms of the
inscribed performances therein, because it is now up to the visitors
to take care of each and every aspect of the entry they wish to
inscribe: from where on the book’s pages and in the spaces of
the book’s openings (the conjoined surface of two adjacent
pages) the entry should be inscribed, to what it should include
(content, graphics, length, etc.), and even to the writing utensil
with which it should be produced (which is not supplied), the
possibilities are there for the visitors to materialize.
Figure
2: From within: Logos and inscriptions on parchment
Before
we proceed to examine the visitors’ entries themselves, a final
point is due with regards to the very nature of the book (and much of
the display in the museum), which concern literacy and literacy
related activities (reading and writing). I mentioned earlier that
the AH museum displays many texts, including handwritten letters sent
by soldiers to their families, personal journals and war journals,
commemorative devices that have the appearance of books and more.
These inscribed exhibits amount to the largest category of displays
the museum exhibit. This pervasiveness of inscribed (textual)
displays is not coincidental and bears meaning in and of itself. I
shall briefly touch on these meanings, which I view as illustrations
of a particular linguistic ideology held be the AH museum .
These meanings are relevant to our exploration because visitors’
inscribed entries join the abundance of inscription in situ and
contribute—and sometime also resist and contradict—its
linguistics (inscriptional) ideology.
First,
presenting handwritten documents is an effective way of claiming and
performing authenticity. In tourism in general, handmade
products have a special value because they index their creators. This
is true for handwriting as well, which supplies the institution with
the much sought after “aura of authenticity” in
(late-)modern times .
This
quality has cultural hues, as it is particularly salient in Sabra
(native Israeli) culture, where informal and un-institutional modes
of communication, such as handwriting, are highly esteemed . These
cultural preferences have their roots in Jewish religion and
tradition. Although the Zionist pioneers to Palestine have envisioned
a revolution that would reject traditional perceptions of the image
of the “exilic learned Jew,” the notion of the “learned
Jew” and with it its corresponding image of the moral
Israeli come in very helpful in the attempts to mitigate the
aggression repeatedly performed by the Israeli army. What is
commemorated at and by the AH museum is a battle, an obvious instance
of institutionalized brutality and violence. Commemoration is often
concerned with moralizing past events, and for the Sabra worldview,
which aspires to liberalism and humanism, the events suggest a moral
issue that requires an adequate resolution .
More
generally, however, the construction of the visitor book and with it
the linguistic ideology index for the (Jewish) visitors Jewish
practices . In an interview with the Kahaner, who is the Head of the
.. He indicated that there are strong ties between the AH site and
the Western Wall, located a ten minute drive from the site. This
association is something that I have heard visitors too discuss, as
they visited at the Western wall before they came to the AH site, or
intend to visit it later. Indeed, within the visitor books there was
a few occasion where visitors did no write on the book but instead
left notes they write and tear from other sources. While this is
speculative, it does seem to echo the religious ritualistic practices
of note-writing in the Western Wall and other Jewish practices that
concern writing and reading.
The
cultural appreciation of literacy sits nicely with the notion of
literacy as a highly charged and value-ridden western ideology. This
type of ideology concerns a Judeo-Christian bias against illiteracy,
where literacy is viewed as correlative to progress, liberalism,
modernity and the like, while illiteracy is viewed critically and
condescendingly as correlating with the opposite . In this respect,
too, the museum effectively employs texts and specifically warriors’
handwritten texts in order to produce an image of educated, moral and
pure character and conduct. Such authentic(ating) inscriptions
express the romantic conjuncture embedded in such phrases as “officer
and gentlemen,” and “the noble and the savage.” The
warriors commemorated in the Ammunition Hill are portrayed as
literate and educated; “men of the sword,” but also “men
of the pen.”
Lastly,
from the perspective of national identity we are reminded of
Anderson’s famous work, which also focuses on acts of reading,
and how literacy (in the form of books and newspapers) allows the
creation of imagined communities and consequently nationhood across
large spaces. In ritual sites of commemoration, the spread, which in
Anderson’s work is geographical, is temporal: different people
arrive at the same place (to read and write) in different times. In
any case, these are the texts and their qualities of endurance and
(im)mobility, that allow different people in different spatiotemporal
positions to imagine their identity and belonging together.
Inscribed
performances: Sanctities and blasphemies
--What
is interesting and paradoxical about these violation is that they do
not origin with or express secular (liberal) worldviews amidst the
“forest of (nationalist) symbols.” Instead these
violations, and the critiques they hold, are expressions of
fundamental ideologies of sorts, which
Acts
of desecration are visible at the museum to an ethnographically
sensitive eye. Before attending to the inscriptions within the VB, I
wish to attend to instances of desecration, or purposeful violations
of the ideology promoted and presented at the AH. These violations
are apparent, for instance, in crosses (X marks) that are inscribed
on national symbols. For instance, on the very bottom part of the
national Israeli flag depicted in Figure 1, a 3X3 inches X has been
drawn (it is not visible in the picture in figure 1). Another cross
is engraved on a picture that is part of the Uzi Narcis exhibition,
located in the first corridor in the entrance to the museum. The
picture depicts the figures of General Narcis, who was in charge of
the Jerusalem Front during the 67’ War, and of Army Chaplain
(General Goren), exchanging embraces. The X engraver, which is
noticeable when observing the picture up-close, is located right on
the spot where men’s bodies are touching. This desecrative act
is significant because it corresponds with and rejects the multiple
meanings this image carries. First, these are men who are embracing,
and for homophobic visitors this in itself may be viewed as
unacceptable display.1
Moreover, in the context of the 67’ War, the embrace of these
particular men has a notable symbolic value, as it embodies a
particular historic moment where the unification of militaristic and
Orthodox ideologies took place. As indicated above, the 67’ War
was a watershed event in terms of the widespread interpretations of
the Zionist project, representing a shift from ethno-national terms
to fundamental-orthodox and messianic terms. The violation of the
image of the embrace is therefore an ideological graffiti that may
express a rejection of the joining of Jewish Orthodoxy with the
Jewish State.
Before
we continue to desecration performances inside the pages of the
visitor book, the above examples beseech two comments. The first
comment concerns that fact that these and other acts of desecration,
which take place in the outdoor spaces of the Ammunition Hill
premises and inside the museum, present similar critical and
offensive objections on behalf of Ultra-Orthodox protestors in
Jerusalem more generally. For instance, in many street signs in
Jerusalem—notably in the Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in the
center of the City—the Arabic written inscriptions are
systematically erased (covered). Further, the notorious and
aggressive Ultra-Orthodox groups called the Modesty Squads (Mishmarot
Hatzeniut), which are informal and basically anonymous,
systematically injure and damage people and images that are viewed as
violating the Ultra-Orthodox codes of modesty. The point being that
practices that concern protest and erasure, which occur on the
premises of the Ammunition Hill site (and, as we shall shortly see,
also in the visitor book), echo and resemble those acts that occur
outside, in the larger (conflict ridden) spaces of West Jerusalem.
Both are instances of destructive acts of inscription of smilar
idkeogical perspectives.
Second,
put more accurately, what are described above are not instances of
violation but rather traces thereof. Being able to
ethnographically trace these marks brings to mind the point raised in
the prologue by the colleague with who I had the exchange, regarding
the neglect on behalf of the staff of the AH site. Indeed, if the
flags would have been cleaned occasionally, or the pictures in
display attended to more closely and restored, the site would have
evinced less occurrences of violation. In other words, what we
observe are actually two types of profanity performed
simultaneously and complementarily: the management’s (passive)
neglect and the visitors (active) acts of desecrative inscription.
(Observe that this parallels what goes on outside the site’s
premises, where the systematic erasure of street names written in
Arabic is not attended by the municipality or it is attended but very
slowly and ineffectively).
The
inattention to the appearance and maintenance of the national site is
not secret, and is clearly observable. The museum has not been
renovated since its opening back in 1975, and it is severely in need
of paintwork and repair work of sorts. In addition, it is also not
very clean. The management of the site is aware of this condition. In
one occasion, as we were walking in the museum, the curator told me
cynically, “this is the hall where we have the alternating
exhibitions; we change them every 25 years…” The
museum’s director, while walking with me around the site’s
grounds, had repeatedly complained about trash being thrown
throughout the site, blaming the “populations” of
visitors for their “manners” (implicitly referring to
large Ultra-Orthodox families who enjoy the spacious premises
freely), and the lack of budget from which the site suffers.2
thbsiyte
Ammunition Hill site is admittedly ill-kempt. It has
Now
the article will turn to examine inscriptions in the visit book, or,
in terms of the discussion above, acts of desecration that are
inscribed within the Jewish spaces (premises, perhaps) of the visitor
book. Yet the first illustration will be of a normative
visitor book entry. By the term normative I suggest that this entry
is highly representative of VB entries that are confirmative, that is
they perform voice the ideological agenda of the site through the use
of the discourse of sacred ethno-national commemoration. After
examining this entry, other entries will be examined, which do not
perform confirmative voices; rather, they express violations of
the ethno-national ideology, and have their origins with different
worldviews and ideologies.
Conclusions
References
1
Recall the protest made by some Ultra-Orthodox visitors at
Yad-Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum some years ago (and the
commotion that it raised), regarding the presentation of exposed
body parts of Jewish women in the Holocaust.
2
Unlike many military museums in Israel, and museums that depict
underground military movements prior to the establishment of the
State of Israel (1948), the Ammunition Hill is not
subordinated to or financially supported by the Ministry of Defense,
and its funding relays predominantly on contributions.
11
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