Sanctities6

Sanctities,
blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation: Commemorative Inscriptions in a
National Memorial Site in Israel

Prologue

In
a recent annual meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association,
an accomplished colleague and I were discussing a recent ethnographic
research that I conducted at the Ammunition Hill National Memorial
Complex (West Jerusalem, Israel). The memorial complex is dedicated
to the memory of soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front during the
1967 war. Shortly before the meeting took place, I spent a month at
the Ammunition Hill site, where my research focused on the site’s
impressive commemorative visitor book . My colleague heatedly argued
that, “the heydays of the Ammunition Hill are long behind us,”
and that the site is rundown and ill-kempt (two points with which I
generally agree). With specific respect to the visitor book, he
argued with noticeable disdain, “I know what’s going on
there. It’s a shame. Delinquent youths from nearby
neighborhoods and other passers-by come there and masturbate on the
book. It’s filthy!”

This
reaction puzzled me. While I understand that some bodily practices
and secretions (which he also mentioned) are viewed in some cultures
as dirty and impure , the coarse symbolic conjunction between
memorialism and autoerotic practices took me by surprise. In
addition, I did not know whether my counterpart was familiar with the
urban history of the Ammunition Hill, where, prior to its
construction, prostitution took place there, under the pine grove on
the hill. However, it was clear that my colleague was keenly arguing
that the commemorative book is a metonym of the site, and that both
were being desecrated; that instead of being sites of consecration
that showed and commanded respect to those who sacrificed their lives
for the nation, they were sites of violation and desecration.
Masturbation and bodily secretions were employed as animated,
embodied illustrations of the degradation of the commemoration
site(s) during the last years.

In
what follows, no further reference to autoerotic bodily practices
will be made. The reason I opted to open with this exchange is that
it reveals some of the symbolic tensions between sanctity of places
and spaces, with a focus surfaces and practices of inscription, on
the one hand, and their various desecrations, on the other, drawing
on a particular illustration from ethno-national(ist) rituals in
Israel. These tensions evince the dialectics between sanctities and
blasphemies, which, though common, are infrequently commented on. In
the sections that follow, I will briefly describe the theoretical
background regarding the linkage between sacredness and nationalism,
which is derived from Robert Bellah’s highly influential
notion of “civil religion.” Then I will characterize the
ways that the Ammunition Hill institution constructs a sacred place
of national commemoration, which will be complemented by a close
examination of visitor book entries, which affirm and violate, adhere
and desecrate the sense of national scarceness and solemnity in the
site.

Ethno-national
civil religion and sacred national commemoration in Israel

According
to sociologist Bellah , civil religion concerns “[t]he
religious dimension that exists in the life of every nation through
which it interprets its historic experiences in the light of its
transcendental reality”; it is—as he famously argued with
regards to the United States—the “genuine apprehension of
universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could
almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American
people” . Bella’s concept was influential because it put
a critical mirror in the face of republican nationalism, indicating
that nations abundantly borrow symbols and rituals from religious
spheres, which they then employ in order to mobilize citizens in ways
that are uncannily similar to the powerful institutions which they
suggested to replace, namely the church.

While
the concept of civil religion originated with observations of
national rituals and memorials in the United States, it has been
fruitfully employed in other countries and societies, sometimes
comparatively. With specific regards to Israeli national culture,
Liebman and Don-Yihya’s initial work revealed the unique
synergy between traditional Jewish symbolism, on the one hand, and
the ideological symbolic apparatus that aims to mobilize and
consolidate the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, on the other.
Liebman and Don-Yihya observed that, “Zionist-Socialism was a
religious surrogate,” and that “[t]he major symbols of
Zionist-Socialism, its myths and ceremonies, were laden with
traditional motifs and representations.” Moreover, the authors
candidly admit that, “[i]t is almost impossible to convey in
English, especially to anyone unfamiliar with Hebrew, the elaborate
and intricate usage of traditional Jewish terminology in
Zionist-socialism” .

Nowhere
is this fusion more evident and effective than in the consecration of
national sacrifice and the celebration of militarism in Israel.
Numerous national rituals, ceremonies, days of commemoration, and
memorial sites and spaces embody and celebrate the Zionist fusion of
militaristic nationalism, through the use of symbols and rituals of
consecration. During the last two decades, a sizable body of
research, mainly within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology
and political science has explored these assorted sites, rituals and
events. Form the national days of Commemoration and Independence to
commemorative road signs, and from archeological sites of ruins that
have become materialized sites of national(ist) ethos to toddlers’
songs and pre-school ceremonies, this body of research documents
Israeli society’s “profound engagement” with
commemoration , amounting to “a national cult of memorializing
the dead” .

The concept of civil religion has been influential and productive
also because it is intuitive. For many Jews who grew up in Israel,
the sanctified collective narrative of nationalism-cum-militarism is
imprinted in personal memories from early days. Standing straight and
experiencing solemnity at the sound of the all-encompassing
sinusoidal national siren, heard during the annual National Day of
Commemoration, zealously partaking in hiking trips and ceremonial
marches, and many other collective practices were moments of embodied
performances of Zionist civil religion.

While Bellah’s concept was especially productive in
stimulating research of hegemonic and institutional (“top
down”) practices, plenty of room was left for examining
people’s actual ways of experiencing and participating in the
rituals, how they perform practices of national sacredness and
consecration, and—when this is the case—also how they
experience and perform practices of protest and violation of the
sacred national sphere.

Ethnography
of inscribed commemoration

The Ammunition Hill Complex was inaugurated in 1975, honoring the
Israeli soldiers who died in the Jerusalem Front during the 1967 War,
and celebrating the “liberation” of East Jerusalem and
the “unification” of the city. The complex comprises of
several spaces and structures, including an outdoor space that is
sprinkled with commemorative monuments and national and military
symbols, that are located between the original trenches and bunkers
where the fighting took place, and an indoor museum.

Wholly devoted to national commemoration and sacrifice, the
Ammunition Hill Museum is constructed as a typical
“national-militaristic shrine,” which materially and
ideology embodies Israel’s “cult of commemoration”
. The museum presents various images and representations of the
Ammunition Hill battle and the campaign over Jerusalem. Its inner
spaces are steeped in a venerated atmosphere created by a perfusion
of symbols and icons. Crucially, the museum’s physical
structure is half-sunken, dimly lit, and built of local
(“Jerusalemite”) stone—all of which produce an
authentic impression of war trenches and an atmosphere of somberness
and remembrance. The display mostly includes discursive devices that
serve commemorative aims, such as the Golden Wall of Commemoration,
where the names of those who fell in the battle for Jerusalem are
engraved, and a short film about the battle, which is narrated in the
(male) first body and is infused with machismo, heroism, and a touch
of grief for those of fell in combat. Other discursive artifacts
include soldiers’ letters, personal and war journals,
autographs and more.

The museum and the site host many commemorative ceremonies
throughout the year, from the National Day of the Unification of
Jerusalem, in which the Israeli president and prime-minister
participate, to more routine and everyday events, such as occasions
when high-schools bring their eleventh graders to receive their IDs
at the site (thus suffusing the monotonous bureaucratic documents
with the sacredness of national commemoration and militaristic
patriotism .

The ethnography I conducted at the museum took place in the summer
and autumn of 2006, and included observations and interviews. These
indicated that the visitors were either (local) Jewish Israelis doing
sightseeing in Jerusalem, or Ultra/Orthodox Jewish tourists-pilgrims,
mostly from North America, visiting Zionism’s “holly
sites.” These tourists-pilgrims were usually on planned tours
to Israel, organized by the Jewish Agency, the Taglit Project and
similar organizations promoting Zionism.

The
research’s focus, however, was the site’s impressive
visitor book, where commemorative entries are inscribed. Two volumes
supply the database for the present examination. These volumes were
chosen because they were the most recent ones to be completed, and
because they are typical of the Ammunition Hill visitor books in all
respects: each contains 100 pages, took between one to two years to
fill (the first volume between May, 2003 and June 2005, and the
second between June 2005 and July 2006), and includes over 1,000
entries. Given this considerable number and the location of the
books, they provide a representative sample of visitors’
inscribed actions at a symbolic site. Most of the entries in the
books are written in Hebrew (50%) and the rest are 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’s function, whereby it is viewed as a sacred stage for
visitors inscribed performances. In the analysis of the entries, I
avoided employing rigorous procedures (such as content/discourse/text
analyses of sorts), and preferred a contextual reading that enjoys
sensitivities promoted by the fields of (critical) discourse analysis
and multimodality studies .

Institutional
construction: The visitor book as a sacred Jewish stage

The
Ammunition Hill commemorative visitor book serves as a sacred
stage that facilitates and invites inscribed performances of
participation in the Zionist ethno-national civil religion. While I
have elsewhere argued for a performative view of this book , I
propose that the book functions as a stage insofar as it is construed
by its users as a consecrated Jewish media. In other words, the
semiotics of performance, on the one hand, and Jewish symbolism
surrounding national commemoration, on the other, are brought to the
fore as the notions of “sacred” and of “stage”
become mutually confirming. This unique condition is attained by a
number of contextual framing cues, by which the sacred function and
the national-performative function are joined, materially and
symbolically.

First,
while visitor books are typically located near sites’ and
attractions’ point of exit, where they allow visitors to
recapitulate their experiences and comment on their overall visit, at
the Ammunition Hill Museum the book is located in one of the
innermost halls. It is positioned in the hall that is near the Golden
Wall of Commemoration and
the eternal flame, where a low and solemn voice of a male narrator
continuously recites the names of the fallen soldiers, their military
affiliations and ranks, praising their youthful beauty and innocence.
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 of the typical location of visitor books,
because it invites acts of ideological and emotional participation in
a national rite, rather than reflections on a completed visit.

Second,
the book’s framing as a scared stage is further augmented by
the psychical structure on which it rests. The book 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 functions as a 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 book’s platform a
particularly 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—elevated—zone.

Figure
1: Book and hall: Solemn national spaces

Here
again the sacred function of the book is cued. The special
construction cues a sacred function, because it suggests that the
book is not a bureaucratic document that is meant to capture
information about visitors (names, dates of visit, etc.), nor even
impressions regarding the visit, but a cherished medium that invites
ritualistic acts in which visitors may engage in situ as part of
their embodied participation in national commemoration. This framing
is further augmented by the fact that the book is the central exhibit
in the hall where it is located (see Figure 1, above). This
arrangement, too, frames the book as a unique medium, which demands
special attention on behalf of the visitors.

Note
that because the book is located as in a special public space inside
the museum, the entries visitors inscribe in it immediately become
elements of the commemorative (Jewish) display at the site.
Here is a transformative medium, where individual inscriptions 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 of the book 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 book’s
pages and their design. In terms of materiality, the book is a heavy
and sizable volume that includes 100 thick pages made not of paper
but of parchment. The size and material of the book’s pages
offer a point of interface between text and texture, where inscribing
practices are granted a particular embodied sense. In terms of visual
design, each of the book’s pages is printed with a vertical
line of four large symbols (Figure 2, below). These include (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 Ammunition Hill (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-national 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.

The
framing cues that I briefly described suggest that the book can be
conceptualized as a sacred stage or media, serving to embody Zionist
ethno-national ideology. First, due to the symbolic and material ways
that the book is framed (its potentialities) and the populations that
can and do access it (its usage)—recall that Jews exclusively
visit the site—the pages of the visitor book embody exclusive
ethno-national Jewish spaces. Moreover, the materiality of the
book conjures particular embodied ways of interacting with it, which
index traditional Jewish practices. The respected pedestal on which
the book lies, which demands readers and writers to stand or to lean,
the book’s parchment pages, which clearly echo the material of
the Jewish Sepher Torah (or Torah Book), and the elevation of
the entire space surrounding it—all are symbolic and at the
same time all offer a stage on which Jewish practices can be observed
and performed.

Figure
2: Sacred text(ture)s: Logos and inscriptions on parchment

Finally,
the nature of the object of the visitor book, and much of the display
in the museum, concern literacy related objects and activities.
In fact, the largest category of exhibits in the museum consists of
textual objects. This detail is not coincidental and suggests that
the site holds a particular textual ideology. The
museum’s visitor book is such a central device because it
embodies the site’s textualist ideology, and as such it does
not only absorb meaning (in the form of visitors’ entries), but
also projects it: its presence in situ says something about the site
and its literacy-related orientation.

There
are obvious reasons why literacy would receive prominence in this
memorial museum. First, because it conjures “traditional
[Jewish] motifs and representations” . Further, presenting
handwritten documents is an effective way of claiming authenticity
(in tourism in general, handmade products have a special value
because they index their creators). In Sabra (native Israeli)
culture, where informal and un-institutionalized modes of
communication—notably handwriting—are highly esteemed and
regarded as “authentic,” this quality enjoys a particular
cultural accent . Lastly, literacy in general and specifically the
association to Jewish symbolism serve to construct an image of the
moral Israeli; after all, what is commemorated at the site is
a battle, an instance of institutionalized brutality and violence.
For the Sabra worldview, which aspires to liberalism and humanism,
these events suggest a moral issue that requires an adequate
resolution. Literacy here tells that the warriors commemorated are
portrayed as literate and educated; they were “men of the
sword,” but also “men of the pen” (savage but
noble, etc.)

More
generally, the construction of the visitor book and with it the
linguistic ideology index for the (Jewish) visitors Jewish practices
.

Of
course, from the perspective of national identity, literacy brings to
mind Anderson’s famous work, which also focuses on acts of
reading, and how these allow the creation of imagined communities and
consequently nationhood across large spaces. With regards to the
Ammunition Hill visitor book, 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.

Inscribed
performances: Performing sanctities and blasphemies

The
fact that the spaces of the museum and of the visitor book therein
are institutionally cued so as to elicit national Jewish sacredness,
does not necessarily imply that visitors—construed as
users/consumers—indeed understand these cues or comply with the
ideological agenda they promote. The fact is that only a
third of the visitors who arrive at the hall where the book is
located approach it, and about 10% of
these chose to inscribe in it. Hence the
majority of visitors do not respond to the invitation and simply pass
on the opportunity offered by the book. These findings are
actually not surprising when considering the observations, which
indicate that quite typical of museum goers, many visitors to the
Ammunition Hill site are sometimes in a hurry, tired, bored,
preoccupied with social interactions (within their groups or
families) or otherwise disinterested.

That
been said, the book overflows with inscribed acts of consecration, in
the shape of commemorative visitor book entries that have various
characteristics of religious language . The first illustration to be
discussed (Example 1, below), was chosen because it is characteristic
of normative entries in this book, i.e. entries that employ the
sacred register of national commemoration with the aim of
accomplishing a commemorative (inscribed) performance. Following its
discussion, entries which do not perform normative or
confirmative voices will be examined.

Example
1

“In
their death they commanded us to live”

Thanks
to the courageous fallen [soldiers] on

Ammunition
Hill, we and our children can

stand
here presently in unified

Jerusalem.

Holly
are these men.

The
Shiffman Family

Hadera

19.10.05

This
illustration is typical of a normative, i.e. confirmative entry,
because it affirms the ideological agenda of the
national-militaristic heritage site: it repeats the transcendent
tenets of Zionist ethno-national civil religion, in its commemorative
facet, namely the (casual) connection between past and present (and
future) and in this case, the justification of the Israeli occupation
of East Jerusalem (and more broadly, of the entire West Bank). In
this and in other entries, the (mythic) past is populated by
sacrificial death, which enables life in the present. Therefore the
dedication on behalf of those living—through remembrance and
commemoration—to those who fell.

It
is not only the aims that are at stake here, but also the means,
which are conveyed confirmatively: the visitors’ inscribed
performance conveys that they have understood and internalized the
sacred register of commemoration. This is conveyed lexically (through
the choice of words, such as “Holly,” and by using
reference (citation, paraphrasing, etc.) to the discourse of
commemoration presented at the site. The entry’s opening
sentence is a direct quote (specifically marked as such by the
inscribers). Other varieties of sacred discourse make reference to
the pool of ethno-national(ist) idioms and icons, which include such
expressions as, “May Their Memory be a Blessing,” “Next
Year in Jerusalem,” “Jerusalem of Gold,” “For
the Glory of the State of Israel,” and icons such as the Star
of David and the Menorah (the Jewish candelabrum). We are reminded
that in order for performance to be effective, i.e. performative,
some aspect of repetition of authority should be exercised . Another
common stylistic feature which serves to mark the entry as
ritualistic and scared, concerns a direct address to the dead
soldiers. Entries that open or close with such expressions as,
“[T]hank you for dying for the Land of Israel,” are also
common in these book . Lastly, note that the entry above is not
preceded by the acronym “bh” or “bsd”
(In God’s Help), which typically precedes entries written by
Observant Jews. This means that the inscribers were most likely not
Observant Jews, which delineates the fact that when it comes to
national commemoration, the sacred register is specifically employed.
In all of these cases, inscribing entries facilitates the assumption
of a particular “inhabitable specking role,” through
which sanctification is accomplished .

Confirmative
entries amount to the majority of inscriptions in these commemorative
visitor books. Yet leafing through their pages clearly reveals acts
of violation and desecration. While statistically, violating entries
amount to less that 4% of the overall number of entries, they are
salient because they express critique rather than admiration and
affirmation, or, in the context of civil religion, performances of
blasphemies rather than sanctities. Also, they are highly visible
because the laws of saliency of this stage concern not only sheer
(quantitative) distribution, but also visibility (iconicity). The
next illustration (Example 2, Figure 3, below), is of a Hebrew text
that is inscribed on the space of an entire visitor book page (which
is usually occupied by 6-10 entries), a fact which clearly grants it
visual saliency.

Example
2

Bsd

Boo
to Sharon

who
made life bitter

for
Haredim [Ultra-Orthodox Jews]

and
[one] need[s] to blow up his

belly
with a needle.

From
Ben Ezra

Figure
3: Boo Sharon

The
mention of the name Sharon refers to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli
prime-minister at the time of inscribing the entry (around May,
2005). Publicly expressing a desire to stick a needle into Sharon’s
belly and to blow him up, are symbolic expressions of radical disdain
not only from the person of Ariel Sharon. Recall that like most
Israeli prime-ministers, Sharon too was a decorated general.¹
Hence an attack on Sharon carries with it symbolic value of “blowing
up” the Zionist association of militarism and nationalism.
Typically, the inscriber’s motivation is revealed—in this
case anger directed against Sharon on behalf of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish
groups. What is interesting is the fact that the stage of the
ethno-national commemorative book was found appropriate for
inscribing this entry. In light of the symbolic context, the entry is
not simply a hate graffiti that could have been inscribed anywhere,
but a situated performance that recognizes what the site—and
the visitor book therein—stand for, and wishes to “stick
a needle” and deflate the Zionist ethos and narrative that the
site recites.

Entries
of this type express violations of various degrees, which originate
with non- or anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox visitors. To some degree,
the occurrence of these entries is accounted by the urban location of
the Ammunition Hill, which is in vicinity to ultra-orthodox
neighborhoods (Ramat Eshkol).

Lastly,
figure 2 clearly shows that the page on which the entry was written
was torn off the book and crumpled. The story behind this inscription
is that there were additional large hate inscriptions, directed
against Sharon and Zionism, which were dealt with by the curator in
charge (who covered them with erasing marker liquid). Such
interventions on behalf of the staff are rare. However, at some
point, one of the site’s maintenance personnel got extremely
upset with these inscriptions and at a moment or rage tore the page
off, conducting thus an act of desecration on top of the violating
inscription itself. He was then was made to return the page to its
place in the book, where the inscription has not been erased (which
is how I found it in the archive).

If
this and similar entries express anti-Zionist motivated violations of
the sacred ethos of national commemoration, then the illustration
below is representative of violations that express what some Israeli
sociologists term Neo-Zionist (counter-)narrative . Hence, example 3
is typical of a cluster of entries that were written around the time
of Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Gaza Strip (August,
2005). These entries perform condemnation of the Zionist narrative
that is celebrated via commemoration at the site.

Example
3

With
the completion of the deportation of Jews from Gush Katif ²

a
museum needs to be built

a
memorial

in
the memory of a country

that
was severed, destructed and vanished

in
the hands of evil and damned people

with
no heart, with no pity

The
interesting point with this entry, over and above the violation it
performs, is its reflexivity. The entry’s focus concerns the
very apparatuses through which national commemoration and sanctity
are performed, namely museums, memorials and rituals. The (unsigned)
inscriber suggests that alternative sites and rituals should be
constructed in order to commemorate the “destructed” Gush
Katif. By doing so, the inscriber does not dissociate notions of
sacredness from sites of commemoration, but rather protests and
suggests that national (Zionist) commemoration is erroneous. Entries
of this type, both inside the visitor book and outside Ammunition
Hill, de-legitimize the association between Judaism as understood and
practiced by some and the Zionist Movement. Note that the Hebrew term
used for the word “memorial” (Yad Vashem) is a
particularly charged one, because it is the name of the official
National Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Site
in Jerusalem. The entry is thus inter-discursive, because it alludes
to the claims of settlers in Gush Katif, who drew comparisons
between their state and the state of Jews in the Holocaust.

The
final illustration (Example 4, Figure 4, below), presents an act of
desecration of a rather different ideological background, and
concerns the politics of ethnicity in (Jewish) Israeli society and
specifically within the Israeli army. The entry was produced
sometimes around January, 2006.

Example
4

Golani
respect!!

[an
image of a tree]

All
the paratroopers shall die!! [an image of a crossed out snake]

[an
image of footsteps]

I
was here…

Figure
4: Anti-commemoration: Ethnic desecration

Golani
is an infantry brigade which has a long standing rivalry with the
Paratrooper brigade. The icon of the first is a (green) tree while
the icon of the latter is a (red) snake. The entry may be understood
as an occurrence within this rivalry, which celebrates Golani over
the Paratroopers. This entry accomplishes this celebration by
expressing a desire for the death of the paratroopers. This act is
expressed through both discursive and iconic means, which amount to a
“hybrid entry” that effectively enjoys the communicative
resources made available in and by the book. This act’s meaning
could have been limited only to the content of intra-military
rivalry, but for the fact that the Ammunition Hill celebrates the
paratrooper Brigade and is associated with this brigade. The site
and the museum present many pictures and heroic tales of the
legendary paratroopers, who were the first to arrive at and to
“liberate” the Western Wall. The symbolic execution of
the paratroopers that the entry accomplishes, rather than their
commemoration and preservation, is actually directed at the
Ammunition Hill site and the (ethno-)national narrative it tells.

The
meaning performed by the entry is even a more complicated, because
the Golani and the Paratrooper brigades have different popular images
of men and masculinities associated with them. While paratroopers are
associated with older images of elite Sabra masculinity, usually of
Ashkenazi background (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe), the
popular image of Golani soldiers is that of a rougher model of
masculinity, usually of Mizrahi background (Jews who immigrated to
Israel from Muslim countries). Hence within the frame of Israeli
politics of ethnic identity, an assault on the Paratrooper brigade
carries ethnic hues, and amounts to an assault on Ashkenazi hegemony.
It is directed at the local politics of commemoration, which lie
beneath the sacred register, exposing the fact that sacred
ethno-national commemoration (and ethno-militarism) is a
prestigious cultural resource. As Weiss indicates, Israeli culture
of commemoration “ultimately presents itself as a key symbol
that cuts across historical periodizations and ethnic divisions.”
Hence we see that the entry’s violation is not limited to
(symbolically) executing rather than commemorating paratroopers, but
also to exposing or the politics behind national commemoration and
social prestige and mobility that are bound to it.

Conclusions

It
is no news that where norms exist deviations and violations soon
follow, and where sanctities exist blasphemies and profanities can be
expected. At the commemorative visitor book in the Ammunition Hill
National Commemoration Site, these dialectics assume the body of
inscribed Jewish performances. There are two points that account for
this. First, the stage for visitors’ discursive-cum-iconic
inscriptions is cued as a “Jewish” stage, which is to say
that it has the semblance of holly Jewish symbolism and rituals that
concern writing and reading. This staging is pursued intentionally
and ideologically, in line with Zionism’s “civil
religion,” notably with regards to the pivotal moments of
sanctified commemoration, sacrifice and emotions of profound
indebtedness.

Institutional
staging, however, supplies only one half of the overall semiotics of
the site, i.e. the invitation. The complementary half, i.e. the
response, is supplied by the visitors themselves, which, according to
the ethnographic observations, are solely Jewish. Hence the site as a
whole and within it the surfaces of the visitor book, on the one
hand, and the consumers that populate these spaces, on the other, are
exclusive (and excluding) Jewish.

The
second point with regards to the dialectics of inscribed Jewish
performances, concerns the discursive nature of the stage. As argued
above, the medium that serves in this occasion, i.e. handwriting, is
not coincidental. It, too, marks the stage and the utterances therein
as “Jewish” performances. It, too, alludes to the
esteemed symbolism of the written word—and of occasions of
reading and writing it—in traditional Jewish custom. The
visitor book emerges as a politically mobilized cultural site of
entextualization.

Within
these Jewish dialectics, most entries in the commemorative visitor
book, confirm the Zionist story that is told at the site. They do so
through repeating and reciting its ideological tenets and its scared
register of discursive and iconic national commemoration. Perhaps
more interesting, and definitely more intriguing are those entries
that do not confirm or affirm the narrative unfolded at the site and
refute the sacredness that the site endows. What is both interesting
and paradoxical about these violations, is that they do not express
secular or liberal worldviews, which aim to dissociate the civic
sphere from religious symbolism. Instead, these violations are
predominantly expressions of fundamentalist Jewish ideologies, which
view the conjoining of national and religious worldviews as
problematical.

References

1
Shimon Kahaner, who is the Head of the Ammunition Hill Association
of Friends and the institution’s central authority, is a close
friend of Sharon and has formerly served with him in the army.

2
Gush Katif is the Israeli name that designates the area where
Jewish settlements were built inside the Gaza Strip.

1