Ginsberg, Problematics of Israeli/Palestinian Identity

During a filmed interview with Balagan’s German director, Andres Veiel, Jewish-Israeli actress, Madi Maayan, is portrayed exclaiming that “The Holocaust is the new religion. It is the opium of the masses in Israel.” Madi’s exclamation comes at the beginning of Balagan, a German-made documentary concerning the Israel–Palestine conflict as dramatized in the Israeli station play, Arbeit Macht Frei in ’Teutland Europa , and is repeated at the film’s conclusion. Suggested by Madi’s quote from Marx’s “A Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. An Introduction,” [1] is the controversial notion that the Holocaust has come to play an ideological role, as “Holocaust,” in the post–Holocaust state of Israel, a function which, insofar as the state of Israel supports capitalism, serves to bolster that support in the form of an ideational fetish with which the Israeli citizenry, the bulk of them Jews, presumably have come to identify.

Madi, the daughter of a Jewish-Czech Holocaust survivor and wife of Arbeit Macht Frei ’s Maghrebi Jewish-Israeli director, Dudi Maayan, qualifies her exclamation as a “provocation” and “a blasphemy,” ostensibly underscoring the critical function of her marxian quote and leading the spectator to assume that Balagan will apply it toward a problematization of Jewish-Israeli identification with “Holocaust,” that is, a dialectical critique of identity politics in Israel/Palestine. In addition, because another of Balagan’s central characters, Palestinian-Israeli Khaled Abu Ali, has also come to indentify with, indeed “believe in the Holocaust,” the spectator likewise is led to assume that this critique, should it develop, will entail analysis of the Israel–Palestine conflict as it overdetermines the significance of “Holocaust” in Jewish Israel.

Unfortunately, as we shall illustrate through a brief analysis today, such assumptions are never borne out, for while Balagan diverges significantly from both Arbeit Macht Frei and another, Israeli film based upon this same station drama, Don’t Touch My Holocaust ,[2] it proceeds not to critique Israeli/Palestinian identity politics as these are intricated by “Holocaust,” but to reinforce them in a manner that both travesties the Marxist dictum emphasized so overtly throughout the film and fundamental(isticall)y repeats the sorts of antisemitism and, by extension, anti–Arabism which ideologically are so much a part of what Marx’s famous dictum actually and instead aims to critique: the material, social and historical conditions for the implementation both of holocausts and of ethno-national conflicts such as the one riving Israel/Palestine, which Balagan appears so intent, but finally fails, to comprehend and understand in their material-historical profundity.

Balagan, an experimental—or, what some critics referred to as an “avant-garde”—documentary that appears both to reproduce and resituate the controversial Arbeit Macht Frei , was subject almost immediately upon its release to vociferous criticism and condemnation. While generally well-received in Germany, where it was screened commercially in several large cities, reception abroad, including Israel, Italy, and the U.S., was characterized by vitriolic pronouncements across the ethnic and religious spectrum against what generally was being considered Balagan’s offensiveness, hübris, and destructive representation of any and all of the perspectives it presumed to delineate and engage. These sorts of crticisms were levied even on the parts of the actors—resident players at the experimental Akko Theatre Centre located in the primarily Palestinian town of Akko—who themselves had been performing in Arbeit Macht Frei throughout the five months during which Veiel was filming Balagan, and even though the film received five prestigious, including two international, awards between the time of its completion in November 1993 and its official release in Spring 1994. [3]

Considering the degree of public anger and indignation evidently provoked by the film as well as the prestige of the awards it did garner, the number of critical reviews of Balagan has to this date been disproportionately low. Despite the fact that the film was so loudly and controversially received, furthermore, extant and available print media reviews, whether condemnatory or, on rare occasions, praising, articulated positions on it in veiled, subtle, indirect ways, as though the making of any ostensibly definitive statements about it would have been preceived as too engaged with, not to mention unequivocal regarding, a cinematic vehicle perhaps better left to the cultural-historical dustbin. [4] In short, and in sharp contrast to the historcial location of other Holocaust films that were also produced and distributed amidst controversy (e.g., Korczak, Saló, The Night Porter , Heimat, and Entre Nous ),[5] Balagan may be considerd a suppressed film—one which has accrued such an all-encompassing, if publicly underpronounced, controversiality—a “taboo” status, if you will, that even this very controverisality has been excluded fom public discourse, as though in a larger, abstract, and uncanny sense, the film were being positioned as an exemplar of Holocaust denial—and not, as we shall insist, as an instance of Holocaust historical revision no more nor less troubling than that of other revisionist Holocaust films.

As we have already briefly remarked, Balagan does forward Arbeit Macht Frei ’s depiction of provocative, or “blasphemous,” practices, most overtly by way of its nude portrayals of the play’s central female character, Madi Maayan, and one of its two central male characters, the Palestinian Khaled Abu-Ali, as well as of the play’s entire ensemble of characters/actors engaging in a carnivalesque ménage of extreme bodily acts. [6] Indeed Balagan may be said to engage in the dramatic praxis of “obscenity,” what cultural theorist Peter Michelson aptly defines as the “bringing onstage [of] what is customarily kept offstage in western culture,” a condition which presumably necessarily entails an aestheticization of the so-called un(re)presentable, “a perceptual alteration whereby the obscene, a species of the ugly, is reconstituted to a function akin to that of the beautiful” and henceforth takes on the simultaneous quality of the culturally offensive, perversely pleasurable, and socially threatening. [7] On this definition, the ostensibly most “obscene” aspect of Balagan—at least as far as goes bodily extremity—is its depiction of male (not least Palestinian) frontal nudity, which until now has generally been confined to Holocaust documentaries, where representation of the penis usually occurs vis-à-vis the male corpse. [8]

Yet this carnivalesque depiction—this veritable épater le bourgeois —is but part of an overall discursive and narrative-compositional structure across which several other, likewise “shocking,” but, for that, more properly conceptual aspects are inscribed that must be considered critically in order that the relationship we are partially conceding between Balagan’s “obscenity” and its suppression most fully be comprehended. These are: 1) the intereffectuation of bodily (or, what Madi refers to as “material”) and national-political “obscenity”; 2) the congealment of these interffectual discursive registers into what we will define is an ostensive, hyperreal locus of personal-identificatory sacrifice at the cinematic as much as narrative-textual registers; and, in relation, 3) the typological composition of the play’s three central characters, Madi, Khaled, and the Mizrahi Jewish–Israeli, Moni Yosef, at the structural nexus of this ostensivity into a super-protagonal triad articulated across, and organized thusly to allegorize, a racialized, aestheticized “Semite” whose thusly hyper-naturalized profanity interpellates the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in which it is imbricated as the ethico-moral exemplar of a transhistorical holocaustic telos bespeaking a “materiality” ultimately less Marxist in orientation (i.e., less critically symptomatic of the relations of social, including ideological, [re]production in the Middle East) than ludically postmodern (i.e., after Huizinga, functioning as an operational locus of ecumenical identification with, and cynical resignation to, such oppressive and exploitative social relations as these otherwise are inscribed ontotheologically, as the inevitable effect of a natural human fallibility, across the film.

The intereffectuation of bodily with national-political “obscenity” in Balagan occurs most prominently (although not necessarily most “shockingly”) via Madi, whose carnivalesque bodily practices are shown via narrative association or by more direct discursive articulation to contain a particular urgency with respect to the national-political register. One notes, for instance, the close ordering of shots of her attempting to scrape from her arm concentration camp numbers she’s tatooed there, or her extracting hidden food from her vagina during an anorexic binge, with singing/listening to Nazi anthems as these are compared by her to the “roaring animal noise” of the simultaneous “montrous” and pleasurable Zionist hymns (which she also sings and subsequently announces are “best” for her). The film-length positioning of these bodily-sensory linkages to the national-political, moreover, in the context of Madi’s application of Marx’s dictum on religion to the Israeli–Palestinian nexus would seem, at least, to underscore this intereffectuation, even to radicalize it. Indeed Madi insists during her apparently Marxist pronouncements that the “blasphemous” character of her performance is part of her aim to “provocate” the audience, “to do the anti–” to them, to make them understand the “material” significance of the Holocaust in Israel/Palestine—which she henceforth defines as the viscerally manifest experience of living in a “well,” a “big hole” or “wound”—a schwarze loch [“black hole”]—that is internalized to the point of one’s coming simultaneously to desire its evacuation (literally, by starving or purging the body in which it presumably is manifest) and the exposure (also literally, through corporeal and other sensorial exhibition) of the perceived necessity for such.

This extremely urgent desire of Madi to convey the national-political significance of the Holocaust through “provocative” visceral denigration and exposure is echoed, albeit more ambiguously, via the Palestinian Kahled, who is, at one and the same time, a supporter of Palestinian liberation and a holder of Israeli citizenship, and who admits, likewise at once, of “believing in the Holocaust” and sympathizing with its denial. Before explicating this, however, which will entail also analyzing its structural connection to the less “provocative,” Mizrahi Zionist, Moni, it behooves us to interrogate the second and third of Balagan’s significant structural aspects, in regard to which Khaled’s characterological problematic can better be understood: the congealment of Balagan’s register of obscenity into an ostensive locus of personal-identificatory sacrifice, or effacement, and the super-protagonal troping thereof by racialist means.

Following Jewish-Israeli theater critic, Keir Elam, “ostensive” refers to a condition under which the field of a performance and its narrative-textual parameters appear simultaneous to one another, such that the enactment itself of that performative/structural field comes to take ontological priority over any referential and/or diegetic content which these latter aspects otherwise would signify under more traditional dramatological conditions. [9] As implied by Madi’s performance, Balagan stages a cinematic internalization and estrangement of “Holocaust” apropos of its perspective on Arbeit Macht Frei . Indeed as with Balagan, Arbeit Macht Frei is not itself an “original” production but one based consciously upon another, similar, production: the Israeli play, Cherli Ka Cherli ,[10] which parodies a well-known and culturally entrenched Israeli practice known as massachet, a kibbutznik ritual comprising a communal meal and a lively series of non-linear, highly theatricalized performances. Cherli Ka Cherli ’s parody of massachet has aptly been described as “a web, a medley of literary extracts revolving around a single aspect of a certain feast...a mind drama [or] conceptual confrontation between personified notions.” [11] Arbeit Macht Frei is a likewise psychodramatic, non-linear, meta-theatrical production, its narrative revolving parodically around “a single aspect of a certain feast”—where “feast” is meant figuratively, as a bodily consumable (and expellable) Holocaust that may be confronted conceptually, vis-à-vis “Holocaust,” in the form of characters who together embody the Israeli problematics thereof. [12]

Arbeit Macht Frei ’s psychodramatic confrontationalism is not limited, however, to the/its onstage, intersubjective “diegesis.” While not denying that field or its critical significance, Arbeit Macht Frei supplements that field with a broader, diacritical notion that characterological problematics refract the ideological problematics of the social real in which both audience and play are situated, whereupon both audience and play are implicated in a dialectic of shared feeling which cannot be understood, much less resolved, via practices by which this dialectic is suppressed or denied.

Hence Arbeit Macht Frei , in contrast to Cherli Ka Cherli , engages in practices associated in theatrical circles with the “total theater” aesthetic of Polish director/guru, Jerzy Grotowski [13]; in film studies with the object-relations therapeutics emphasized most recently in Holocaust cultural theory by Dominick LaCapra; [14] and in philosophical circles with the “aesthetic of reception” theorized by (former Wehrmacht S.S. officer) Hans Robert Jauss [15]—practices in which characterological personification of societal problematics become hypostatized into “reified,” “sociopsychic archetypes,” super-protagonal figures whose status as components of the so-called “reality convention” has deteriorated and who henceforth function not as loci for the sort of cathartic audience identification elicited by more classical dramatic genres but, apropos of the Ricoeurian “metaphor” or the Whitean “trope,” as rhetorico-poetic means by which the catharsis normally experienced vis-à-vis the stage is now perceived immanent to the social-interactive, post–theatrical context, a context in which it now becomes imperative for audience members to (re)enact the scene of theatrical confrontation (with which they presumably identify at the visceral, pre-symbolic level) and thereby to transpose the process of understanding and potentially resolving the dialectic in which are implicated both play and audience onto the various non-cultural terrains of social life, including the “imaginary institution” of that life. [16] By extension, this basically post–cathartic, self-sacrificial, liberation-theoretical aesthetic delimits the “ostensivity” of Arbeit Macht Frei ’s stage–audience relationship, which is effectuated not only via characterology, moreover, but formalistically, primarily by bringing the audience literally into the field of performance—physically, via direct address, or by the device of the mobile, or, station, play—so that they are positioned as actual participants in, rather than as mere spectators of, it, compelled basically to move with the performance at the aesthetic-philosophical crux of the discursive and corporeal registers it also has been mapping, such that spatio-temporality too becomes subject to hyperrealization, and the “ostensive” enactment of the performative/structural field takes on a priority even over this primary, existential dimension.

In Balagan, this “ostensivity” and, in relation, its super-protagonality, entails the extension of these sorts of effects to the hyper cinematic register, which is accomplished partially through the device of post–theatrical interviews that either literally depict mobility in the (post–)theatrical context (e.g., Veiel driving with Khaled back and forth across national borders into the Occupied Territories to visit his impoverished family, and with Moni, likewise back and forth across borders, into the Golan Heights to visit his Settler brother) or inscribe mobility more figuratively, through the device of narratological mediation. The implementation of this second device is not unrelated to, and even in places extenuates, that of the first, the post–theatrical, especially travelling interviews. Its effect, moreover, is super-protagonal, as it involves a congealment of the film’s central characters, both across and by way of their differential movement and discursive positioning, into a racialized, “post–semitic” triad overdetermined in the similarly post–theatrical positioning of Madi as its immanent-ideal “imaginary.”

First, at the discursive level (and to return to the question of Khaled’s “obscenity”), it must be noted that while Khaled, albeit not without ambivalence associated with his ethno-nationality, including its Islamic determinants, appears frontally nude onstage, Moni, an observant Sephardi, does not. By the same token, while Khaled is figured as a “shifter” for his ethno-nationally grounded oscillation between disvowal of and “belief in” the Holocaust and, by extension, the possibility of a multicultural and/or binational Israel/Palestine, Moni is figured as fixed in his Zionist convictions despite his express sympathy for Khaled’s Palestinian plight. Notwithstanding—indeed in view of—this differentiation, economized discursively into an asymmetrical dialectic of constancy–variability, Khaled and Moni are linked across an ethico-moral polemus marked, again discursively, by an almost Spinozean articulation-by-degree, to the question of bodily exposure as posed within the Islamic/Judaic context. Insofar as the fulcrum of this linkage is the actual public exposure by Khaled of his penis, however, and insofar as the sympathy Moni does hold for Khaled is itself expressed viscerally, by physcial contact, including especially a kissing embrace between the two men (which, by the way, highlights mutually balding heads), and insofar as Khaled’s penis, like that of the albeit hidden Moni—but surely unlike that of the omnicient Veiel—is circumcised, the matter of their linkage, including its national-political significance, is substantialized, such that the totality of that linkage comes to comprise nothing less than the ethno-genealogical foundations of a “socius,” a communal-identitarian organicism of the Islamic/Judaic context—known commonly, if erroneously, as the “semitic.”

Considering the fact that the term, “semitic,” signals a racialist paradigm inaugurated in the late nineteenth century during the rise of European nationalism, such a substantialization is troubling, to say the least. Rather than present a critique of the racializing process itself, however, which would have entailed recognition of the historical indigeneousness of both Judaism and Islam to the Middle-East and, by extension, a critique of the (neo)colonialist enterprise, hailed variously as “westernization” or “democratization” by European/Euroamerican powers and the transnational corpor ate interests they service, usually under a “Judeo-Christian” rubric and with primary and overriding reference to the legacy of the Holocaust, as this ultimately ascribes an atavistic nature to the Jewish/Arab nexus, Balagan forecloses cine-metaphysically on the dialectics of this substantialization. This it does meta-narratologically, and recuperating the ultra-“obscenity” signified by the female, Ashkenazi (i.e., white, Euro-Israeli), Madi—whose name in Arabic, not coincidentally, means “messiah”—whose “ostensive” performances of “blasphemy” mediate and, in turn, underscore, in the form of interviews as well as theatrical and post–theatrical displays of “the anti–” as these are positioned strategically throughout the narrative, the national-political conflict signified by the Khaled–Moni polemus as this itself is defined, crucially, as, at once, an ethico-moral and actual physical relationship to the Jewish/Islamic penis and its “semitic” ethno-genealogy.

Although Moni and Khaled remain politically and ideologically unreconciled by the conclusion of Balagan, for instance, a conceptual ostensivity is established between them by the positioning of Madi’s second “opium of the Israeli masses” proclamation as a narrative aside within the context of a crucial scene in which Arbeit Macht Frei ’s cast and audience participate as a group in publicly televised, individual confessions of their feelings regarding the Holocaust, such that the apparent organicism of the Moni–Khaled polemus is transposed onto a hyper-narrative, multiperspectival, immanent-transcendent, virtual register now and again qualified by Madi as religious ideology—but an ideology (and this is the crux) by/for which one performs, accordingly and repeatedly, the denigration and public exposure, the sacrifice of one’s body, henceforth conceived as essentially corrupt for its imbrication in worldly, in this case ethno-nationalist, conflict, to something “other” than a body, “other” than a national-political conflict, and “other” than the historical, material real on which sole grounds is possible the effective dismantling and overturning of the social relations and conditions which make self-sacrificial desire for, and identification with, the “other,” the unreachable nostalgic future—“the opium of the people”—both possible and necessary in the first place.

With this in mind, one is hard-pressed to limit explanation of Balagan’s suppression to its bodily or even national-political “obscenity,” as these are hardly ideologically “obscene” vis-à-vis the Palestine–Israel conflict. Yet Balagan is a limit-text, going farther than most films, if any, in exposing and problematizing that conflict. In effect, Balagan is itself a self-sacrifical, or, self-effacing, production, a film bearing a “super-protagonal” significance upon the medium of “ostensivity.” Henc we may conclude by asking if Balagan’s suppression, apropos of its effectivity, hasn’t in fact been due to its offering such a powerful Christian critique of the Palestine–Israel conflict that it makes the perfect cine-cultural stand-in, or red herring, for any more radically grounded cinematic perspectives thereupon, ones that perhaps would adhere more closely and strenuously to the political and economic significance of Marx’s “opium of the masses” passage, ones that perhaps would be attuned more sharply and unequivocally to the crucial difference an historical rather than substantial materialist analysis might bring to a critique, conceptualized by way of that radical analytic, of the transnational political-ideological function of “Holocaust” across the middle-eastern terrain at the post–Soviet close of the Twentieth Century.

Endnotes

[4]. Particularly negative reviews included: Susan Gerhard, “Blasphemera,” San Francisco Bay Guardian 20 July 1994: 38; Leah Garchick, rev. in San Francisco Chronicle 25 July 1994: E6; Chris Vognar, “Jewish Films on the Edge,” The Daily Californian (n.d.); and Dennis Harvey, rev. in Variety 19 Dec. 1994–1 Jan. 1995: 76-77. See also Ilsa Lund, rev. in Moving Pictures 17 Feb. 1994; Hajo, rev. in Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung 18 Feb. 1994; Sven Siebert and Evelyn Gratzfeld, rev. in Dok Festival Leipzig 30 Nov. 1993; Margit Voss, rev. in Neues Deutschland 3 Dec. 1993; and Herbert Seifer, rev. in Neue Zürische Zeitung 9 Dec. 1993. One might in addition note Yosefa Loshitzky, “Memory in Transition: Second Generation Israelis Tell the Holocaust,” Society fo Cinema Studies Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, 1997, which draws a negative comparison between Balagan and Don’t Touch My Holocaust, on grounds that the German production network of Balagan funded the latter in lieu of the former, thus expropriating for German purposes (never clearly explicated by Loshitzky) the subject-matter of the Holocaust from its prsumed rightful owner, the (Mizrahi-)Jewish Israeli, director Tlalim. For a more sustained interrogation of this comparison, see Terri Ginsberg, “Regarding the Holocaust: Politics of Hermeneutics in Four Contemporary Holocaust Films,” dissertation, New York University, 1997.

[6]. E.g., spinning topless in a washtub while ingesting and expelling mush; flailing wildly while enclosed in a glass cage filled with suffocating layers of shredded paper; clinging topless to a wire-mesh fence with arms akimbo in a christic posture and lower bodily stratum clothed in diaper-like rags; hanging upside down topless from a swinging rope; beating themselves and one another with rubber truncheons while dancing naked on raised platforms; blaring incoherently at a microphone with tongue tied back and teeth blackened to connote rotting; and performing acrobatics in a military uniform strongly reminiscent of the Nazi S.S.

[13]. Grotowski is known, inter alia, for his hyper-Christian mystery plays, Apocalypse cum figuris and Akropolis, each of which, not incidentally, was filmed, and the latter of which is set in Auschwitz. See: Zbigniew Osi_ski, Grotowski and His Laboratory, trans. and ed. Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay (New York: PAJ Publishers, 1986); Tadeusz Burzy_ski and Zbigniew Osi_ski, Grotowski’s Laboratory (Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1979); and Jennifer Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski (London and New York: Methuen, 1985).

[16]. Kaynar op cit., pg. 289. Kaynar also refers to this liberation effectivity, but as a “redemption” (290). In addition, and as regards the notion of reification, he deploys the constitutive (Kantian) phenomenological concept of “noumenality,” which he sees “eradicated” by a critical refiguration presumably enabled via the reception-aesthetical dynamic (293). Regarding the concept, “imaginary institution,” see Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (1975; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

“Balaganand the Problematics of Israeli/Palestinian ‘Identity’”

Endnotes