LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

shai ginsburgin the Jezreel Valley. Both the kibbutz in general and the geographical locationof this particular kibbutz were symbols of the success of Social-Zionist ideology,the success of transforming both land and man and creating an organic relationshipbetween them. Uri’s name is likewise saturated as one of the names mostidentified with Zionist discourses. Over and against the popular image of thepassive and detached exiled Jew, Uri seems to embody the Zionist ideal of thenative Hebrew: an instinctive farmer, an instinctive scout, a natural fighter andcommander.Moreover, many critics saw in Uri more than just an individual character.Shamir describes Uri as follows, leading his subordinates on a training session:Leading a company or a platoon, Uri was as if walking alone. The more of a commanderhe was – the more egotistical he was. […] He was a continuous-move of couples ofstrikes on a line that previously was incidental – and following them, a new path inthe mountains. He was hips that divided bushes and slaughtered their dry stems, hewas for women here and there, the unknown wives of his subordinates, an objectivenecessity, a part of what is called in life independent circumstances, interference,external factors. […] He was a vintager. And maybe, one day, he would return to this.Then he would be alone with his vine, making sure not to hurt its clusters. He wasthe one who would force a polished French-wrench to fix in their place stubbornscrews in a ‘corn-lister’ and leave the stamp of a lying body behind him on theground. […] He was a tanned, young Jew on the Majdal–Kurum road for a Britishpolice-car passing quickly, for Arab gasoline-drivers. He was a mischievous thief whopenetrated a few yards in the Banias village, untied donkeys from their knots, andafterwards left plucked-feather-marks all the way to Mansura. (Shamir 1947: 169–70) 9This quote is but a segment of a longer section that displays a tight rhetoricalstructure with the repetition of the anaphora ‘he was’ that appears more thantwenty times within the span of three pages. Reading this paragraph, Dan Mironargues that Uri ‘is not [only] a private individual, a soul with a particularexperience and development, but also the essence of the phenomenon of Uri,the new historical factor […]. At the moment he is nothing but a force,movement, action. In fact, “he is a hundred young men, if not more,” the NewHebrew youth’ (Miron 1975: 447). Indeed, the paragraph reads like a paean toUri. The repetition of the existential ‘he was’ inculcates Uri’s presence assomething transcending the merely human. The rhythm of these sentences,added to the accumulative effect of the anaphora, transfers Uri’s figure from thehistorical realm to a mythological one. Ultimately, Uri emerges as a mythologicalhero, a native god of the land.Uri’s death was seen primarily as the decisive moment of his mythical biography.Critics commonly perceived this death not as a personal one, but rather as representingthe willingness of the Hebrew natives of Palestine to take upon themselves thenational struggle for independence and even to sacrifice their lives heroically for the— 112 —www.taq.ir