LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

etween myth and historywith minor changes it was accepted as the official Zionist eulogy for the Jewishvictims in the armed conflict in Palestine and later in the State of Israel (Segev1999: 107). Moreover, it sets, in fact, an interpretative model effective for whatit says as much as for what it does not say. Changing the traditional model,Katzenelson’s eulogy appropriates the acts and death of individuals for thecommunity via the establishment of a communal commemorative act. This isdone not only by identifying the dead with a community, but also by turningtheir death into a symbol of the communal ideology. The latter is marked here bysuch catchwords as ‘labour’, ‘plough’, ‘peace’, and ‘glory’ in a hegemonicdiscourse that equates the Zionist project with the agricultural settlement andcolonisation of the land – that is, Social-Zionist ideology. At the same time, thetransformation of the individual death into communal symbols leaves nothingpersonal in this eulogy: all individual attributes are turned into nouns thatfunction as generic adjectives (sons and daughters, people of work and peace),and even personal names are omitted. For my discussion, it is of particular interestthat the precise circumstances of death are erased here. What remain are thereality of death, on the one hand, and the memory of the community, on theother hand.Drawing together Trumpeldor, Uri and the critics, I would argue that criticsexamined He Walked in the Fields and its protagonist against Katzenelson’syizkor. Despite the ambiguities marring Uri’s death, its reception is surprisinglysimilar to the reception of Trumpeldor’s. Faced with the massive killing in theJewish-Arab conflict in Palestine, critics looked to the novel for a reaffirmationof the myth of the Zionist settlement of Palestine, as Trumpeldor represented.Those who approved of the novel read Shamir’s Uri as a literary realisation ofthe archetypal image of the eulogy’s Zionist settler: the man who was forcedfrom behind the plough to protect his land and home. Not the least among Uri’sarchetypal characteristics is his symbolising power, not unlike that of Trumpeldorand his comrades, of a hegemonic Zionist ideology.Following Yael Zerubavel’s discussion of the formation and function of themyth of Trumpeldor within Zionist culture, one can note structural similaritiesin constructing the myths around both Trumpeldor and Uri. First, in both cases,the characters’ personal sacrifice is seen as breaking away from traditionalJewish martyrdom, which is centred on Jewish passivity and victimisation.Second, in both cases, the individual death is elevated beyond its immediatehistorical (or textual) context into a symbolic text that serves as a paradigm forunderstanding other communal experiences. 23 Third, both cases present acertain ambiguity between the actual (or textual) death and the myths correspondingto it. As Yael Zerubavel notes, in the case of Tel-Hai, the actualwithdrawal from the outpost was erased from the ‘official’ story and transformedinto a myth of successful defence and a historical edict never to abandon a— 121 —www.taq.ir