HANNAN HEVER
[1]
In this chapter, I will attempt to reconstruct the complex and tortuous process whereby Abba Kovner (poet, partisan, refugee, and survivor of the destruction of European Jewry) encountered the Palestinian refugees as a Jewish fighter in the 1948 war who bore responsibility for their plight.
In order to understand the nature of this process, through which Kovner, in his poetry, created a link between the Holocaust and the Nakba, it is worth reading the second-to-last chapter of a cycle of the long poem (poema) Predah me-ha-darom (A Parting from the South), entitled “Sderat broshim ba-derekh tzafonah” (“A Road of Cyprus on the Way North”). Kovner wrote his long poem in 1949, after having participated in the 1948 war as an education officer in the Givʻati Brigade, fighting against the Egyptian army in the Negev. In this chapter, he describes the end of the war and his and the brigade’s departure from the south.1 In the first chapter of the poem, the speaker addresses the reʻim (“boys,” in Shirley Kaufman’s translation), a well-known term at that time (as found in Haim Guri’s “Shir ha-reʻut” [“The Friendship”]) for comrades in arms, which entered Hebrew literature from the heroic culture of the Red Army (in which use of the term “comrades” was widespread) in the World War II:
I
Slowly, boys. They march behind us. They go north—
What a blind day! They hold our paths in their hands.
A step falls in each step. Is anyone up ahead?
A shadow clutches its shadow. My heroes are silent.
My shadows, shadows. No use to walk behind us!
My heroes don’t remember the years of our lives.2
Ostensibly, the focus of this part of the long poem is the Israeli soldiers who fell in battle and whose memories haunt the living fighters. At the end of the war, the fallen trail the living like shadows as they make their way home, northward, after parting from the south (as in the title of the poema) where they fought. This interpretation is explored at length in Dan Miron’s reading of the poem:
In the concluding poem, the author writes unequal couplets, marching northward, along the road of Cyprus, in two columns: the soldiers who had survived the battles part from the south and return home, northward. Behind them, or perhaps in front of them, stride the shadows of the dead; the two columns, the dead and the living, sharing a great and deep silence between them. It is therefore hard to tell the difference between them. The dead are shadows, but so are the living heroes—stunned, belonging neither here nor there (‘My heroes don’t remember the years of our lives.’) The real thus blends with the imaginary, the living merges with the dead, ‘a step falls in each step,’ ‘a shadow clutches its shadow.’ It is unclear who is ahead and who is behind. The day is bright, but it is also ‘a blind day.’ The poet tries in vain to awaken, separate, return the dead to their rest in the desert: ‘My shadows, shadows. No use to walk behind us!’ he warns, but to no avail. The heroes have forgotten their lives and the dead walk in their midst.3
The phrase “they hold our paths in their hands” would appear to indicate that it is the fallen soldiers who lead the way—and who determine the agenda of the young State of Israel, after the war. Nevertheless, “it is impossible to know who is following and who is leading, just as they could not know who would be struck by blind, cruel fate. If we consider all of these things, then we will understand the great outcry that the entire book was meant to express and with which it concludes: ‘Oh, my friends, why are you silent? If the silence is not.’”4 Indeed, the reaction of the surviving fighters to the presence of their fallen comrades in their lives, as “a shadow clutches its shadow,” is one of thundering silence, as “my heroes are silent.” The living cannot conduct dialogue with the dead as living subjects.
Kovner thus undermines the status of the central figure of the living dead in Hebrew poetry.5 Dan Miron saw in A Parting from the South an expression of Kovner’s refusal to accept the existential and national cult of death, as developed in the poetry of the national poet Nathan Alterman in the 1940s. Miron attributed this to Kovner’s awareness of the need to make a sharp distinction between the world of the dead and that of the living, since “the final chapter of the poema (the one preceding the conclusion, “Ha-daf asher nishʼar ba-kvish” (“The Page that Was Left Behind on the Highway”) is dedicated mostly to the poem “Mot dambam” (“Dambam’s Death”),6 which is a detailed response to the Altermanian myth of the dead fighter and his love…. Dambam calls upon Shlomit, his beloved, not to ‘touch’ his death and not to become attached to his shattered body ‘on the road at night,’ as such an attempt would give rise to a false and distorted attachment.”7
At the same time and, in fact, stemming from the very same doubts regarding the relevance of the Jewish casualties to the constitution of Jewish national life in the young state, the poem seems to offer another possibility: the identification of the shadows as Palestinian refugees fleeing those places conquered and destroyed by Israeli forces.
The possibility of reading the poem “A Road of Cyprus on the Way North” as referring also to the Palestinian refugees is strengthened by the poem “Shaʻarei ʻir” (“Gates of the City”), which opens the second of the “Marʼeh ḥolot” (“Mirage of Sand”) cycles. Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:
Who set fire to the city
And did not wake the city?
Its fields rise like parchment
Scorched for three nights.
I will not know the city
If a dog did not wake the city.
It burns like sunset
For three long nights [by a wanton hand].8
The city that was set ablaze was probably the Palestinian city of Beersheba, which fell to Israeli forces on October, 21, 1948—a fact that Kovner notes in his daf kravi (combat page or combat missive) on that day.9 Kovner, who served as an education officer in the Givʻati Brigade, wrote missives for raising the morale of the brigade’s soldiers. He wrote them in the framework of his activities as the Givʻati Brigade’s education officer during the fighting in the south—fighting aimed at breaching Egyptian lines, driving the Egyptian forces out of the southern part of the country, and breaking the blockade of the Jewish settlements in the Negev. The pages were known for the extreme terms in which they described the Egyptian enemy, regularly displaying the caption “Death to the Invaders!”—the very same caption Kovner used on the leaflets he wrote for the Jewish and Polish resistance in the Vilna ghetto, in which he called on them to rise up against the Nazi occupiers.10
The expression “a wanton hand” (yad ʻarelah, omitted in Kaufman’s translation) in reference to the soldiers of the Givʻati Brigade (to whom Kovner dedicated the poema: “To the Brigade—its name was Givʻati”) is consistent with the image of Picasso’s Guernica that he evokes to describe the Givʻati’s actions: “Torn and scattered—a sea of fallen helmets—hilltops / and Guernica on every hill. // “Guernica on every hill!” we listened to David.”11 Kovner draws a parallel between the conquest of Beersheba and the attack on Guernica, the Spanish city bombed and destroyed during the Spanish civil war by the Nazi Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937, during which attack 1,600 civilians were killed. Picasso’s famous painting Guernica is a heart-wrenching outcry against Nazi barbarism. As incredible as it may seem, in evoking this image, Kovner appears to compare the wanton cruelty of Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians of Beersheba to that of Nazi forces against the inhabitants of Guernica. The line “Guernica on every hill” makes this analogy even stronger because the word “hill,” givaa in Hebrew, refers directly to “Givʻati,” the name of the brigade.
It would seem that the poem “Kolot me-ha-givʻah” (“Voices from the Hill”), in the third of the “Mirage of Sand” cycles in A Parting from the South, should be read in a similar vein. The poem begins as follows:
This is Ḥirbet Fatatah!
Who set the fire in Khartiya and Ḥata?
A fire was set in Khartiya and Ḥata,
The rising fire—is it from Khartiya and Ḥata?
Fire rises from Khartiya and Ḥata
Is there anyone still in Khartiya and Ḥata?12
“The villages of Khartiya and Ḥata stood along the Majdal (Ashkelon)–Beyt Jobrin road, in the vicinity of today’s Kiryat Gat.”13 In asking “Who set the fire?” and “Is there anyone still in Khartiya and Ḥata?” the poema raises the question of responsibility for the Nakba, as it recounts the deadly violence and expulsion suffered by the Palestinians. The series of questions that Kovner asks here reinforces the reading of the poem “A Road of Cyprus on the Way North” as a description of Palestinian refugees traveling along the roads after having been driven from their destroyed homes—not merely as a parallel reading to that of the fighters returning from the south to their homes in the north but as the primary and essential reading. According to this reading, which highlights Kovner’s consciousness of the fate suffered by the Palestinians, the speaker appeals to his comrades, asking them to slow their march and, in so doing, take notice of the Palestinian refugees who “march [walk] behind us.” The difficulty in facing the Palestinian suffering that haunts the Israeli fighters, whose path “they hold…in their hands,” is reflected in the exclamation “What a blind day!” The keen presence of the Palestinians’ fate in the lives of the fighters, who feel the responsibility they bear for having been its cause, is illustrated by the phrases “a step falls in each step” and “a shadow clutches its shadow.” The speaker then asserts, in a critical voice: “My heroes are silent.” This voice is unable to respond to Palestinian suffering and give expression to the burden of the Israeli fighters’ responsibility. This interpretation is further reinforced by the poem’s end, in the following lines: “My shadows, shadows. No use to walk behind us! / My heroes don’t remember the years of our lives.” This passage reiterates the speaker’s awareness of the fact that they have forgotten or, more precisely, that they have been induced to forget the events of the Nakba. The presence of the Palestinian refugees in the lives of the fighters returning from battle becomes pointless, as the fighters no longer remember. The poem thus voices protest against the removal of the events of the Nakba from the moral and political consciousness of the young State of Israel, founded on the destruction of the Palestinian people.
Reuven Shoham addresses this duality in the following remarks on the chapter “Gates of the City”: “The reader finds it difficult to decide whether the city is an enemy city and the ‘wanton’ hand that set it ablaze is ours, or whether it is one of our cities and the wanton hand is that of the enemy.”14 Similarly, in “Voices from the Hill,” Shoham notes both the sense of guilt experienced by those who set fire to the “abandoned clay huts” and, following Hrushovski,15 the attacks perpetrated by the Egyptian enemy.16
The fact that the poem “A Road of Cyprus on the Way North” is constructed so that it might contain both of these antithetical meanings—fallen Jewish fighters and Palestinian refugees, side by side, opposite one another, and even in place of one another—fundamentally undermines the politics at the heart of military and national conflict, defined by Carl Schmitt as the contrast between friend and enemy.17 This is the principle of distinction between Jews and Gentiles that guided Jewish and then Zionist discourse practically from its inception. In order to justify its colonial violence, Zionism had to create a sharp distinction between the Jewish colonial and the Arab native. This provided the moral basis for validating Zionism’s own violence against the native other, while presenting violent resistance to the colonial act as terrorism: fundamentally different and, therefore, illegitimate.
In creating the possibility of mutual interchangeability between Jewish dead (contrary to prevailing Hebrew literary discourse, at the time, which sought to harness them for the constitution of national life) and Palestinian refugees (defeated and bereft and thus unable to contribute to the constitution of a Palestinian nation on the territory they no longer possessed), Kovner negated the Zionist principle of distinction. He blurred the boundary between Jewish suffering—comprising both the horrifying consequences of the Holocaust and the Jewish casualties of the 1948 war—and the suffering of Palestinians killed and driven from their homes. In so doing, Kovner entered a twilight zone in which it is clear that any parallel between the Holocaust and the Nakba is entirely without basis, yet equally clear that asserting a complete lack of commonality or comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba is also unconscionable. The rhetorical solution to this fundamental question of comparison and distinction lies in the creation of a dynamic twilight zone of semantic motion that manages to produce—as in the poetry of Avot Yeshurun—difference within similarity and similarity within difference.18
It is worth noting that the equivalence that Kovner suggests in the poema is between dead Israeli soldiers and Palestinian refugees and not between living Jewish soldiers and Palestinian refugees, as in S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. The narrator in Yizhar’s story is a victorious Israeli soldier, who creates a false symmetry between the fate of the Palestinians and his identity as a Jew who carries the burden of Jewish history in the diaspora. In drawing this analogy between the diasporic Jewish victim and the Palestinian victim, Yizhar denies through the use of irony the fact that, contrary to past Jewish weakness in the diaspora, he—as an Israeli Jew—is now the one with power, driving out the Palestinians.19
Such erasure of the asymmetry of power relations in representations of the expulsion opens the perpetrator’s path to self-exoneration—which is the function of Yizhar’s analogy between the Holocaust and the Nakba. Kovner takes a different approach, however. Having come to Palestine from the diaspora, he did not draw a baseless analogy between the Jewish conqueror and the diaspora Jew, and thus he did not completely erase the asymmetry in power relations. In so doing, he refused to give in to the Schmittian dichotomy between the Palestinians as a complete enemy and the Jewish army as a complete friend. By means of the Janus-faced composition of “A Road of Cyprus on the Way North,” he managed to create something in between, shaping the moral responsibility of the poem’s speaker, who denies the dichotomy of the Palestinian analogy between the Holocaust and the Nakba and denies the sweeping Zionist rejection of the existence of any analogy whatsoever between the two. From the Palestinian perspective, the Nakba was the direct result of the colonialist mechanism by means of which Europe exported to the Middle East the Juden Frage (“Jewish Question”), which they had tried to solve by heinous crimes. This kind of exporting of violence became the main reason for the bloody conflict between Palestinians and Jews. In this sense, the Palestinians are the victims, who paid a heavy price for Europe’s desire to resolve its “Jewish Question” once and for all by removing Jewish refugees from its territory and, to some extent, seeking to atone for its crimes. In A Parting from the South, however, which Kovner wrote after the Nakba, he rejected the Palestinian view that had correctly identified the violence as a colonialist “export” and had gone as far as drawing a full analogy, yet he opposed those who denied the possibility of any analogy between the Nakba and the Holocaust.
[2]
As Reuven Shoham20 has pointed out, the bold and complex approach that Kovner takes toward the Palestinian refugees in the poems of A Parting from the South appears to stand in sharp contrast to the well-known “combat pages” he produced only a short time before writing and publishing his poema—only months after the battles had ceased. This is, of course, a sharp thematic contradiction, but I would also like to note the extreme poetic contrast between the blatant expressionism of the combat missives21 and the neo-symbolism of A Parting from the South.
The conquest of the villages of Khartiya and Ḥata, which Kovner described after the war in “Voices from the Hill,” was reported in the combat page distributed on July, 19, 1948. Contrary to the description in the poem (included in A Parting from the South), the enemy in the combat page is clearly identified—with marked hostility and without question or doubt—as the Egyptian enemy. In the heat of combat, there is no room for questions like “Who set the fire in Khartiya and Ḥata?” or “Is there anyone still in Khartiya and Ḥata?” that appear in Kovner’s poem, which, as noted above, was written after the fighting had ended. The combat pages ignore the human element, the Palestinians inhabitants, treating the villages as military targets to be conquered.
Without a doubt, the condemnation of the Egyptian—and, to a lesser extent, the Palestinian—enemy reached its height in the analogy with the Nazis, from which Kovner, as noted above, distanced himself greatly in A Parting from the South. In the very first combat page, written following the first lull in fighting (beginning on June, 11, 1948), Kovner employed the analogy to its fullest immediate effect—revenge—in the following lines:
And the souls of six million—who did not live to see the day—call to us from the earth:
May great revenge be exacted—(Kovner [signed by Shimon Avidan]).22
Revenge, like artwork in Kant’s aesthetics, serves no practical purpose beyond itself and offers no solution or redress for the subject’s real future, as the subject remains trapped in a past she cannot change, while revenge offers nothing that may determine or change her future existence. Pure revenge is thus the complete negation of the one who executes it, as a subject who acts and exists in a reality beyond it. Revenge, therefore, is nothing but the reaction of a traumatic subject who seeks, through revenge—ostensibly directed at an external object—to act only upon himself, in order to try to put the pieces of his life back together. This revenge is the reaction of someone making a final effort to cope with the shattering of the Jewish subject during the Holocaust. In the words of Abba Kovner, “the Jews who remain can no longer be driven to despair, but they may become Europe’s new horror.”23 Only those who have been utterly shattered, who are no longer capable of despair, may resort to pure spectacle that does not change reality but which may result in their becoming “Europe’s horror.”
Revenge is the product of utter despair on the part of a subject who has been completely crushed. It can therefore be nothing more than an empty, final gesture: a doomed attempt to restore self-respect that has already been destroyed beyond repair. This is the main reason why the certain outcome of pure revenge—that is, revenge that exists only for its own sake—is the transformation of the moral autonomy of the enlightenment subject into a hermetic identity, closed within itself, requiring no external impetus or justification. The violence that such an avenging subject may employ can only be realized against itself and within its own confines. The complete emptiness of the gesture of revenge leaves no room for any positive content that might endanger its realization as an empty gesture. In other words, the necessary outcome of the ultimate and pure act of revenge carried out by an avenger who has basically lost interest in any object beyond himself is violence that can only be directed inward. The realization of pure revenge is, thus, in effect, an act of suicide.
Revenge carried out in the name of a nation may have the potential to resolve the debate between the primordial explanation for the existence of nations (Anthony Smith) and the explanation that nations are discursively constructed, imagined national communities (Benedict Anderson). It is true that revenge may express the violent reaction of an ancient people, but the emptiness of revenge and the absence of anything beyond itself suggest that it may be justified, as a national response, only on the basis of that emptiness. This justification of national violence (based on emptiness) renders a primordial explanation or justification for the existence of the nation superfluous, as it would not be seen (rightly so) as a Hegelian expression of a primordial essence.
In “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin formulated what he described as the antinomy that would exist “if justified means on the one hand and justified ends on the other were in irreconcilable conflict.”24 The fact that the violent means employed to achieve revenge stand in contradiction to its justified, albeit empty, ends lies at the heart of the paradox of revenge. Although, according to natural law, the execution of a Nazi is justified, it can achieve no ends external to the act of revenge itself, as “violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.”25
Here, both the means and the ends are just, and the antinomy between them forces the avenger—in search of justification for his violent means, denied to him by the sovereign to whom he is subject—to look to the sovereignty that he constitutes in himself and of himself.
Carl Schmitt characterizes Hamlet, who avenges his father’s murder, as one whose revenge enjoys legitimacy, inasmuch as he himself is sovereign and is the legal heir to the throne, as opposed to one who has exploited the legal system in order to seize the crown.26 Yet the antinomy of the avenger does not allow him, in principle, to accept any legal assistance from the sovereign. In other words, his revenge is ultimately realized outside the law, since “if positive law is blind to the absoluteness of ends, natural law is equally so to the contingency of means.”27 Therefore, only the private and autonomous sovereignty that is constituted within itself can resolve the paralyzing antinomy of the avenger. Benjamin describes the process by which the self-constitution of sovereignty and law is derived in the following passage: “If, therefore, conclusions can be drawn from military violence, as being primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character” (emphasis added).28 Clearly, lawmaking violence strongly opposes what Benjamin calls “law-preserving violence,” which entails a threat in its very use of violence to preserve the authority of the sovereign’s law—military conscription, for example.29 It is in this vein we can understand the negative and strict response of the leaders of the Yishuv (apparently to the point of involving the British Mandatory authorities) to the lawmaking plans for revenge devised by Kovner and his friends immediately after the war. Having failed to receive the support of the sovereign, Kovner decided, of his own accord, to act outside the law.
Revenge by means of lawmaking violence can only resolve the antinomy of violence by destroying the unity of the subject who is, in effect, her own sovereign. The possibility noted by Benjamin, whereby sovereignty may effectively blur the distinction between lawmaking and law-preserving violence, may, ultimately, deny the avenger authorization for his action, bringing him to suicide. Benjamin writes that the violence employed by the police is “violence for legal ends (in the right of disposition), but with the simultaneous authority to decide these ends itself within wide limits (in the right of the decree). The ignominy lies in the fact that in this authority the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended. If the first is required to prove its worth in victory, the second is subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends.”30 Since the attempt to rely on lawmaking and law-preserving violence to justify revenge presumes the existence of a united agent, erasing the distinction between the two types of violence—that is, the avenger’s ability to distinguish between the two (perpetrating state violence and self-isolating from it) and to make a sovereign law himself that would justify his revenge—can bring the avenger to self-destruction. In other words, only the fragmentation of the subject can release the avenger from the antinomy that does not allow him to justify his violence. The paradoxical result is that in order for the subject to constitute himself as sovereign, which legitimizes his act of violence, he must dismantle his sovereignty and create it, de facto, as sovereignty filled with voids,31 which is both a condition and a justification for revenge.
That is why, in order to provide external justification for the brutal war fought by the Givʻati Brigade against the Egyptian Army, Kovner, in his combat pages, draws an analogy between the Egyptian enemy and the Nazis, settling his score against the Nazis of the Holocaust period with the Egyptians of the present. Using revenge against the Nazis to represent and justify revenge against the Egyptians is based precisely on the internal act of the trampled Jewish subject seeking to constitute himself through revenge, as a Zionist way of resolving the “Jewish Question” in Europe. In defining the battles in which the Givʻati Brigade halted the Egyptian invasion as revenge against the Nazis for the six million who perished in the Holocaust, Kovner translates the Nazi solution to the “Jewish Question” in Europe into a Jewish solution to that question in the Land of Israel.
[3]
The “Jewish Question” stems from the sharp contradiction between the insistence of Jews who had emerged from the ghetto on exercising their presence as Jews in European public space, on the one hand, and European public space itself, on the other. This contradiction stands in contrast to the naïve views of the maskilim from Moses Mendelssohn (“Germans of the Mosaic faith”) to Y. L. Gordon (“Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home”), who believed that Jews could make a clear distinction between private Jewish space and public European space, which they considered religiously neutral. Of course, this was not the reality, and European public space had always had a Christian legacy. There was thus a contradiction, fatal at times, between Jews and their presence as Jews in Christian public space. Emancipation—the solution favored by the maskilim—was supposed to resolve this contradiction by granting Jews civil equality regardless of their Jewish identity, thereby making them full partners in the sovereignty of the European state. Even when emancipation was realized, however, and certainly when efforts to achieve it were unsuccessful, the conflict between Jews and European space persisted. An obvious solution was immigrating to the United States, where, at least in theory, there existed neutral civil and public space. The radical solution that Zionism offered to the “Jewish Question,” based from the very beginning on the idea of spatial separation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, was to remove the Jews from European public space to a Jewish space in which the conflict at the heart of the “Jewish Question” would no longer exist—or so Zionists who advocated the Jewish sovereignty of a Jewish nation-state that would exclude Palestinians (with the exception, for example, of Zionists such as Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber) had hoped.
Once again, the question of comparison and analogy alongside distinction and disconnection between the Holocaust and the Nakba arises. It is greatly exacerbated by the fact there is a causal connection between the importation of the failure to resolve the “Jewish Question” (or to escape its horrifying “success” in the form of the “Final Solution”) to Palestine and the attempt to achieve a resolution there by creating a Jewish space without Palestinians—a euphemistic way of referring to ethnic cleansing by means of the Nakba. As I have noted, the rhetorical solution to this acute aporia of comparison and distinction, simultaneously impossible and essential, lies in creating a dynamic twilight zone of semantic motion, one capable of generating difference within similarity and similarity within difference—as brilliantly accomplished, albeit without the dimension of revenge in Kovner’s poetry, by Avot Yeshurun.32
The title of the combat page from November 11, 1948—“Invaders, for whom do the bells toll?”33—draws a similar analogy, by means of a literary allusion to Ernest Hemingway’s famous book about an International Brigades volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who joined the Republicans fighting against the Fascist forces of General Franco. Franco, as is well known, received considerable assistance from Nazi Germany and was the first to defeat the antifascist forces. This allusion to the role of the Nazis in the Spanish Civil War serves Kovner to characterize the Egyptian enemy. This stands in sharp contrast to the image of the Guernica that he evokes in A Parting from the South, which is also a reference to Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War, but—incredibly—in order to characterize Israeli soldiers, perpetrators of the Nakba. In so doing, Kovner reinforces the analogy between the Holocaust and the Nakba that he draws, albeit in reverse, in his combat pages.
In January, 1945, after the liberation of Vilna by the Red Army (1944) but before the end of the war, the idea of revenge against the Nazis began to take shape in conversations in Lublin between a number of Jews from Vilna, including Kovner, and a group of partisans from Rovno. The idea was further developed in the period between March and June 1945, also involving members of the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. The “Nakam” (“revenge” in Hebrew) group was formed to exact revenge from the Nazis, on European and particularly on German soil.34 The revenge planned by the group was meant to be realized on a far greater scale than other acts of revenge carried out primarily by members of the Jewish Brigade, who hunted down and eliminated Nazis inside and outside Germany. The “Nakam” group came up with two alternative plans. The first, preferred by a majority of the group, was to poison the water supply in German cities, indiscriminately killing six million Germans. The second was to poison loaves of bread supplied to the Germans—this was done on a single occasion, the only operation the group ever managed to carry out.35
The question we must ask here is how the radical, militant stand that Kovner presented in his combat pages, including the call to Givʻati soldiers to exact revenge from the enemy (as a substitute for taking revenge against the Nazis, which did not succeed), can be reconciled with the very different approach he took to the Palestinian refugees expelled and harmed by those same soldiers, in the same period, in the wider context of the Nakba. It seems that Kovner himself tried to answer this question in his reference to a combat page included in the poema with the title “The Page that Was Left behind on the Highway.” In his reference to this chapter Kovner asserts that “poetry is a request for forgiveness for what we do in our lives, and for what was done to us, for if poetry has any moral significance, maybe that is its significance…. And lyric poetry is a request for forgiveness, perhaps that is why there is a combat page there by that name. Secondly, I wanted to say, that it is the page-document that will be left behind on the highway that will be over and gone.”36 Kovner would thus appear to have defined A Parting from the South as a request for forgiveness: both from the Palestinians, victims of the Nakba, and from the soldiers who fell in battle. In both cases, it is forgiveness that Kovner asks in the name of the Israeli sovereign, responsible both for the events of the Nakba and for the deaths of Israeli soldiers in the battles it sent them to fight. A particularly interesting point is that in Kovner’s words regarding the combat page, “that it is the page-document that will be left behind on the highway that will be over and gone,” he is, in effect, claiming that now, after the war, the aggressive combat page is no longer valid, and it is now the turn of poetry to ask forgiveness from those who paid dearly for the realization of the messages contained in the wartime pages.
On the limited possibility of response by the tortured to his torturers, Jean Améry wrote that in light of the fact that “the other person, opposite whom I exist physically in the world and with whom I can exist only as long as he does not touch my skin surface as border, forces his own corporeality on me with the first blow…is on me and thereby destroys me,”37 the only option open to me is revenge: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Such revenge, however, which is, if only for a moment, a departure from my isolation, offers no more than “a minimal prospect of successful resistance, a mechanism…set in motion that enables me to rectify the border violation by the other person. For my part, I can expand in urgent self-defense.”38
Kovner illustrated this in his characterization of the passage from acting within a fragmented perception of reality—first in the Vilna ghetto and then in the Rudnicki forest, as a partisan—to the constitutive moment of revenge as a symbol rather than an allegory. Allegory, as Paul de Man explained, expresses destruction and decay, based on the temporal delay between the textual signifier and its quasi-realistic signified.39 Therefore, unlike the symbol, it exists in the absence of a progressive, redemptive story. The symbol, on the other hand, is the result of an essential moment that fuses signifier and signified, renders the signified fully present in the signifier, and, consequently, tells a redemptive, even messianic story. It was thus Kovner’s preference for symbolic representation—related to his affinity with the poetry of the Zionist neo-symbolist school, guided in the Yeshuv by Hebrew poet Abraham Shlonsky—that enabled the subject, beaten and crushed in the Holocaust, to overcome, if only for a moment, the fragmented post-trauma that dictated his perception of the violence he and his friends had suffered in Vilna and [in] the Rudnicki forest, and to find its redress in the act of revenge. Only for a very short, transient moment could he become the figure Mikhal Dekel’s interpretation of revenge identified as “an angry solitary figure, an individualistic agent who will face the humiliation of the Jews and potentially act on their behalf.”40
Kovner, who identified with the precision, antinomy, emptiness, and pointlessness of pure revenge, sought to fill this emptiness with Jewish sovereignty that justified the act of revenge by means of the political theology of divine revelation—explicitly noting the significance of violence as a system of mutual reflection between the enemy and the avenging Jew: “The Jewish partisan did not only seek to inflict damage on the enemy, but risked all, that he might see himself in the mirror—and at least for one, brief moment, feel in every of drop of his blood that indeed, there is revenge!”41 (emphasis added). Kovner said of himself, “In all of the crises that I have experienced along the way, one thing remained unbroken. I never ceased being a believer,”42 making no distinction between his belief in God and his belief in Zionism and the forces of progress. He also recounted that already in the Vilna ghetto, in the winter of 1942, one of the battalions of the FPO (United Partisan Organization) had written: “And even if we are unsuccessful, our struggle is holy. And if one must fall—then let it be as a free man with a weapon in his hand”43 (second emphasis added).
Kovner thus seeks to avoid pure revenge, which lacks all purposes and leads to withdrawal into oneself and, inevitably, to self-destruction. As Jean Améry wrote about believers: “Whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself. He is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. He is both more estranged from reality and closer to it than his unbelieving comrade. Further from reality because of his Finalistic attitude he ignores the given contents of material phenomena and fixes his sight on a nearer or more distant future.”44 Pure revenge may thus be avoided through belief, by transferring the avenger’s identity from the estranged individual, trapped within herself, to the avenging God: “‘You must realize one thing,’ a practicing Jew once told me, ‘that here your intelligence and your education are worthless. But I have the certainty that our God will avenge us.’”45
From Kovner’s point of view, the Haganah command’s opposition to revenge operations was therefore a sovereign response—unable to justify acts that would have fundamentally undermined its own authority. Sovereignty is, in effect, a mechanism that grants a license to perpetrate acts of violence, including murder; that is to say, it justifies the use of violence, the extreme consequences of which it defines and translates from “murder” to “killing.” Thus, when violence does not enjoy justification afforded to it by the sovereign, it does not kill, but rather murders.
The violence over which the state has the monopoly is presented as legitimate violence, while violent opposition to the violence of the sovereign is generally called terror. As a result, Kovner was forced in his first book of poetry, ʻAd loʼ ʼor (Until no Light, 1947), to ground the sovereignty that would afford legitimacy to the revenge exacted by the partisans from the Germans in political theology, that is, to claim legitimacy for violence, based on divine authority. The human act of revenge is thus realized as if under divine authority, approved by virtue of the fact that it is participating in the fury of the avenging God.
[5]
Kovner the Zionist, who had faced this dilemma in all its force immediately after the Holocaust, manifestly changed the principle of justification for revenge in the combat pages he wrote during the 1948 war, after the establishment of the sovereign Jewish state. And indeed, during the war, Kovner’s doubts disappear when he represents the bloody struggle between Israeli and Egyptian forces as a struggle between two sovereignties, each of which has an army at its service: “Because it is an enemy. Because it is an army.”46 Kovner the partisan, on the other hand, who had employed nonstate violence against German soldiers, agents of German sovereignty, could—in the wake of the 1948 war—show empathy toward the Palestinian refugees who were, as he had once been, disconnected from any sovereignty.
It is specifically as an avenging subject, first as a partisan and then as a soldier in 1948, that Kovner was able to develop empathy toward the Palestinians, without the slightest contradiction between the two stances. His call for revenge against the Nazis and later against the Egyptian army was a response to the violence that had been directed against him and which had shattered or threatened to shatter his unity as a subject. Revenge against the Nazis and then against the Egyptians was thus an effort to mend the shattered fragments of his subjectivity. The realization that the Palestinians—who had experienced the Nakba, whose homes had been destroyed, and who had become refugees—were in fact victims changed Kovner’s perception. The Jewish victim of Nazi violence—and, from Kovner’s perspective, Egyptian violence—had become the victimizer. In other words, the idea of Jewish revenge lost all justification where the Palestinians, victims of the Nakba, were concerned. The Palestinian refugees posed no threat to the integrity of Kovner or his fellow Israeli soldiers’ subjectivity. The revenge that had relevance for him as a response to Nazi violence and, mutatis mutandis, to the violence of the Egyptian Army, turned into empathy for the Palestinian victims.
Kovner’s perception of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 as “stateless”47 undoubtedly assigned them a passive role, exposed to the violence of the Israeli state, without recognizing them as subjects with a will of their own and the ability to respond. Unlike the empathy that Avot Yeshurun shows toward the Palestinian refugees, recognizing their individual humanity, Kovner’s empathy stops at indirect and metonymic representations of the Palestinians by means of village names. Contrary to Yeshurun, who, as a Zionist, questioned the limits of the political theology of Zionism and the principle of separation at its heart, Kovner insisted on upholding and strengthening it. This would appear to be the cost of empathy that seeks to remain within the framework of Zionist political theology. In other words, Kovner is blind to anyone beyond the boundaries of the Jewish homo politicus, and he thereby establishes the outer limits of empathy as well as the responsibility that he, as an Israeli, is prepared to assume for the Palestinians’ fate.
The political status of the Palestinian refugees as stateless persons allowed Kovner—who well remembered the revenge operations in which he had taken part as a partisan and as a member of “Nakam,” who is not as a soldier subject to the authority of a sovereign state—not only to identify with the plight of the Palestinian refugees who found themselves outside the borders of a sovereign state that would, in theory, have protected them, but also to assume responsibility for that plight, in complete contrast to the things he wrote in the combat pages. The fact that the refugees were stateless allowed him to remove them from the Schmittian political dichotomy48 of friend (the Israeli army) and enemy (the Egyptian army). The approach that Kovner adopts to represent Palestinian refugees is one of compassion and responsibility that undermines the friend-enemy dichotomy. It is no coincidence that he was only able to take such an approach after the war, when the wartime state of emergency that had demanded his commitment to the Schmittian political dichotomy (as reflected in the combat pages) had ended. Only then could Kovner develop a new perspective—one of empathy rather than separation and exclusion—albeit within the confines of Jewish nationalism.
The fact that in the combat pages the Egyptians are presented as the ultimate enemy later (in A Parting from the South) makes Palestinians not the ultimate enemy but a remnant, a trace, a supplement to the binary opposition between friend and enemy. Since Kovner displays no signs of hatred toward the Palestinians, nor is there any justification for revenge against them, there is no vestige in A Parting from the South of the displacement from the Nazis to the Egyptians, so prominent in the combat pages. Kovner, who did not serve in the Palmach—the Zionist-leftist military force that maintained a distance from the nascent state and from the first prime minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, for which the Zionist leader successfully sought its disbanding—joined the 1948 war to fight the Egyptians in the service of the avenging Jewish state. After the war, however, Kovner was able to relate to the Palestinians not as to an enemy and therefore not as a theological sovereign, like the Nazis.
Kovner’s perspective as a partisan who had used violence outside state sovereignty now came to bear, after the war, in partisan solidarity with the stateless Palestinians. Thus Kovner, the post-1948 poet who resolved Benjamin’s antinomy of violence, and hence of revenge, by means of presence and responsibility, ultimately chose the path of solidarity with the Palestinian refugees. This choice brought him to signify the violence perpetrated against the Palestinians with Picasso’s Guernica. In so doing, and in criticizing the actions of Jewish sovereignty against the Palestinians, Kovner, incredibly went as far as to reverse the direction of displacement: from the Givʻati Brigade to the Nazi Luftwaffe.
*Translated from Hebrew by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel
1. Michal Arbell, “Abba Kovner: The Ritual Function of His Battle Missives,” in “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 100.
2. Abba Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert: Selected Poems, trans. Shirley Kaufman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 92.
3. Dan Miron, Mul ha-ʼaḥ ha-shotek: ʻIyyunim be-shirat Milḥemet ha-ʻAtzmaʼut [Facing the silent brother: Essays on the poetry of the War of Independence] (Jerusalem: Keter; Tel Aviv: Open University, 1992), 320–321.
4. Benjamin Hrushovski, “ʼAbba Kovner ve-ha-poʼemah ha-ʻivrit ha-modernit” [Abba Kovner and the modern Hebrew long poem (poema)], in Abba Kovner: Mivḥar maʻamarei bikoret ʼal yetzirato [Abba Kovner: A selection of critical essays on his writings], selected and with an introduction by Shalom Lurie (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 69–70.
5. Hannan Hever, “Ḥai ha-ḥai ve-met ha-met” [The living living and the dead dead], Siman Kriʼa 19 (1986): 188–195.
6. Abba Kovner, “Mot Dambam” [Dambam’s death], in A Parting from the South [in Hebrew] (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1949), 22, 89.
7. Miron, Mul ha-ʼaḥ ha-shotek, 233–234.
8. Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert, 83.
9. Abba Kovner, Daf kravi, Ḥativat Givʻati, ed. Ofakim Public Relations Ltd. at Machon Shemesh (Tel Aviv: Organizing Committee of the Reunion of Veterans of the Givʻati Brigade, 1963), 19; Haggai Rogani, Mul ha-kfar sheḥarev: Ha-Shirah ha-ʻivrit ve-ha-sikhsukh ha-yehudi-ʻaravi 1929–1967 [Facing the ruined village: Hebrew poetry and the Jewish-Arab conflict, 1929–1967] (Haifa: Pardess, 2006), 153.
10. Dina Porat, Meʻver La-Gashmi: Parashat Hayav Shel Abba Kovner (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), 119.
11. Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert, 77.
13. Rogani, Mul ha-kfar sheḥarev, 153.
14. Reuven Shoham, Hamarʼeh ve-ha-kolot: Keriʼah kashuvah be-’Predah mi-ha-darom’ le-ʼAbba Kovner [The sight and the sounds: A close reading of Abba Kovner’s “A parting from the south”] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, Hakibbutz Haartzi Hashomer Hatzair, 1994), 48, 50.
15. Hrushovski, “ʼAbba Kovner ve-ha-poʼemah ha-ʻivrit ha-modernit,” 76.
16. Shoham, Hamarʼeh ve-ha-kolot, 62–63, 65.
17. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
18. Hannan Hever, “The Post-Zionist Condition,” trans. Lisa Katz, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 630–648.
19. Hannan Hever, “‘Shum gerush loʼ poter klum’: ʻal ‘Ḥirbet ḥizʻah meʼet S. Yizhar” [“Deportation does not solve anything”: On Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar], 601–614, in Textures: Culture, Literature, Folklore, for Galit Hasan-Rokem [in Hebrew], ed. Hagar Solomon and Avigdor Shinan (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2013), 2, 11–14.
20. Shoham, Hamarʼeh ve-ha-kolot, 22–25, 60–73.
21. Arbel, “Abba Kovner,” 104–105.
22. Kovner, Daf kravi, Ḥativat Givʻati, 1.
23. Abba Kovner, Leʻakev ʼet ha-keriʻah [Beyond mourning], ed. Muki Tsur (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998), 61.
24. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 237.
26. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, (New York: Telos, 2009), 55.
27. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 237.
31. Yehouda Shenhav, “Porous of Sovereignty, the Exception, and the State of Emergency: Where the Imperial History Had Disappeared?” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 29 (2006), 205–218.
32. Hever, “The Post-Zionist Condition,” 630–648.
33. Kovner, Daf kravi, Ḥativat Givʻati, 24.
34. Rozka Korczak-Marlaand and Yehuda Tobin, eds., Abba Kovner: Mi-shelo ve-ʻalav [Abba Kovner: Of his own and about him] (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 1988), 5; Miri Freilich, Ha-Partizanit: Sippur ḥayyeha shel Vitka Kovner [The partisan: The life story of Vitka Kovner] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2013), 181–206.
35. Dina Porat, Meʻver La-Gashmi, 216–253.
36. Abba Kovner, ʻAl ha-gesher ha-tzar: Masot beʻal peh [On the narrow bridge: Oral essays] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1981), 162.
37. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 28.
39. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), 227–288.
40. Mikhal Dekel, unpublished paper.
41. Abba Kovner, ʻAd loʼ ʼor: Poʼemah partizanit [Until no light: A partisan poema] (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, Hakibbutz Haartzi Hashomer Hatzair, 1947), 11.
42. Kovner, ʻAl ha-gesher ha-tzar, 121.
44. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 14.
46. Kovner, Daf kravi, Ḥativat Givʻati, 4.
47. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 267–269.
48. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 13–14.