Le choc de la création de l’État

• Main Author: Yigal Schwartz
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 2009-12-01
• Series: Yod
• Subjects: Israeli literature; Zionism; Yishouv; Eretz; Multiculturalism; generation Palmah
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/yod/325
• ISSN: 0338-9316; 2261-0200

The occasion of Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, was one of the most exciting and moving moments in the long history of the Jewish people. This was a moment that the Jews had hoped for, yearned for, and prayed for throughout their two thousand years of exile. However, we should not understand from this that the declaration and the actual establishment of the Jewish State were not accompanied by difficulties and crises. Just the opposite is true. Ben-Gurion’s declaration and the establishment of the State created a chain of reactions and counter-reactions in the society and culture developing in Eretz Israel that can be characterized as post-traumatic. In this article, I will discuss the responses apparent in much Israeli fiction to the following phenomena: the traumatic passage from the “Yishuv society” to a state; the difficulty of coping simultaneously with renewed nationalism (which had already been dealt with in Europe) on the one hand and with modernism and postmodernism on the other; the unresolved struggle between the narrative of redemption and the narrative of the Diaspora and the complicated passage from a “melting pot” society to a multicultural one. In conclusion, I present the issues in a political context. I attempt to indicate the similar/different approaches of the authors of the Zionist left and the Zionist right to the practical implementation of the Zionist meta-narrative.