“And the Land Changed Its Face” On the 50th Anniversary of Siman Kri’ah

Siman Kri’ah—a Hebrew literary journal and an affiliated publishing house established in 1972—challenged the radical changes in Israeli space in the aftermath of the 1967 War. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights resulted in contradictions that challenged the Zionist axiom of spatial separation between Jews and non-Jews in an unprecedented way, and a sharp spatial contradiction developed between the axiom of separation and the occupation of territories populated exclusively (at the time) with Palestinians. The movement of Israelis beyond the Green Line, and especially the establishment of Jewish settlements in occupied territories, alongside the integration of the Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories into the Israeli economy challenged the axiom of separation and fostered a change in the class structure in Israel. In “Kaḥ,” (Take), the first poetry book published by Siman Kri’ah, the acclaimed Hebrew poet Meir Wieseltier dealt with these dramatic changes through avant-gardist and violent poetry that sought to update the figure of “The Watchman unto the House of Israel,” a figure that for generations was fundamental to the conception of Hebrew Literature as a national literature. Wieseltier’s poems reasserted the sovereignty of the “The Watchman unto the House of Israel” by reconfiguring its gaze, such that it addresses the spatial contradictions that informed post-1967 Israel. Key to the poet’s strategy in this volume is the poem “If There Will Be No Jerusalem,” in which he harshly censures the genre of Jerusalem songs celebrating the victory in the war. In contradistinction, the poem puts forward an alternative historical narrative, in which the 1967 war ended with a defeat, voiding the occupation and thus the spatial contradiction created in its wake.