Abstract
This close reading of the Romantic Zionist poem “In the Field”, written by the National Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, exposes the rhetorical inability to divide Palestine between the Palestinians and the Jews. The poem contrasts the Zionist Jew, who merges, through the figure of personification, with European nature, and his rhetorical inability as a Zionist, who is intimately attached to Zion, to become one with nature in the diaspora. Thus the Romantic Jewish subject, constructed by the personification that merges the speaking voice in the poem with nature, cannot be simultaneously both a Zionist Jew that merges with nature, and a Zionist Jew who cannot accomplish such a merge due to the rhetorical barrier between the romantic subjectivity and nature. Bialik equates national Zionist values and Zionist colonial violence. The poem’s rhetoric, which cannot sustain both contrasting sets of values, constructs a solution requiring the creation of nature in Palestine that will be, in contrast to European Jews’ nature, entirely Jewish. The Zionist speaking voice in the poem constructs a sharp division between Jews and Arabs, which then leads him to acknowledge and to relate to the existence of only his people living in Palestine and to erase from the poem the Arabs who live in Palestine’s nature. The rhetoric of the Romantic Zionist poem requires the expulsion of the Palestinians present in the concrete, real-life Palestine space. This expulsion negates any possibility of dividing the territory of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. The rhetoric of the poem allows, finally, for one of two opposing options: either colonialist expulsion of the native residents off the territory to be divided, or a binational sovereignty on the same territory. Either way, a rhetorical solution to the conflict between Jews and Palestinians by partition is an impossibility.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 872-887 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Interventions |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- Bialik, H. N
- nationalism
- partition
- personification
- Romanticism
- Zionism