Israel Has Moved

224 Pages·2013·0.926 MB·English

by  Diana Pinto

Diana Pinto
israel has moved
ISRAEL HAS MOVED

ISRAEL HAS MOVED
Diana Pinto
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, En gland
2013
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
An earlier version was originally published in French as
Israël a déménagé, © Éditions Stock, 2012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Pinto, Diana.
Israel has moved / Diana Pinto.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-674-07342-5 (alk. paper)
1. Israel. 2. Israel—Politics and government.
3. Israel—Social conditions. 4. Israel—Religion.
5. Israel—Economic conditions. I. Title.
DS102.95.P56 2013
956.9405'4—dc23 2012038241
For my cousins and friends in Israel

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. The Intergalactic Café, or Ben-G urion Airport 17
2. The Two Roads to Jerusalem 27
3. The Lesson from East Talpiot 43
4. In the Eye of the Storm 60
5. Rooted Utopias 81
6. The Aquarium 99
7. The Bubble 112
8. The Tent 131
9. Between Memory and Memory Chip 151
10. Stargate 175
Epilogue: Israel Quo Vadis? 188
Notes 195
Ack now ledgm ents 213

INTRODUCTION
Israel has moved. The country has changed its geographic and
temporal references, its pol itic al horizons, and its cultural giv-
ens. It still occupies, of course, the same GPS geostationary co-
ordinates in the Middle East. However, both mentally and sym-
bolically, Israel has abandoned its Arab neighborhood, whose
recent springtime revolutions with their heavy autumnal over-
tones never really inspired it. Even more important, the country
is also in the pro cess of forfeiting its more than 2,000- year-o ld
anchoring— be it in symbiosis or in confl ict—w ithin the grand
Western symbiosis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem.
Israel today thinks of itself as living in its own cyberspace at
the very heart of a globalized world with increasingly Asian
connotations. It lives inside its own utopia, in the literal sense of
a non- place. Its postmodern future is being built on scientifi c in-
novation, and yet the country seems to be rooting itself in an in-
creasingly ancient, even archaic, past whose tenets are ever more
religiously and ethnically exclusive.
This grand conceptual move, prefi gured by many individual
geographic shifts, has been taking place silently while the rest
of the world (or rather, those who considered themselves friends
of Israel) continued to repeat the same old “two- state solu-
tion” mantras linked to the peace proc ess. In Israel itself these
mantras have lost all relevance, given the absence of po litic al
will and the population’s desire to look beyond what it