Destroying Israel: Necessary Destruction in Post-Zionist Contemporary Writing

A preoccupation in contemporary Israeli and Jewish American fiction with the destruction of the state of Israel must be understood against the background of a post-Zionist discourse that predicts imminent disaster, but also in the context of post-apocalyptic scenarios after 9/11. The collapse of the Word Trade Center in 2001 now stands in a series of catastrophes going back to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Added to the situation of permanent disaster is the imagined end of the Jewish people after the upsurge of politically correct anti-Semitism in the early twenty-first century (Jacobson’s J). Counter-factual and alternative histories (Semel’s Isra Isle, Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Foer’s Here I Am) project fears that things can only get worse and that the post-Zionist prophecy of the destruction of Israel will inevitably be realized. Although hardly representative of broad Jewish American support of a Jewish state, Michael Chabon, Josh Cohen, and Samuel Levinson write from the premise that Jews in America are no safer than under rocket fire in Israel. In these novels, moreover, we see the interaction of love and politics on national and individual levels projecting disaffiliation and exilic nomadism.