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fundamentalists, the Verbovers, adopt in Chabon’s novel. Once the
Verbovers are mobilized and their Zionist vision militarized,
violence becomes, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, “a form of creativity,
a form of ‘constructive aggression’” (2007: 141). Zionism was
originally invented and then reanimated in Israel, Rose writes, as a
response
—
first to anti-Semitism in Europe and then to the
Holocaust. It is a response to a long history of pain, suffering and
loss, as suffering congeals into an assemblage of shared affects such
as fear and shame: fear of annihilation and shame for the Holocaust.
Rose argues that Israel “comes into being on the back of a guilty,
repudiated, unconscious identification with its own dead” (141). It
is fear
—
the fear that they may perish of shame
—
that prompts the
fundamentalists such as the Zionist Verbovers to sweep shame under
their carpet. The Verbovers, moreover, also give the logic of Zionist
thought a deadly twist as secular and political Zionism succeeds in
sacralizing itself and is translated and re-told as a messianic narrative.
What is the messianic narrative that Zionists activate to lend
legitimacy to themselves? Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler have
both offered diagnoses of this Zionist symptom.
12
For Rose, it is
both a narrative of redemption and of catastrophe; or, to be more
precise, it writes a narrative of apocalyptic redemption, with evil
being forcefully defeated and the divine retribution of justice re-
instituted. First, the conservative fundamentalists are terrified that a
history of pain and shame will be repeated. This proactive, though
pessimistic, view of the future motivates them to take preemptive
actions to prevent what they fear the most from being actualized.
However, in order to mobilize people otherwise indifferent to, if not
unsympathetic, to their causes, they turn to hatch and organize a
conspiracy to bring about a small-scale catastrophe, with the sole
12
Other than Jacqueline Rose whose
The Question of Zion
I engage with here, Judith
Butler has also attempted to articulate, by drawing upon Jewish sources, a
diasporic and non-nationalist-oriented ethics that allows Jews to live and be
together with non-Jews. See Butler’s
Parting Ways: Jewishness and Critique of
Zionism
.