On Israeli writing

This article confirms both my belief that Israel is an utopian project and my belief that all utopias are dystopias about to explode. It gives a great overview of Israeli writing and how there *is* an undercurrent in Israeli society that is critical of the state's foundational imaginary. Definitely worth checking out.


Chroniclers of pain | Review | guardian.co.uk Books
All nations, as Ernest Renan famously stated, rely on forgetting or historical error (which is why, he adds, progress in historical knowledge can threaten national identity). They rely on stories that have to be forged out of a retreating past, reworking memory as they go. In the case of Israel, we could say that forgetting became a matter of survival and denial a way of life.

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