Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow
of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the
multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in
contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose
written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas,
written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon,
Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical
questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as
a democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals,
the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and the
sovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks.
The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its critical
extensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and in
particular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari and
their successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoretical
analysis of the collage
of voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times of
political and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.
