Interesting article by Joel Schalit on the role of a
fantasized Israeli identity for certain American right-wingers (which I heard
about on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News). Schalit discusses the prominence of
online commenters who claim to be Israelis bringing the realities of Israel’s
precarious situation to an ignorant US left audience, who on investigation turn
out in fact not to be Israelis or indeed Jews, but conservative American
Christian Zionists. A fantasy about Israel as a hard-headed reality serves a
particular function in justifying American foreign policy.
Maybe the most high-profile example of this is the character
of Ziva David on NCIS. Ziva, a former Mossad agent turned NCIS investigator, is
an appealing character. She’s competent, smart, and funny, as well as being
somewhat psychologically damaged in the
sort of way that makes for endearing TV characters (it also doesn’t hurt that
the character is played by Cote de Pablo, who is very pretty although not even
slightly Israeli).
But she also functions as a strange metonym for Israel. Her
Mossad background is, particularly in her early appearances, brought up through
references to her skills as an assassin and torturer, that is, through her
extra-legal ruthlessness. The show is both horrified by and enamored with this
ruthlessness – Ziva is continually reminded by other characters that her
methods are not acceptable in America, with a mixture of pride, awe, and
regret. Ziva, and thus Israel, is presented here as sublime in Burke’s sense,
as inspiring a kind of fear that leads to admiration. The racist uses to which
Burke puts this concept of the sublime (the natural sublimity of Blacks is
adduced as a justification for slavery) perhaps points towards the racism underlying
Israel’s simultaneous exclusion from and inclusion in Western “civilization”
which Schalit notes in right-wing American attachments to Israel.
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