Borders, Territories, and Ethics

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadowof the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on themultifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested incontemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflictand the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prosewritten 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 criticalquestions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel asa democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals,the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and thesovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks. The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its criticalextensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and inparticular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari andtheir successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoreticalanalysis of the collageof voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times ofpolitical and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.