Expanding the Horizon of Criticism: Revisiting “Israeli Literature Responding to the Six-Day War” (vols. 12–13, 1999)

Hannan Hever returns to his 1999 article about the accepted view that Israeli literature written against the occupation in the wake of the 1967 war was politically ineffective. He proposes a new reading of that article, with the aim of exposing its missed opportunities and blind spots. The current article is based on a negative dialectical reading, which enables Hever to avoid today the static dead end that criticism of the occupation reached then. According to the thesis he formulated in his original article, the fact that Israeli writers and intellectuals pointed out the inefficacy of the literature written in the wake of the ’67 occupation derived from the entrenched and unsolvable Zionist contradiction underlying the definition of the State of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. The current article analyzes the price paid then by critical thinking that opposed the occupation, which for understandable reasons could not stay its response. The dialectic of the new article allows for negative thought, following which it is possible to point to the literary works of Natan Alterman, one of the founders of the Movement for Greater Israel, as a solution to the contradiction between democratic universalism and Jewish particularism.