Israeli war literature resists easy ideological justification of state violence

Evidence

Clearly, the violence that is exercised here, “the familiar process by which power dehumanizes those who exercise it,” as Alter describes it, is a violence, a process, and a power that have to be distinguished in their specificity. It is particularly important therefore to consider that Yizhar does not once indicate that the struggle in which the soldiers are involved was, for the Israelis, a “war of independence.” Such ideological justification, so easy to invoke, appears thus excluded at the outset. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 577

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Israel-Palestine reading cluster and to Yizhar’s wider body of work on the 1948 war.