Volunteering for the pyre
Yoni Gelernter on the Masada fantasy
In Israel, nearly every schoolchild is brought on a field trip to Masada, Yoni Gelernter recounts in his Issue Sixteen essay. The mountain fortress is the site of one of the foundational myths of the Zionist movement: the mass suicide of the Sicarii during the First Jewish-Roman War around 73 C.E., as narrated by the historian Josephus. Rabbinic tradition paid the Masada story no heed for millennia and modern scholars often doubt the veracity of Josephus’s account, but Masada has become central to Israel’s self-imagination. The story’s prominence, Gelernter argues, registers the deadly impulses that have always structured Zionist ideology: a fantasy of doom in which any act of violence against the enemy becomes acceptable.
The Masada Option | Zionism’s Death Drive
YONI GELERNTER
Israel must be both victim and victimizer; otherwise, Zionism’s delicate logic will collapse. For such a nation, convinced both that it is permanently and necessarily besieged and that it is the only possibility of survival for the people destroyed in the Holocaust; convinced both that it must live by its strength and that its strength is justified by the moral authority it derives from its weakness; convinced both that it has an unimpeachable right to exist and that it is the most fragile and vulnerable of existing societies, there is only one possible future — destruction — and only one way of redeeming that destruction — enthusiastic participation.
This Sunday, December 14, we will be selling Drift issues and merchandise at Press Play at Pioneer Works. Please stop by, pick up a gift for the little-magazine lover in your life, and say hi! And in the meantime, don’t forget to shop our online holiday sale.
