Liberalization and Culture in Contemporary Israel by Ofengenden Ari;

Author:Ofengenden, Ari;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Big Brother and Its New Political Uses

Big Brother of course forms an exceptional political metaphor, not in the original totalitarian sense which Orwell intended it, but in a way which is related to the television show’s main dramatic motor: the periodic evictions of certain members from the house, a process that resonates strongly both with the Jewish national story—being evicted from Europe, being under the threat of being evicted “to the sea” in their new homeland, and of course with the Palestinian national story that is essentially a story of evictions, that is the evictions of 48’ and 67’ and the threat of transfer.

Before Amjad, our hero, meets the other housemates, he is asked by Big Brother to conceal his identity as an Arab, and impersonate a Jewish-Israeli, to which he is at first taken aback but then enthusiastically responds, perfectly mimicking the classical core of a past Israeli identity, in fact acting as the son of Palmach members that Kaniuk satirized. At the end of the series he is, of course, comically evicted. Such is the basic plot of Arab Labor, Amjad enthusiastically tries to assimilate, to mimic, to belong to the “house” usually by adopting some aspect of high Jewish-Israeli culture, either past or present, with results that reveal the fault lines in Israeli society its complex mix of acceptance and exclusion of the Arab-Israeli. The dynamic of mimicry, of acceptance and rejection, of reversals of success and failure at belonging are effective both as comedy and as political intervention. Amjad gestures to the powers that construct him as one of “us,” and not one of “us” at the same time. As Homi Bhabha comments:

Mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.31

Arab labor indeed comments on the societal forces that would like the Arab-Israeli to be completely like the Jewish-Israeli but that at the same time insist on Arab difference.

The themes of mimicry, assimilation, inclusion, and exclusion based on race and identity are both familiar and sensitive subjects in the Jewish national narrative; the attempt to assimilate in Europe and its violent end is always in mind while watching the series. Indeed many have commented that Sayed Kashua is the most classically Jewish-Zionist author writing in Israel, comparing him with Theodore Herzl the founder of political Zionism.32 Herzl wrote theater drama, such as “Das Neue Ghetto” (The New Ghetto) that utilizes some of the same ploys as Arab Labor: the attempted mimicry of the Jews to their gentile surrounding, pride on assimilation, rejection of society, shame and nationalist reactions to shame. Kashua appeals to Jewish and Zionist tradition in order to critique the exclusion of today. In biblical terms one can say that Arab Labor episodes remind the audience “Thou shalt neither vex a

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