The Fall Of The House Of Herzl: Israel As A Horror Flick
Horror films are often centered around a house: a safe haven. But they are also a place of danger and sometimes a monster in and of themselves. To Israelis, the Jewish state can play all three roles.
By Yuval Ben-Ami |Published June 24, 2013
Last week my girlfriend Ruthie came up with a scary idea: “Why don’t we start watching classic horror films together?” she asked.
This would of course be a perfect remedy for a couple suffering from a decline in intimacy: a lack of clinging to one another. I assure you that we have no need for that. We simply love cinema. Ruthie asked online for suggestions, and soon we headed on our roller coaster of chills. The first film we watched was Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” the second: Italian cult classic “Supriria.”
Through all the screams and slashing scenes, I found myself thinking a lot about politics. Here’s the true curse of living in this haunted land: we can’t get politics out of our heads even when the zombies break into the house and reach directly to the throat of the pretty blonde. Why would we? We are made to believe that we live in this house. Ehud Barak called Israel “a villa in the jungle,” aka, an outpost of humanity besieged by wild beasts. Horror cinema is all about stirring anxieties, and this exactly what our politicians do for a living. Israeli society is suffering en-masse from a state of PTSD, a state which our leaders preserve rather than heal, keeping us dependant on their promise of military protection. Last week I heard Netanyahu say on the radio: “The Palestinians don’t only want the West Bank, they want Jaffa, Ashdod and Haifa.” His tone was taken straight out of the radio and television broadcasts in “Night of the Living Dead.”
American horror cinema is indeed borne of political anxieties. The plot of “Night of the Living Dead” incorporates many of the fears experienced by Cold War American society: the fear of nuclear holocaust, the fear of “red” society, in which individuals lose their identity, even the uncertainty of where racial politics are headed, in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. The murderous aliens of B movies produced in the 50s and 60s were always allusions to very terrestrial beings, or at least semi-human ones, such as Brezhnev.
--CLIP
This ambiguous sense of home, can play strongly on the emotions of both left- and right-wing Israelis. In the right-wing narrative, particularly that of the paranoid Netanyahu variety, Israel is precisely that house. We escaped to it from the zombie apocalypse/Frankenstein’s monster/Mengele’s needles, and are now trying to collect ourselves. Meanwhile, a combination of ever-persistent zombies are still trying to penetrate the house (Arab nations, Iran, Palestinian refugees abroad). The backyard is swarming with them (West Bank and Gaza Palestinians) while inside, evil hides in the closets (Palestinian citizens of Israel, Jewish leftists, likely-to-be-antisemitic tourists).
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