The Last Canaanite

Israeli film critics were bewildered by the 1990 film haDerekh leEin Herod (The Road to Ein Herod). “Not much thought and very little talent have gone into [it]… it is impossible to take anything in this picture seriously, when everything is so blatantly fake and clumsy,” wrote Dan Fainaru in the Jerusalem Post on its release (Fainaru). Orli Lubin, writing for Hadashot, was appalled at the decision to adapt a novel about the Jewish and Arab relationships to a land into English (including even English street signs). “The attempt,” she wrote, “to bring the story closer to an English-speaking audience makes it just as false as the results of an attempt to bring Hollywood movies closer to an audience in Timbuktu… In both cases, [the filmmakers] deceive themselves into thinking that by this disconnect from its roots they achieve universalization” (Lubin). Amos Kenan’s original 1984 anti-military and pro-peace novel, set during an imagined Israeli military coup, focuses on the historical loops societies find themselves in, destined to keep reliving and revenging the past. The main characters, an Arab and a Jew, on the run from the forces of Israeli militarism, hide in abandoned Arab villages, vineyards, and finally in a long forgotten Judean refuge from the Bar Kochba war, symbolically progressing back in time through the conquests of the land. In the warping climax, an Israeli general declares war on the past and monologues about firing nuclear missiles at Emperor Titus, destroyer of the second Temple, before he even has a chance to invade (Kenan).

The film adaptation stars Gregory Peck’s uninspired son, Tony, and Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter (and future far-right politician), Alessandra. The Arab lead is played by a Jew. A film nominally about revanchism and the repetitions of history, starring the failson of a film star and the granddaughter of a revanchist obsessed with restoring history? A novel about the peculiar Jewish and Arab relationship to the land itself adapted into a strange fantasy English-speaking version of Israel lacking past, present, and future? A commentary on the fundamental differences in treatment and desire of an Arab dissident and a Jewish dissident that portrays them as exactly the same? One almost suspects some sort of cosmic joke (The Road to Ein Herod).

One imagines Kenan horrified by the casting of Alessandra Mussolini in an adaption of his novel and the massacre of his peacenik message, as he himself was a proud man of the Israeli peace camp. He supported the Algerian FLN, met with Sartre and Chomsky, and was fined thousands of shekels for writing against settler counterattacks during the Second Intifada. Surely such a man would recoil from the besmirching of his ideological message by the daughter of the ur-fascist. Or perhaps not, because Kenan was a Canaanite (Twersky).

Canaanism rose to, if not prominence, then notoriety, in Mandatory Palestine in the forties among a small clique of sabra (native-born) Jewish poets, sculptors, and other intellectuals, most associated with the radical Lehi paramilitaries. It was the product of a bold synthesis of European fascism (especially Italian Futurism), dialectical rejection of Zionism, and biblical criticism based on contemporary archeological discoveries (such as the Ugaritic texts). Its central tenant, as explained by Yonatan Ratosh in a 1944 speech was that “A Hebrew cannot be a Jew, and a Jew cannot be a Hebrew.” In other words, there existed a ‘Hebrew’ nation distinct from the Jewish nation. As Zionism served as the national movement of the Jewish nation, Canaanism (a derogatory exonym, the Canaanites themselves preferred to be known as the ‘Young Hebrews.’) was to serve as the national movement of the Hebrew nation, which they held had existed in antiquity throughout the ‘Land of Kedem’ and had since degenerated into modern Jews, Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Druze, and other Semitic peoples (Ratosh).

In his seminal essay “Canaanism: Solutions and Problems,” the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron wrote that Canaanism was “an attempt to continue the path from the point where Zionism stopped.” Zionism changed the paradigm of Jewish communal life to a framework where the Jews could exist as a sovereign nation in addition to their long-standing role as a scattered diaspora. Canaanism simply took that one step forward and envisioned the Jews (despite their protests to the contrary, their appeals to pan-Semitism ring hollow) as a sovereign nation and nothing more. It is also important to situate Canaanism within the radical context of the revival of Hebrew and the rediscovery of Ugaritic and other ancient Semitic texts. Evron notes that the Canaanites Hebraicized their names to “Ratosh, Amir, Megged, Shamir, Tammuz, Yizhar, Bartov, Guri, Shaham, Aloni, Kenan.… [the name changes] represented a decision to break the connection with the world of the Halprins, the Steinmanns, the Smilanskis, and the Levins.” Note that the Canaanites did not chose biblical names, as many Jews did, but pre-Judaic Semitic names, such as Ratosh (to tear apart), Tammuz, a Mesopotamian shepherd god, or even Kenan, a mystical pre-Noah figure.

If ancient languages were transforming, seemingly overnight, into spoken languages, and if long-forgotten religions and texts were being re-interpreted, anything seemed possible. In dialectical contrast to the present political stagnation in Israel and Palestine, Mandatory Palestine in the 1940s was a place of revolutionary possibility. The Canaanites may seem bizarre and naïve now, in a time of Israeli politics dominated by the professionally unimaginative “security center” and the “nation-state right,” but they were hardly out of place in their time. The predecessor to today’s mild-mannered and dovish Israeli Labor Party, Mapai, advocated an agricultural collectivism not unfamiliar to Mao, while the ancestor of the all-encompassing Likud, the Irgun, assassinated British officials in pursuit of annexing Jordan. These were heady and hyper-ideological times (Evron).

Of course, Boaz Evron was no neutral observer. Of the first generation of sabras, he had been a Canaanite and a member of Lehi early in his life. He never fully abandoned the Canaanite critique of Zionism. His columns in Yediot Ahranot were perceived as so sympathetic to the Palestinians that they were nicknamed “Fatahland.” He even founded, in 1956, a group called “Semitic Action,” that advocated for a Jewish-Arab federation. But the name of the group betrays him. His principle motivation was never the sort of left-wing anti-Zionism that formed the early majority of the Jewish peace camp. He retained the strange and fantastic idealism of Canaanism. Though Evron and Semitic Action acknowledged that their Semitic federation would have ties to the Jewish diaspora (and thus repudiated, in part, the central Canaanite tenant of separation between diaspora and sabra) they still argued that the ties between Jews, Arabs, and other Semitic peoples were stronger than their divisions, making them post-Canaanites. Make no mistake of it: Evron had not converted from Canaanism to internationalism. He was still a Semitic nationalist (Harif).

Nor is Evron a neutral writer with which to analyze the ideals of Amos Kenan. It was Amos Kenan who co-wrote Fatahland with Evron and who co-founded Semitic Action with Evron. Kenan and Evron were friends since their days in Lehi. They followed, as far as can be seen, the precise same ideological path. For Kenan, at least, it was an increasingly lonely path. By the late 80s, the few remaining Canaanites were seen charitably as curious historical relics and less charitably as atheist fifth-columnists in league with terrorists. So it happened that he came to accept an offer to see his most successful novel adapted as a science fiction film.

The film adaptation of HaDerekh leEin Herod was directed and produced by Doron Eran, with the screenplay by Rami Na’aman. Amos Kenan, however, had significant influence on the process. For example, he vetoed two different screenplay adaptions. Rami Na’aman was the third screenwriter brought onto the project, and the only one to secure Kenan’s approval. Na’aman also wrote his screenplay in Hebrew, and had to collaborate with a translator (Ruvik Danieli) to produce it in English after Kenan’s approval. Na’aman did not explicitly collaborate with Kenan (he told me he only met Kenan once, at the post-production party) but his screenplay must have closely followed Kenan’s vision for the film, given that Kenan clearly showed no restraint in vetoing earlier drafts by other writers (Na’aman).

Given Amos Kenan’s relationship to the production process of the film adaption, perhaps it hews closer to his vision of his novel then one might at first assume. If that is the case, what does that imply about his own vision?

Forget interpreting the novel as a left-wing critique of Zionism and the film as a muddled version of that critique. As shown, Amos Kenan, though of the left and critical of Zionism, did not follow the traditional left-wing and internationalist critique of Zionism, but rather a post-Canaanite critique of Zionism. Take one long-running joke throughout HaDerekh leEin Herod: Muhammad, the main Arab character, pretends to be Jewish under the name Rafi. When the unnamed narrator and Muhammad capture an Israeli general and his driver, they find both of them are also named Rafi. Kenan blurs the line between Arab and Jew, not in pursuit of some post-ethnic utopia, but because he suspects that Arab and Jew are synonymous. Or consider the exquisite concern Kenan shows for the connection between land and history. The narrator and Muhammed hide out from the Israeli army in an ancient cave complex, implied to be a legacy of the Bar Kochba War. The heroes are literally saved by the history – and the Jewish history, no less – of the land itself. Finally consider the climax at the end of the novel. The general who has led the coup ushers the narrator (Muhammed and General Rafi both having been shot) into his headquarters, where he proudly explains (even citing, in a fascinating metatextual twist, Kenan himself), that he will soon launch missiles backwards through time and space to destroy enemies of the Jews before they have the opportunity to enact history. But which enemies of the Jews does the general target? King Nebuchadnezzar, who sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple. King Sennacherib of Assyria, who besieged Jerusalem and forced King Hezekiah of Judah to submit. King Shalmanaser of Assyria, who carried the ten northern tribes away forever. Most importantly, he targets Emperor Titus of Rome, who destroyed the Second Temple and ended Jewish sovereignty in Palestine for two thousand years. The general targets oppressors of the Jews, to be sure, but only specific oppressors. There are no oppressors of the diaspora, only those who targeted independent Jewish sovereignty. The general’s targets do not include Torquemada (as the narrator suggests), or Louis IX, or Edward I, or Ulysses Grant. At the narrator’s suggestion, the general does target Khmelnitsky, who is, however, not pictured with the rest of the targets. Even Hitler is not targeted. These two trends – the negation of diasporic Jewish experience over Jewish experience within the land of Israel and the obsession with sovereignty – are pure and undiluted Canaanite, not Zionist or post-Zionist, in their origins.

 The film adaption may well have reflected a Canaanite vision, or more precisely a parody of a Canaanite vision. Take the decision Orli Lubin was aghast at: to set the film in a strange, English-speaking version of Israel. The film is drawing attention to the necessity of language (the Canaanites, obsessed with the Ugaritic texts of antiquity and bolstered by the revival of Hebrew, knew the importance of language), and especially Semitic languages, to the land of Israel itself. Tommy Lapid, the Israeli liberal leader (and father of former prime minister Yair Lapid) famously remarked that his vision of Israel was Holland. The film offers a rejoinder by offering a vision of Israel as Holland- divorced from land, language, religion, and culture, and consequently as sterile and as distant as “Timbuktu,” in the words of Lubin (Bennet).

Or take the casting of Israeli Jews to play Arabs. The Canaanite vision was one of the fundamental unity of Jew, Arab, and Semite. If there is no real distinction between them, and they reflect a single “Hebrew,” or “Canaanite” people, then it is ridiculous to object to casting one as the other. The casting of Peck and Mussolini is understandable as well. Peck might reflect the degradation of father to son, ancestor to descendant, which in Canaanite terms was understood in the context of the degradation of the proud Hebrew to the diaspora Jew. Mussolini, of course, is representative of the profound influence that Italian fascism had on the Canaanite movement.

Amos Kenan, consciously or unconsciously, supported a film that reflected both the hopes and the failures of his earlier Canaanite days. The film showed the futility of a lifeless and internationalist state (as advocated by post-Zionists and anti-Zionists), and thus the necessity of strong connection to the land and its people, while also criticizing the exclusivist claims of both traditional Zionists and Palestinian nationalists. Fifty years after the overthrow of Mussolini, Kenan acknowledged his own youthful support for the dictator but finds him and his ideology ultimately lacking. As the First Intifada raged around him, even Kenan must have seen that the Jewish-Arab unity he had once championed was further away than ever before. Where had he and his ideological compatriots gone wrong? His answer lay in the film he oversaw, which was foolishly dismissed by critics.

Or perhaps it was merely a failed cash grab.