Against Inevitability: Genre and Crisis in Palestine/Israel

The nightmare of the past months in Palestine and Israel seems to require that we revisit many of the ways in which we have come to think about the cultural politics of war and emergency, to name but two of the themes of this special section. Similarly, we cannot think about the global politics and histories of the present moment without addressing the ongoing situation in the Middle East / West Asia, even though it is still escalating and we are unsure about what “it” is and how long it will go on. As a literary critic, I approach these questions by thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and the ways that we tell them. I also approach them as someone who is heavily and personally invested in these stories and whose future they hold. Now it is March 2024; the unrelenting horror is ongoing and shifting all the time, and I am writing in its midst, unable to imagine the time or the world when this will be in the past (I wonder with dismay if it will ever be). As an Israeli, I am in anguish about the people and places decimated in Israel by Hamas's murderous attack on October 7, 2023, and the deep societal break it has triggered. As an Israeli, I am also paralyzed by my feelings of shame and complicity in the genocidal carnage that Israel has unleashed on Gaza and am petrified at the further escalations unfolding. I also am fearful for my students, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel, already a vulnerable minority, even more vulnerable these days. The following is thus a personal essay written in medias res; it is in turns literary, academic, theoretical, and polemical. It traverses various texts and contexts, combining various genres of writing to think about the discourse of inevitability that undergirds our stories and to think about literary genre as a way out of its impasse.

I want to offer a few words about these texts and contexts and my relation to them. The theoretical underpinnings of this essay come from my recently published monograph Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (Ben-Yishai 2023), which offers a cultural and literary history of the state of emergency imposed in India from 1975 to 1977 by then prime minister Indira Gandhi. Having finished the book during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and thinking I was done with emergencies, I went on sabbatical to Kolkata, to begin a new project. Turns out, emergencies were not done with me. As what is arguably the most horrific crisis in the history of Israel and Palestine unfolded, I was far away but unable to think, read, or write anything new. My haze was punctured when, still in Kolkata, I picked up (and could not put down) Paul Lynch's gripping novel Prophet Song (2023). Winner of the Booker Prize, the novel is set in contemporary Ireland during a fictional state of emergency; the Guardian called it “a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state” (Jordan 2023). The novel resonated painfully with the news I was reading on my phone, but also sent me back to the book I had just published. I started to think of Prophet Song as a linchpin to yoke together my academic work on the fiction of the Indian Emergency with the situation at home and the ways in which it is comprehended and narrated. This essay, written back home in Haifa, weaves through these fictional and nonfictional emergencies in India, Ireland, and in the Middle East.

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I open with a fictional emergency in contemporary Ireland. Paul Lynch's Prophet Song depicts the life, or rather the mind, of Eilish Stack, a scientist, wife, and mother of four, as she tries to do the right thing for her diminishing family in an increasingly oppressive, claustrophobic, and dangerous “state of emergency.” The novel does many things, among which is a consideration of crisis after COVID (In what ways has the pandemic prepared us for the next catastrophe? In what ways has it normalized emergency and inured us to it?). Most powerfully, the novel hones the question “When is it time to leave?” the answer to which is always “Not yet” but also always “When we could have.”

In order to decide what she must do, Eilish needs to understand what is going on, and here is where the novel, to my mind, is unparalleled—in its depiction of a mind in the very process of comprehension. Told entirely in free indirect discourse, the novel masterfully slows and breaks down the process of cognition to painful detail, while retaining a breathtaking urgency.

In their narration, Eilish's thoughts and feelings become material objects, malleable and dynamic. The nebulousness of cognition and of comprehension—of belief and disbelief—is made concrete. Rather than descriptions of thoughts, feelings, and decisions, thinking, feeling, and deciding are stressed as processes of comprehension. Knowledge is not an object but a process (“the searching mind alighting on other things”), which is continuous (“sees herself thirty minutes before eating a sandwich while time was already on the march”), even dialectical, always unexpected and unforeseeable.

By contrast, the events outside Eilish's mind are crushingly expected and foreseeable. The “emergency” in the novel (metonymy for a state and society deteriorating into the abyss of fascist totalitarianism) is in itself a cliché made up of a series of horrific and generically determined tropes and events, such as imprisonment without trial, surveillance, missing people, torture, increased militarization, and people “not wanting trouble.” But locked as the narrative is into Eilish's point of view, the state of emergency is not narrated, contextualized, or historicized. There is no account of how it came into being, how it develops, who carries it out or why. Instead, the physical and discursive elements of emergency rule pop up in the narration of Eilish's life, often on the peripheries of her vision and comprehension, in a series of unrelated moments, as she shuttles her children back and forth and tries to locate her missing husband and ensure the safety of her family.

The novel records the changing physical setting—the “checkpoint,” (86) “youth in uniform” (86), “marksmen on rooftops” (88), military trucks, and personnel carriers (90)—that Eilish encounters as she navigates the city in her minivan. But the erection of these checkpoints, or the arrival of the various militarized personnel, are never narrated as events in the novel. These signs of emergency are part of the background, taken for granted by Eilish, and perhaps by the readers, as the inevitable outrages and horrors of this anomalous time. In the grammar of the novel, they do not form a narrative of their own.

The same is true for elements of fascist discourse that make their way into Eilish's consciousness and the novel's narrative through snippets of conversations and encounters: “Inciting hatred against the state” (11). “We are living in difficult times” (33). “The talk is of internment camps” (35). “Habeas corpus has been suspended under national emergency legislation” (39). “The state has special powers and suspended the judiciary” (39). “This is not a time to speak, she says, but a time to keep silent” (48). “This should be a time of unity for our nation” (64). “An age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading to expansion” (71). Presented in this way, these snippets seem to tell a very clear and dangerous story. But in Eilish's mind (or in the novel's free indirect discourse) they are never integrated into a historical narrative. I would like to suggest that the reason for this lies in narrative form, and more specifically, genre. The generic framework for Eilish's narration is evident in the novel's back-cover copy, which heralds “a mother's fight to hold her family together.” The same framework demands that every fiber of her mental and narrative energies is devoted to understanding what she needs to know to complete this story and achieve its good ending. In other words, Eilish is locked into the generic affordances of the bourgeois realist novel, privileging the interior lives of individuals, as signaled, among other things, by free indirect discourse. Her tragic undoing comes because she has no cognitive resources left to piece together the “nightmare logic [or narrative] of a society that is quickly unravelling,” perhaps because that belongs to another generic order.¹

However, unlike Eilish, who struggles to comprehend, we the readers already know. We can easily piece the snippets together because it is the generic dystopian story of “emergency” or “rise-of-fascism” that we know so well. The novel's epigraph from Ecclesiastes 1:9 brings this home: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” We thus watch Eilish's tragedy unfold, incredulous at her inability to see that the events she reads in the framework of her bourgeois realism, in fact demand to be read in another genre altogether.

Our incredulity is worth belaboring. As the above lists and the novel's epigraph make clear, the emergency of Prophet Song is exceptionally generic. It responds, almost mechanically, to all of the genre's dictates of dystopia and emergency. And so we—the readers standing outside the narrative—can recognize what is going on because the novel has given us the most generic account of these events and because we are not implicated in them. One wonders what would happen if the societal fall to fascism in the novel came in a different form, language, or order of events. What if we were implicated in the unraveling or even complicit in it? Would we recognize it then? Or would we accept it—tragically, despondently—as the condition of our being, as simply the way things are?

The representation of emergency in its most clichéd tropes and recognizable forms thus marks the novel to its readers as highly and devastatingly political, even though Eilish's internal narrative may not recognize it. However, because even the external narrative of the emergency is not narrated as a series of contingent events but simply as backdrop, it also has the opposite effect, by which the fascist state of emergency is strangely dehistoricized and depoliticized. The readers who recognize the genre of emergency recognize it as a reified already-known event and thus comprehend it as inevitable. This sense of inevitability, immanent in the reified, generic emergency narrative, is what I want to think about. I argue that inevitability is folded into our understanding of “states of emergency,” that it is predicated on genre, and that our job as literary critics is to examine the various ways in which inevitability works, to our detriment. To do so, we go back to another, historical, emergency and the fictional and nonfictional genres in which it was inscribed.

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In June 1975, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi famously imposed a state of emergency throughout the country in response to what she called “the deep and widespread conspiracy” against her. The immediate trigger was a court ruling invalidating Gandhi's election due to misconduct in her 1971 campaign. More generally, Gandhi's increasing power and authoritarianism had prompted the rise of varied oppositional forces. Threatened by these oppositions, Gandhi acted swiftly and ruthlessly. Across the country, tens of thousands were detained without trial and sent to jail, where many were tortured; opposition leaders—from the Left and from the Right—were also arrested. Basic civil liberties were suspended: elections for the Parliament and state governments were postponed; the constitution was amended; heavy censorship imposed; houses and bazaars were demolished, in the name of slum eradication or “beautification.” Finally, and perhaps most horrifically, Gandhi's son Sanjay led a widespread forced sterilization campaign targeting many of the nation's poor and indigent. The Emergency ended as abruptly as it began: in January 1977 the prime minister astonished the nation yet again when she decided to dissolve Parliament and call for new elections (in which she was roundly defeated). Gandhi's surprising return to power in 1980, her son Sanjay's death a few months later, and her assassination in 1984 hastened the desire to forget the period, which was swiftly relegated to the status of anomaly in India's democratic history, surfacing from time to time, and with renewed force most recently during the authoritarian regime of Prime Minster Narendra Modi and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party).

My monograph Genres of Emergency makes two main arguments which are important to our discussion here. The first claims that the meanings of the 1975 – 77 Emergency in India—for its various constituents at the time and for those seeking to understand it after the fact—were predicated on a tension between crisis and continuity. Indeed, writing on the Emergency—at the time and after the fact—offers a complex fusion of tropes of disruption and continuity. The crisis trope focuses on the anomalousness of the Emergency and its drastic, antidemocratic measures. Stressing the period's singularity, for example, was the mandate of the Shah Commission, appointed in 1977 to investigate the Emergency's “excesses,” stressing its anomalousness rather than its continuities. Recent scholarship, however, presents the events of the Emergency in their wider historical contexts and sees them as of a piece with larger trends in Indian social, legal, and political history. The Emergency was undoubtedly a crisis, but one that was oddly consistent with the chronic, ordinary problems of Indian democracy, as well as part of a continuous chain of ostensibly singular emergencies.

Indeed, emergency situations—in India and around the world—have always presented a complicated and ostensibly paradoxical mix of crisis and continuity, of an anomaly that is both a contrast to the ordinary and at the same time part of a chronic situation. Arguing that the state of exception has become “the new normal” has by now become a cliché in itself. However, rather than pointing out that the state of emergency is mundane (although it is) or that it is rooted in colonial structure (although it is that too), my point is that it functions simultaneously as exceptional and nonexceptional.

Like its events, Emergency literary fiction also straddles the tension between the singular and the generic, between the unprecedented and always-already. Moreover, my research shows that this tension was worked out in its literary and nonliterary texts through an explicit awareness and engagement with their genres. Rather than focusing on the way these novels remember the Emergency or inscribe it in Indian or global collective memory, I read fiction written on the Emergency in the 1980s and 1990s to understand the interventions they offer into India's political past and present, and into the cultural configuration of emergencies, both singular and iterative. In other words, ranging from the globally prominent to the little-known, and diverse in their forms and politics, Emergency novels share two common features. The first is the uneasy tension between crisis and continuity, and the second is their experimentation with literary genre. Taken together, these features underpin my argument that the novels narrate a singular, unprecedented crisis in recognizable, even formulaic forms, using the iterative nature of genre to recontextualize the ostensibly unprecedented Emergency within crises past and future.

The diverse group of novels published in English about the Emergency through the end of the twentieth century are thus characterized by their experimentation with literary genre. More specifically, these novels use the conventions of their respective genres (realism, epic, allegory, and thriller) to reach back in time and across cultures and languages, invoking past iterations of these forms and histories and anticipating those to come. Unlike Hayden White (1974), I do not claim that these four genres are particularly suited to the representation of Emergency. Instead, I ask what these novels do through their engagement with these genres. The answer I came to is that genre affords Emergency fiction a uniquely effective form of historicization. By its very structure, genre indexes previous iterations of the form, condensing historical knowledge and perspective, asking that its newest iteration be read in light of its predecessors. It thus functions as a malleable, historically saturated form. By focusing on the formal qualities of each, I foreground the ways in which these texts do not (or not only) reflect or represent a historical event but rather intervene to resignify these events within a historical and global context. In this way, the novels articulate complex political interventions, subtly indicting the long-standing faults in democratic structures that enabled the authoritarian regime that was and foreshadow those to come. The complex interplay between the novels’ political subject matter and their aesthetic and formal attributes reveals the novels’ own complicity in the long-term consequences of the Emergency and the often-uneasy interface between a novel's overt political affiliation or stand and its imbrication, willing and unwilling, in its own political contexts.

I thus argue that genre functions not only as a mode of representation but also as a conceptual object, a certain set of conventions and expectations, condensed over time, within which its form and content garners meaning. Take for example, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (1996), a realist novel that takes place in the Emergency. I argued that since realism has come to be associated with the mundane and the quotidian, Mistry uses it as a way to situate the Emergency within a discourse of the normal and thus to raise questions about the relationship of the political emergency (crisis) to the stagnating colonial and postcolonial structures which enabled it (continuity).

Yet, while genre can generate powerful political critique, its conventions can, of course, simply become reified, when genre ceases to function actively and critically and serves instead to reaffirm expectations. Nayantara Sahgal's Rich like Us (1987), to name one, is another realist novel that, unlike Mistry's, does not question the genre in which it is written and thus gets trapped within its dictates. The result is a highly conventional narrative that generates a sense of political inevitability rather than insight. While these narratives can adequately and even powerfully reflect on their subject matter or times, they do not end up offering significant political insight or intervention.

Other novels, such as Salman Rushdie's reworking of the epic in Midnight's Children (1991) or Arun Joshi's allegory The River and the City (1994), challenge the reification of genre via modernist or postmodernist defamiliarization, rewriting and reworking the genres in which they are composed. Both of these novels break or deconstruct their genre-based conventions, their experimental form offering political critique. Finally, and most effectively, a small group of novels, such as Mistry's A Fine Balance and Manohar Malgonkar's thriller The Garland Keepers (2013) cannily use the reified conventions of their genre as a reflection on political reification and commodification, producing highly conventional narratives that reflect critically on their own conventionality and that of the society in which they function. The result is fiction that, whether lowbrow or high, signals its urgent commitment to writing as a mode of political action by pitting its genre-as-mode-of-representation against its conventions.

Returning briefly to Prophet Song as an example, I would argue that Lynch's novel belongs in the second of the three categories. The interior narrative, which follows Eilish's process of comprehension, uses free indirect discourse to defamiliarize and challenge the reified complacency with which she apprehends the deepening state of emergency around her. The result is a terrifying and powerful political critique of generic Western bourgeois complacency in the face of a world descending into totalitarian violence. At the same time, as I showed above, the novel fails to critique the generic nature of the state of emergency, which remains pretty much an unexamined cliché. The external narrative, that depicting the state of emergency, also remains locked into its genre. Failing to foreground the emergency's genericness (its conventionality), the novel unwittingly accepts it as inevitable. Put in terms of plot, while Eilish could have saved herself and her children (had she comprehended better, had she been less complacent), neither she nor anyone else could have had any effect on the state of emergency, which is preordained.

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Before we reach our crisis today, we have to make another stop, at the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought a renewed consideration of states of emergency, employed variously worldwide to combat the health crisis. In many of these countries, India and Israel/Palestine prominent among them, the emergency measures sat far too easily with ongoing erosions of democratic government and governance. The severe limitations to individual and collective rights carried out for the sake of public health seemed oddly of a piece with those already in place in the name of “security” or “public safety.” In India, the harsh and hastily imposed lockdown that left millions of migrant workers to their gruesome fate resonated with the anti-Muslim riots in New Delhi in February 2020, which in turn followed on the heels of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, and other authoritarian measures instituted by what is increasingly called the “undeclared Emergency” led by the BJP.

In Israel, where I was writing under lockdown at home, the Benjamin Netanyahu – led government used the pandemic to deepen existing antidemocratic and surveillance measures imposed by the long-standing emergency legislation that undergirds the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. Emergency measures seemed to form an amalgam of crisis and continuity, a nexus that forms the relationship of emergency to its past. The connections between my research and my surroundings thus came fast and strong. Indeed, refracted in the pandemic emergency, it became clearer in my study that emergencies worldwide are not only similar to past emergencies but that they are constructed on a template of “emergency,” a structure within which an emergency could be comprehended despite its ostensible singularity. In other words, emergencies are unprecedented, but they need to be recognizably so.

Once identified and declared, an emergency brings about an array of generically determined actions and reactions that seem inevitable and necessary. Whether in the form of suspensions of civil liberties, the “bitter pill” that the nation must take for its own good; fearmongering against enemies from without or within; or prioritization of public safety and convenience, a.k.a. the “trains running on time,” states of emergency are predicated on a series of conventional tropes. This is captured perfectly by Salman Rushdie (1991: 481) in his depiction of the Indian Emergency in Midnight's Children: “The word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements.” As Rushdie's astute use of the connecting hyphens makes clear, emergency measures come as package deals. They are reified—that is, ready-made, inevitable, and unquestioned. Note the use of the passive voice and the lack of agents in this quotation. The “word Emergency” is merely “heard,” and everything else follows unquestioned. The emergency measures, violent and undemocratic, are dehistoricized and depoliticized, they do not originate from a political agent nor are they given a historical context. Once declared, a crisis becomes merely a crisis, disconnected from its historical origins, attendant only to its immanent logic. These, in turn, further normalize the state of emergency and, as I have shown with regard to Prophet Song above, tend to dehistoricize and depoliticize it.

If the danger of literary genre is reification of its conventions, then its correlate in thinking about the state-of-emergency-as-genre is normalization. The paradox of genre is that it is necessary for comprehension; we cannot understand an event without understanding what kind of event it is. But once an event becomes an event of a certain kind, then it loses its singularity, and hence its meaning as crisis: it becomes normalized. As I wrote the concluding lines to my book, the COVID-19 pandemic, then two years old, had become the new normal. Would it have an actual “end”? we wondered. And if it did, would we recognize it? At the same time, the global refugee crisis of the early twenty-first century continued (and still continues) unabated, building on previous—by now normalized—ones, including the ongoing displacement of Palestinians where I live and write. Imbricated in each other, historical and political genres abound; events fade in and out of view, at times as crisis, at others as continuity. Hovering above all of these, I have tried to argue here, is the genre of emergency, where crisis meets continuity in the struggle to make sense of the senseless, in the fear of normalizing that which should not be normalized.

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With all this in mind, we finally arrive at our current crisis in the Middle East / West Asia. Trying to delineate the momentous crisis that includes Israel's latest war on Gaza, the Hamas attack that preceded it, and the famine that it engendered offers an exercise in futility. Naming it—even with a temporary placeholder—remains elusive, first, because it is still ongoing and changing; second, because we cannot bracket off the crisis that this undoubtedly is from its continuities, yet we also seem to be unable to think about both at the same time; and third, because the societies or nations experiencing these events—Palestinians and Israelis—experience and understand them in radically different ways and as part of entirely differently conceived (if not separate) historical contexts, leaning on and generating irreconcilable narratives. The result is, in addition to everything else, an epistemological crisis and a discursive one.

For many of us in Israel, the sheer onslaught of unimaginable horrors that the past months have brought on, the fact that they seem to be drawing from a bottomless pit of horror, as well as our own closeness to these atrocities and complicity within them, have made thinking about our current crisis especially difficult. But think about it we must; otherwise we give in to the dictates of the genre, by which we give into to the logic of crisis and emergency, to our detriment.

Indeed, the first thing I learned from my research is to look beyond the singular horrific crisis and to see it also as a continuity, part of an ongoing historical and political reality. The current deadly violence is not, in fact, just a singular moment of crisis, although almost all of those involved want to claim it as such, with good reason. Nor is it, for obvious reasons of scale and kind, just “more of the same,” although continuities abound. Finally, it is not an inevitable result of a two-sided “conflict” in which we—around the world—must line up to take sides, proudly locating ourselves on the right side of history, while history continues to wreak havoc on those who do not get to choose. Rather, it is deeply embedded in a historical context, inextricable from the occupation of Palestine by Israel, with its attendant apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing. It is also a part of US foreign policy and of the international military-industrial complex.

For example, the language of Israeli leaders that the International Court of Justice in The Hague pointed to in January 2024 as language that signals genocidal intent is one that we in Israel know too well (continuity) even though it now carries farther (crisis). Having inadvertently normalized this language as “extreme” and “marginal” and thus not to be taken seriously, mainstream Israelis cannot recognize the way it has become a course of action and the ways in which they—we—are swept up in that action. The imbrication of crisis and continuity is also wreaking havoc within Israeli society. In Israeli academia, not long ago proudly at the vanguard of a massive protest movement to safeguard Israel's deteriorating democracy,² students and professors, most of them Palestinians, have recently been suspended, arrested, and otherwise disciplined for speaking out (or what was perceived as speaking out) in ways that opposed the strict national narrative. The inconceivable is shrugged off as inevitable. Fascism, feared but dismissed again and again as the project of the Far Right, has been mainstreamed under the sign of crisis, at times by those who seek nationalism to restore their sense of stability, at others by cynical opportunists, and most often by those unwittingly paralyzed by fear and helplessness, or simply—like those in Lynch's novel—“not wanting to court trouble.”

The risk of the rhetoric of “emergency” is thus giving in to inevitability and taking for granted all that it entails. Once identified and declared, an emergency brings about a series of predetermined actions and reactions that seem inevitable and necessary. These, in turn, further normalize (and I would also say, essentialize) the state of emergency and, as I just explained, tend to depoliticize it. For example, in the prevailing military narrative, Israel must restore “deterrence” after the Hamas attack or else risk what it sees as inevitable annihilation. Locked into our genres of belligerency, we cannot recognize this violence is what has gotten us here in the first place. Tragically, “ceasefires” too are part of this genre, part of the cycle of inevitable violence in which we are bound. They offer not an end to violence but only a pause, a countdown to the next round. A way out requires shifting from the genre of “war” to try and find another, political, one that might offer a way out.

While it may seem inevitable, the violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics that are human made, and can thus be unmade. I believe that with all my heart. It requires that we recognize the ways in which this violence is genre based and thus prompts recognition of that which we are primed to recognize—that is, what we already know in ways that we already know. We have become very good at recognizing and calling out the ways in which we are doomed, all the ways in which we are helpless in face of others’ wrongdoing. This allows us a sense of mastery (like the readers of Prophet Song, “we know”), but it also gives into the logic of inevitability, which courts our complicity in generating inevitability and bolsters the power of those who have brought us here in the first place.

The point is not that there is no wrongdoing or that all wrongdoings are equal, nor that there is fault on “both sides.” This is emphatically an argument against any form of moral or political equivocation. Instead, I am pointing out that, like Eilish (locked into her genre of bourgeois complacency) and like the readers of the novel (locked into their reified understanding of fascist emergency), the logic of inevitability does not allow us to recognize those strands of reality that are not embedded in our genres. We can thus only narrate the ways in which we are doomed (the ways that have brought us where we are) confirming and reconfirming the power of the genre through which we already understand our world. We cannot recognize the crumbs of events and discourse that are the peripheries of our vision and comprehension, but we may be able to see them, and offer political hope, if we shifted our genres.

Genre can thus doom us but also offer a way out, by finding new ways of knowing and of political action. If we remember that we need to read genre-as-mode-of-representation through its own conventions, we can see what we are doing and our complicity in what we abhor. By way of example, we return one last time to Prophet Song. The consciousness of Eilish's husband, Larry, is represented only once and marks the only deviation in the novel from Eilish's point of view. Summoned by the GNSB (the Garda National Services Bureau, Ireland's newly formed secret police), he too struggles to comprehend, “seeking something within the shade of his own thinking and cannot alight upon it” (Lynch 2023: 4), and then to come to terms with what he understands: “He takes a long drink and steps into the living room. Listen, he says, almost watching his voice as it falls to a whisper. It will turn out to be nothing, I'm pretty sure. As he speaks he finds his belief fall away as though he had poured the drink of water into his hands” (5). Here, too, comprehension is defamiliarized, in the description of the collapse of Larry's belief, made as concrete as a spilled drink of water, but also as evanescent. Note, however, that the moment when belief bottoms out comes at the same time as he whispers the cliché to Eilish, “It will turn out to be nothing.” Made cognizant of the genericness of the words of comfort he utters, Larry is jolted into realizing the genre of events through which they are living, the part he is playing, and the inevitableness of it all. The novel implies that he can no more change his fate than return the spilled water to its glass.

Larry's disappearance by the hands of the GNSB also marks the disappearance of his consciousness and of any other perception other than Eilish's in the novel, deepening our sense of claustrophobic inevitability. However, in the final section below, I would like to argue that this moment in the novel—where the narrative reflects critically on its own reification—also offers a possibility of political intervention.

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October 7, 2023, was experienced by an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis as the greatest crisis in the history of the nation. The Hamas attack was just one part of it; the collapse of the Israeli military in the prevention and immediate response to the attack was another. The state, led by Netanyahu's government, also abandoned its citizens—most glaringly in its callousness toward the fate of those civilians kidnapped during the attack—but also in the collapse of its education, health, and welfare systems in the immediate aftermath. Gutted by decades of commitment to a neoliberal economy on the one hand, and the increasingly messianic settler-colonial project on the other, the Israeli state came up empty-handed to its citizens and confirmed their deepest fears and sense of abandonment. As in every Israeli crisis, the military solution became the only solution. Indeed, the Israeli Army, aided by a massive emergency draft, was the first to revive, and unsurprisingly—to those who know and understand Jewish-Israeli society—the public cathected to its promise to restore “security,” whatever the cost.

The cost, of course, is borne unevenly. First and foremost are the Palestinians in Gaza, who are still undergoing an onslaught with clear genocidal attributes. Second are the Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, where, under the aegis of the war on Gaza, Israeli settlers and the military that works at their behest deepen the project of ethnic cleansing in favor of messianic settlement. Third are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose citizenship has always been tenuous and vulnerable, once again silenced and branded as the enemy within. Last are the Jewish citizens of Israel, who are paying the price of this militarized security with their lives, with further erosion of democracy, and with the collapse of the economy. All of this cost is exacted differentially, with the weakest parts of each society (the poor, women, etc.) paying disproportionately.

And yet the prevailing discursive mode in Israel in March 2024 and since October 7, 2023, is that of inevitability. Netanyahu's continued power over the nation seems inevitable; the military response in Gaza is deemed inevitable given Hamas's attack on October 7 (“What else could we do?”); and “living by the sword” (oft-repeated euphemism for endless war, which rests on an unacknowledged and unsubstantiated assumption that we will always have the upper hand) seems to be our destiny. “Security” is understood only in military terms. Even the many Israelis who resent and reject these narratives accept their inevitability. One of the main problems with the discourse of inevitability, of course, is that it is a self-fulfilling prophesy and thus makes its bearers complicit in its (inevitable) outcomes.

As a literary scholar, I turn to genre as a way to look at our crisis and the ways in which we comprehend it. Paying attention to the genres in which we narrate our emergency and understand the way they are dooming us, we can see the way that we are creating and perpetuating our own undoing. We for whom the current situation is unacceptable need to recognize and locate our complicity in the outrage or wrong that we deplore, and rather than deny or distance ourselves from our involuntary complicity, or be paralyzed by it, let the particularity of our specific complicity inform the actions we take. Rather than practicing a politics of purity, which aims to distance ourselves from our complicity, we can thus act strategically and powerfully—letting our complicity galvanize our ethical political action. We need to challenge the discourse of inevitablility at every point and turn, offering alternative ways of understanding our past and present.

Some of these alternatives might include reading our history and our crisis not through a military but through a civil framework, where those living between the river and the sea are all on one “side,” rather than on two conflicting ones. Instead of militarized genres of vengeance and triumph, we might consider other genres of collective mourning and reparations. I am not naively replacing dystopia with utopia. Rather, I am advocating messy and difficult cognitive and political work. If we recognize how inevitability works against us all, we can then shift our gaze—not from pain, horror, anger, and futility but through them—beyond our moment of crisis to understand its continuities and thus to imagine a different future. We cannot afford anything else.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Rachel Ablow and Tania Roy, who challenged me to think and write in the midst of my haze, to Louise Hornby, Catherine Zimmer, Tanya Agathocleous, Yoon Sun Lee, Eitan Bar-Yosef, and Yosefa Raz, who read and commented on previous versions, and to Nitzan Lebovic, for conversation on Prophet Song.

Notes

References