The Short Story Contains Them All: Victims and Perpetrators, Past and Present, in Post‐Holocaust and Post‐colonial Israel

Abstract

This article engages with both the experience and construction of victimhood in Israel, moving between different locations and events, and comparing the public, or grand narrative with individual accounts. The main issues on which the article focuses are the relationships between victims and perpetrators, and between past and present, inquiring as to the political and moral consequences of forming these categories and identities, and of extrapolating from the past to the present. Both of those issues are discussed in relation to one another, in questioning how this extrapolation constitutes victimhood‐related identities, and how those categories are formulated via the movement between past and present. Drawing on the notions of “storytelling”, the “short story”, and the “merographic connection”, the article offers a new perspective on accommodating tensions and moral paradoxes between and within narratives, as well as between past and present. These notions also provide the textual templates which form the basis of this article.

Keywords:

• Israel
• Holocaust
• Storytelling
• Merographic Connection
• Short Story

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Özlem Biner, Dr Tanya Richardson, Jurgen Gispert and Juliana Ochs for their comments on this article. This research was carried out with the assistance of the Council for British Research in the Levant.

Notes

[1] Another series of trials held in the 1950s were the “Capu trials” (see Yablonka 2004; Zertal 2002).

[2] The use of the term “riots” is a common reference to the violent Arab clashes with both the British government and Jewish population before 1948, and is therefore another extrapolation in this case.