Rescuing the Person from the Symbol: "Peace Now" and the Ironies of Modern Myth

Abstract

Rescuing the Person from the Symbol: “Peace Now” and the Ironies of Modern Myth* Michael Feige (bio) Introduction On 20 February 1983 a hand grenade was hurled into a “Peace Now” demonstration in Jerusalem, killing one and injuring eight. The slain victim was Emil Grunzweig. The Israeli peace camp was on the verge of gaining a martyr. All the components for the creation of a politically useful myth were present: a movement activist, who as an immigrant, a kibbutz member and an army officer epitomized Israeli values, had been killed by the traditional enemies of the peace camp while demonstrating his devotion to the ideas of peace, democracy and civility. Peace Now, being a movement dedicated to fighting the policies of the ruling right-wing Likud government, was presented with the opportunity of exploiting the symbolic benefits of victim status. Nonetheless, the Peace Now leadership manifested a deep reluctance to construct a myth out of Grunzweig’s life and death. Both publicly and privately they distanced themselves from the idea of hagiographic commemoration and deliberately refrained from using their associate’s memory for political purposes. In other words, this is a rather remarkable case of non-commemoration, anti-mythmaking and conscious collective forgetfulness on the part of a political movement. [End Page 141] The reasons for Peace Now’s apparently counter-intuitive and counterproductive—one may even say politically suicidal—course of action have much to do with the intricate relations between myth and modernity, which have been addressed by the most prominent thinkers on these issues. Mythical beliefs were regarded as characterizing the irrational, emotional, “dark” side of human nature, and it was believed that they were destined to disappear with the enlightened age of modernity. The German thinker Ernst Cassirer suggested a systematic binary opposition between mythos and logos, with an evolutionary process leading from one to the other. 1 In the field of collective memory there is much discussion on the transformation in historical consciousness that has accompanied, and even defined, the modern age. 2 French historian Pierre Nora has followed Maurice Halbwachs in making a clear distinction between “memory” and “history,” claiming that “memory” implies viewing the past as an integral part of the present, with the same principles that shaped the past also being at work in the present. History, on the other hand, implies a clear and final boundary between past and present, when the past becomes, to use David Lowenthal’s spatial metaphor, “a foreign country.” History objectifies the past and strips it of the enchantment needed to manufacture mythological tales. 3 Claims that myth is not compatible with modernity have to confront the overwhelming evidence that myth does in fact appear, and even flourishes, in the modern age. It may be perceived as “modern political myth,” based loosely on historical evidence, but its continuing existence merits consideration. 4 The phenomenon has been most pronounced in totalitarian regimes, where leaders were elevated to mythical status and promoted grand ideologies based on elaborate mythologies. 5 Myth, however, can be found in democratic regimes as well, as exemplified in works on the commemoration of American presidents. 6 Modernity and the nation-state in themselves are constituted on grand mythological narratives, or rather, in David Apter’s term, on mytho/logics. Modernity itself has been portrayed as a “white mythology,” possessing attributes similar to those it claimed to have ousted. 7 Sheldon Wolins has dramatically expressed the change—not the disappearance—of myth in the modern world, arguing that “instead of eliminating the dark vision of world destruction which haunted all myths of primeval chaos, the power [End Page 142] of science and technology has, of course, darkened it further and left it unrelieved by eschatological hopes. Man has become his own myth.” 8 Researchers today focus on two issues that have some affinities with the questions regarding the theoretical possibility of modern myth. One concerns a “problematic past” that cannot be ignored, yet does not fit easily into an identity-enhancing narrative. Since Halbwachs’s first classic formulations, students of the field are well aware that all representations of the past are in a sense problematic. The process of constructing myth out of historical evidence...