Three Ruins in Infiltration by Yehoshua Kenaz

Abstract

Abstract: This article will discuss the visual, social, and political meanings arising from the description of three ruins in the novel Infiltration (1986) by Israeli author Yehoshua Kenaz. The novel tells the story of a group of recruits with mild disabilities at a basic training camp in Israel in the 1950s. The three ruins are situated in the locales where the soldiers live or train. The first is in Ramla, where Avner makes love to his married paramour; the second is a remnant of the village of Sarafand, where the recruits train for night combat and Alon, the kibbutznik, shoots for no reason; and the third is in the Sand Dunes near Ashkelon. Previous scholarship has overlooked the similarity between shooting into an Arab ruin and shooting at a “ghost”—the traces of a Palestinian village left after the residents’ expulsion/flight during the 1948 War of Independence. The ruin is a traumatic, liminal space that awakens in the narrator’s mind childhood memories mingled with nightmares. The soldiers confront the third ruin at the Barne ʿ a Sand Dunes during a series of military exercises practicing infiltration tactics. The scene is revealed as a mise-enabyme , a part of the novel that replicates the general plot in miniature. This article will examine the differences between the three ruins, showing why it is only at the third ruin that the recruits realize they are witness to the catastrophic erasure of a human settlement. The first two ruins create a romantic-melancholy impression, while the third is surrealist. The article will elucidate the link between these artistic movements and the novel’s political-social dimensions.