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InterventionsInternational Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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‘THE HORROR’ IN HEBREW

Eitan Bar-Yosef

To cite this article: Eitan Bar-Yosef (2015): ‘THE HORROR’ IN HEBREW, Interventions, DOI:10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079499

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079499

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‘THE HORROR ’ IN HEBREWHea r t o f Da rkne s s i n I s r a e l i Cu l t u r e

Eitan Bar-YosefBen-Gurion University, Israel

..................Africa

colonialism

Heart of Darkness

Israel

translation

Zionism

.................

Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Israeliculture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa,the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked,both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing onthree major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s;young Israel’s intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and thepessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essaysuggests that the novella’s relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in thework’s fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictionsthat have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. Thismirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, whooffered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in hisinfluential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeligeneral, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thuscontinues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel’s colonial violence.

Every year, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of fasting, Israelinewspapers offer their readers special supplements, in which texts about

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atonement and repentance appear alongside agonizing articles that revisit thenational trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The special Yom Kippuredition published in 2008 by Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s leading tabloid, fol-lowed these conventions. However, in addition to the familiar assortmentof articles, readers were also given an exclusive holiday supplement: a newHebrew version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Translated byShulamit Lapid (a well-known novelist) and her son Yair Lapid (a popularjournalist), the novella was published as a thin, undistinguished softcoverbooklet, forty-eight pages of densely packed text, relieved by an occasionalillustration. In their introduction, the translators explained that ‘a tale thatbecomes a classic… can be reinterpreted in every place and every period,whether it is Gaza or Israel, Northern Ireland or Tibet, Darfur or Ruanda.’Conrad, they continued, understood that ‘the occupation corrupts’ – anidiom often used by the Israeli Left to warn against the moral degeneracyassociated with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories: Conrad’s‘journey into the Dark Continent is primarily a journey into the soul… It isnot hatred that corrupts us, but indifference. If it overtakes you, then youare, truly, at the heart of darkness’ (Lapid and Lapid 2008).1

The unusual editorial decision to include the translation as a special sup-plement no doubt reflected Yair Lapid’s popularity (five years later hewould harness his celebrity status to establish a centrist political party,sweep the Israeli middle class, become the new finance minister and – not sur-prisingly – abandon his previous warnings about the moral price of the occu-pation). Nevertheless, the idea that Conrad’s novella belongs in the specialYom Kippur edition also reflects, I argue, its intriguing place in Israeliculture.2 Although Heart of Darkness never became a widely disseminatedtext, the myth that stands at the core of Conrad’s tale – namely, the journeyinto the heart of Africa as an archetypal reflection of human degenerationinto greed, violence and madness – has been repeatedly evoked in variouspublic contexts, both implicitly and explicitly. As will be shown, the relevanceof the novella to Israeli culture has surfaced in several significant episodes: theemergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel’s intensive involve-ment in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the deep pessimism that encompassedIsraeli society after the 1973 war, leading to a growing disillusionment withZionist ideals.Focusing on these phases, my discussion examines how and why Conard’s

tale has been evoked in cultural arenas, from theatre to the press. In somecases, I explore direct allusions to Heart of Darkness; in others, my analysishighlights more elusive resonances. In all these contexts, however, referencesto Conrad’s novella allow us to ponder some of Zionism’s complex historicaland ideological trajectories. In her acute reading of Amos Oz’s novels,Jacqueline Rose has noted how references to South Africa – that is, to apart-heid and its legacy – sometimes flicker in Oz’s novels: ‘In all these moments,

1 All translationsfrom Hebrew aremine, unlessotherwise stated.

2 To be sure, as RuthMayer (2002) hasshown, Heart ofDarkness continuesto play a central rolein contemporaryconstructions of‘Africa’ all over theWest. See also Sewlall(2014).

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South Africa appears as the unlived life of Israel: mundanely, almost contin-gently, as the place where the Israeli might have chosen to go; more troub-lingly, as the sign wherever it appears – hysteria, fanaticism, apocalypse –

of the barely imaginable, barely acknowledgeable, political unconscious ofthe nation’ (1996, 45). Conrad’s journey up the River Congo, I claim,offers an even more powerful interpretative framework, rooted in thework’s fluid allegorical mode which anticipates or parallels tensions and con-tradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its very inception.

Herzl’s Heart of Darkness

In 1957, Habima, Israel’s national theatre, staged a comedy called Senunit atMayumba Beach, by Yosh Halevi.3 The plot focused on a group of Israelisailors whose merchant ship, Senunit (Sparrow), lingers on the shore ofFrench Equatorial Africa. The engine has broken down, and with no spareparts, the mechanics cannot replace the faulty rings. ‘I’ve examined all themaps with a magnifying glass…There is no trace of a town from here toPointe Noire’, sighs the captain. When a sailor asks whether there is any habi-tation inland, the captain explains, ‘All we have are nautical charts, whichonly show a three-mile wide coastal strip. Behind it there’s a large white ter-ritory and an inscription: Africa’ (Halevy 1957, 5).Even in its first few minutes, Halevy’s play echoes – unknowingly, it seems –

marginal yet meaningful elements from Conrad’sHeart of Darkness. Readersof the novella might remember how, at the beginning of his narration (recited,in turn, by another, unnamed narrator), Marlow recalls his childhood fascina-tion with maps: in these cartographical images, just as in the marine chartdepicted in the Israeli play, Africa appeared as a ‘blank space of delightfulmystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over’ (Conrad 2006,8). Hired by the managers of a Belgian trading firm to travel to centralAfrica and serve as the captain of a small steamer, Marlow makes his wayto the distant trading post, only to find a wreck. He then waits franticallyfor rivets to arrive – again, just like the sailors in Halevy’s play, desperateto fix the engine and sail.Following this exposition, the Israeli play envisions a rather unexpected

contact zone (though this, too, could be said to resembleMarlow’s miraculousmeeting in the jungle with the accountant, ‘a white man, in such an unex-pected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort ofvision’ [18]). Bored out of their wits, Sparrow’s crew-members have alreadymet the local, half-naked African natives. Imagine, then, the sailors’ shockwhen several European Jews, in tropical gear and pith helmets, suddenlyclimb on board. This is the small Jewish community of Mayumba (popu-lation: 7). As the sailors soon discover, the community’s founding members

3 Halevy (1925–2004) was a seaman,then a journalist andplaywright. For ananalysis of theproduction’s place inthe racial politics of1950s Israeli theatre,see Bar-Yosef (2013).

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arrived in Africa several decades earlier – indeed, shortly after the British gov-ernment offered the Zionists an opportunity to establish an autonomousJewish state in East Africa.This actual historical event – a central episode in early Zionist history, well

familiar to the play’s spectators in Tel Aviv – took place back in 1903, andcame to be known as the Uganda Affair (Weisbord 1968).4 Theodor Herzl,the ‘visionary forefather’ of political Zionism and founding president of theWorld Zionist Congress, embraced the British plan enthusiastically. To hismind, this African Zion would function as a ‘miniature England in reverse’(quoted in Elon 1975, 375): namely, whereas the British metropolitancentre established colonies overseas, the Jewish colonies overseas could even-tually establish a metropolitan centre in Palestine. For many Zionists,however, the plan betrayed the dream of establishing a Jewish state in theLand of Israel; and following Herzl’s untimely death in 1904, the idea wassoon aborted. As for the Jewish settlers in Senunit at Mayumba Beach,opting to stay in Africa, they fulfill Herzl’s vision, at least partially, bymigrating to Western Africa, where they form a new ‘colony’, and wherethey eventually meet their Israeli brethren.The play is essentially a romantic comedy: born and bred in the jungle,

Mayumba’s young Jewish girls are desperate to find themselves nice Jewishhusbands and leave Africa. There is also a strong satirical dimension: theplay mocks, for example, the Jewish tendency to split and argue (Mayumbahas two competing Zionist organizations). But the most intriguing elementis the representation of race. ‘What a strange religion’, observes one of theIsraeli sailors at the sight of the African savages swaying fervently as theypray and wave a rooster above their heads: ‘These are obviously strangepagans’ (Halevy 1957, 7).5 The sailors soon learn, however, that the Africanswere converted by the Jewish settlers of Mayumba, who refer to the natives asKushi-yudim, Negro-Jews. ‘When we came here thirty years ago they were allcannibals’, explains Bukshpan, one of the veteran Jewish settlers: ‘We’veturned them into observant Jews so they don’t eat us up’ (12).The problems begin when these African Jews explain that they, too, wish to

migrate to Israel. A boisterous scandal follows: happily, due to a comic mix-up (the ship’s cook quotes a series of apocalyptic biblical phrases), theAfrican-Jews realize that life in the Jewish State would be more dangerousand laborious than they had anticipated. Changing their mind, they attackthe Jewish settlers. ‘I barely made it’, moans Bukshpan as he climbs onboard, ‘the negroes… they wanted to eat me up.’ ‘Oh, Captain’, cries hisfriend, Mr Levi, ‘what horror’ (60).The horror! The horror! These are of course the famous last words of Kurtz

– and this is where the play seems to echo, most overtly, Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness. Hailed as a man of genius, an embodiment of European civiliza-tion, Kurtz is the company’s most successful ivory trader. But when he

4 The name ‘Uganda’prevailed althoughthe territory wasactually in today’sEast Kenya.

5 Jewish spectatorswould immediatelyidentify this as theJewish ritual ofKapparot(atonement): a daybefore Yom Kippur,observant Jews swinga chicken or roosterover their head, andthen slaughter it.

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ignores the company’s orders, and when strange rumours begin to spreadabout Kurtz’s degeneration, the company directors decide to stop him.During the nightmarish journey up the river, Marlow witnesses the violenceand brutality of the colonial apparatus; and when they finally reach Kurtz,Marlow is amazed to find a figure of a crazed, ghostly, dying tyrant. Snatchedfrom his admiring African worshippers, Kurtz dies on board the steamer onthe journey back, not before bequeathing his papers to Marlow, as well asthat final, puzzling verdict – his last words.It is difficult to assess whether, evoking ‘the horror’ at the end of his play (as

well as the African natives’ attack on the ship), Halevy was alluding directly toConrad’s novella – first published in Hebrew just three years earlier, in 1954.What remains unequivocal, however, is that Halevy’s play creates a playfullink between topical questions – Israel’s growing diplomatic and commercialinvolvement in Black Africa, from the mid-1950s onwards (explored below) –and the origins of the Zionist movement, in which African fantasies playedsuch an intriguing role – first and foremost, as we have noted, in theUganda Affair of 1903.Significantly, the idea that Africa could function as an alternative homeland

for the Jews surfaced just as Conrad was writing his novella, serialized inBlackwood Magazine in 1899 and published in book form in 1902. Theseare the very years in which Herzl’s thoughts increasingly turned towardsAfrica. In January 1902, Herzl drafted a long letter to Cecil Rhodes, theBritish arch-imperialist, asking him to support the Zionist cause (Levene2009). ‘How, then, do I happen to turn to you… ?’ asked Herzl andreplied: ‘Because it is something colonial’ (Herzl 1960, 3: 1193–1194). Fru-strated by the lack of progress in his negotiations to obtain a charter tosettle Jews in Palestine, and seeking ways to assist the Jewish refugeesfleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, Herzl began to consider other territoriesfor Jewish colonization. In May 1903 Herzl described in his diary howhe ‘started out from Chamberlain’s Uganda suggestion – and hit uponMozambique’ (1960, 4: 1487). Two months later, in July 1903, Herzldecided to turn to Belgium’s King Leopold to secure a charter in Congo.‘The Congo State has land enough which we can use for our settlement’,wrote Herzl to a Jewish Belgian banker: ‘We can take over part of the respon-sibilities, that is, pay an annual tax… to the Congo State, in return for whichwe naturally lay claim to self-government’ (1960, 4: 1512).Paraphrasing Jaqueline Rose, we could say that the Congo Free State – the

backdrop for much of Conrad’sHeart of Darkness – functions in Herzl’s writ-ings as ‘the unlived life of Israel’: not simply as a marginal allusion which rep-resents the ‘political unconscious of the nation’, but as a concrete politicalscheme. To be sure, like many of Herzl’s initiatives, his vision of a Zionistcolony in the Congo did not materialize; but it nevertheless exposes the colo-nial logic that shaped Herzl’s thought.

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These colonial tropes and fantasies, which permeate Herzl’s writing, areinherently connected to the Zionist desire of westernizing the Jews. Muchhas been written about Herzl’s tendency to internalize the anti-Semiticimage of the Jew as feminine, physically inferior, even black (Gilman 1986,6–12). Indeed, Herzl’s Zionism was in many ways an attempt to transformthe defective Jewish body of the diaspora. As Daniel Boyarin has noted, itwas precisely by transforming European Jews into colonists that Herzlhoped to redeem their physically inferior bodies and thus turn weak, margin-alized diaspora Jews into virile white men (1997, 304–310). This explainsHerzl’s deep fascination with Africa (Bar-Yosef 2007): there, against the back-drop of the ‘Dark Continent’, the slippery Jewish whiteness would finally befixed, constructing the Jews as unambiguously white. A revealing example ofAfrica’s bleaching effect on the Jews can be found in Herzl’s utopian novelAltneuland (1902). In one significant episode, Herzl envisions how, havingtransformed Palestine into a blossoming garden, the Jews would turn toAfrica, to assist the black natives (1941, 169, 170). While Herzl stresses theaffinity between Jewish and African histories – both races suffered centuriesof persecution – he is also careful to position Jews and blacks on oppositesides of the racial spectrum. The Jew is cast as the civilized, benevolent,white settler whose sacred duty is to bring progress, first to the desolateplains of the Holy Land, then to the darkness of Africa.This fusion of humanitarian and racial fantasies demonstrates the complex,

self-contradictory nature of Herzl’s Zionist ideology. Following in the foot-steps of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979), scholarship hasshown how Herzl and his fellow European Zionists were influenced by thecolonial ethos of the fin-de-siècle (Barnard 2013, 20–21): Zionists employedvarious colonial practices (scientific expeditions, settler plantations);embraced what they saw as the civilizing mission of bringing progress to abackward territory (Palestine, or indeed Africa); adopted Orientalist tropesin their attitudes towards the ‘natives’ (first Palestinians, then Arab Jews);and nurtured the common interests shared by the Zionist movement andthe European empires. Resisting this interpretation, Zionist historianshave pointed out that, unlike typical European settler colonialism, Zionismlacked a unified metropolitan centre which had initiated thecolonial venture in the first place. Zionism, they asserted, was basically ananti-colonial movement which sought to liberate the Jews from their historicalposition as an oppressed, persecuted, colonized people (Bareli 2001; Shimoni2007). Boyarin’s claim that Herzl’s Zionism ‘is almost, but not quite coloni-alism’ (1997, 307) sums up this hybridized form.The reception of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness displays striking parallels

between this ongoing dispute about Herzl’s Zionism – colonial, anticolonialor perhaps postcolonial? – and the critical debate regarding Conrad’s owncolonial outlook. While many scholars have traced in the novella a harsh

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critique of the European colonial project (Hawkins 1982), others – led by theNigerian novelist Chinua Achebe – have claimed that the tale is ultimatelyracist, presenting Africa ‘as setting and backdrop which eliminates theAfrican as human Factor…Can nobody see the preposterous and perversearrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up ofone petty European mind?’ Achebe asks in desperation (2006, 343, 344).These radically diverging views are rooted in the novella’s ambivalent tone:Conrad never explains whether Kurtz’s detestable rites reflect the primitivismof African culture or the barbarity of European colonial violence. Indeed, thenovella repeatedly suggests that the ‘heart of darkness’ is in fact situatedwithin the great imperial metropolis itself.The ambiguities and contradictions that characterize both Herzl’s and

Conrad’s thinking are perhaps typical of a general fin-de-siècle mood. Still,it is tempting to point to the biographical parallels between these two menof letters, who both struggled to shape and redefine their cultural and nationalidentity. Born in 1857 in the Ukraine to his Polish nationalist parents, Conradwas a Russian citizen who settled in Britain and wrote in English. Born inBudapest (1860) to an assimilated Jewish family, Herzl’s self-fashioning asa German-Jewish author and his realization of a deep anti-Semitic darknessat the heart of the great European centres led him to the Zionist solution.In both cases, their intricate position as both insiders/outsiders shaped theircomplex views of colonialism – and, in Herzl’s case, affected the nature ofthe Zionist enterprise as a whole. In this respect, the image of fin-de-siècleZionism embodied by Mayumba’s Jewish colony in Senunit at MayumbaBeach positions Conrad’s African nightmare as a founding myth of theZionist enterprise.Indeed, the ending of the play offers a fascinating variation on the

Conradian reluctance to define where, exactly, the ‘heart of darkness’ islocated. The narrow escape from the African cannibals implies that, sailingfull speed towards Israel, the Jews on board the ship (both colonists andseamen) can now leave the ‘horror’ behind them. Nevertheless, a closerlook at the play suggests a different view: while the natives seem to representa dark and primitive African elsewhere, they could also be said to symbolizean increasingly visible constituency of the Jewish state itself. The play’scharacterization of the lazy, superstitious Kushi-yudim recalls the image ofthe North African Jews who immigrated to Israel during the 1950s – asdepicted, for example, in Aryeh Gelblum’s notorious articles in the liberaldaily Ha’aretz: ‘The primitiveness of these people is unsurpassable. Theyhave almost no education at all, and what is worse is their inability to compre-hend anything intellectual.’ Gelblum was particularly shocked by the immi-grants’ ‘chronic laziness and hatred for any kind of work’ (quoted in Segev1998, 160). ‘African Jews’ – the title often given to North African Jewishimmigrants – are thus reimagined in the play as African Jews, literally.

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When these ‘African Jews’ decide to stay in Africa, the relief felt by both theIsraeli sailors and the Jewish settlers of Mayumba mirrors the fear and loath-ing felt by many veteran Ashkenazi Israelis as they encountered the waves ofimmigration from Moslem countries.6 The play’s ending thus exposes thefantasy of an exclusive ‘all-white’ Jewish community. The racial conflict,which allegedly takes place in Mayumba, is in fact played out within Israelitself. The ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not ‘there’, but ‘here’, at home.

Alone, in Africa

In addition to its take on (and tribute to) the origins of political Zionism in the1890s, Senunit at Mayumba Beach also reflected the diplomatic and commer-cial reality of the late 1950s – one in which Africa was becoming increasinglycentral to Israeli self-fashioning. Desperate to create strategic relationshipswith states located in the ‘second circle’ (that is, beyond the ‘first circle’ ofhostile Arab states), Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign MinisterGolda Meir orchestrated Israel’s entry into Black Africa on the eve of decolo-nization. By the early 1960s, Israel created ties with dozens of new Africanstates, developing an incredibly ambitious framework of aid projects (Peters1992). Between 1958 and 1973, more than three thousand Israeli expertsserved on missions in Africa, offering technical assistance in a variety offields, from agriculture and regional planning to engineering and militarytraining (Decalo 1998, 109).The Jewish struggle for independence in the final years of British rule in

Palestine was an important factor in this process. The anti-British campaign,ending with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, reinforced the cre-dentials of Zionism as an anti-colonial movement: this dimension appealed tothe leaders of the emerging African nations (who were not troubled, it seems,by the long and fruitful cooperation between Zionism and the British Empire,following the Balfour Declaration of 1917; or by the colonial dimensions ofIsrael’s conduct towards the Palestinians, both the refugees who were exiledduring the 1948 Nakba and those who remained in Israel as second-class citi-zens). ‘Like [the African nations], we had shaken off foreign rule’, explainedGolda Meir: ‘We couldn’t offer Africa money or arms, but on the other hand,we were free of the taint of the colonial exploiters because all that we wantedfrom Africa was friendship…We went into Africa to teach, and what wetaught was learned’ (1975, 318, 319). That Meir failed to recognize the colo-nial elements intrinsic to the Zionist enterprise is hardly surprising; but neithercould she sense the colonial undertones of her own dichotomy between thosewho go to teach and those who must learn.Israel’s surge into Africa produced a rich array of texts, artefacts and pro-

jects: travel accounts and reportage; exhibitions of African art; performances

6 For a recentreconceptualizationof ‘Mizrahi’ in thiscontext, see Cohen(2014).

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of African dance companies; and translations of African literature – poetry,novels and autobiographies by the rising African leaders, from Kenyatta toNkrumah. It is perhaps not completely coincidental that a new Hebrew trans-lation of Heart of Darkness was published in 1961, a year which marked thepeak of Israel’s involvement in Black Africa. This new Hebrew version, byMordecai Avi-Shaul, was particularly influential because of its title: whereasZe’ev Hartavy’s earlier translation (1954) employed a common, everydayword (hasheha) for its translation of ‘darkness’, Avi-Shaul chose a muchmore obscure word (ma’pelya) – mentioned only once in the Bible, in oneof Jeremiah’s admonishments (2: 31).7 By selecting such an obscure andawkward word, not part of spoken language, Avi-Shaul invested the talewith an additional sense of mystery, calamity and even gloom. And whilehis decision distorted the original (although Conrad’s style is often opaqueand difficult, ‘darkness’ belongs to a rather basic register), Avi-Shual’s trans-lation of the title (Lev ha-ma’pelya) became a familiar, even widespreadidiom.8 Employed in various contexts, the phrase – and the myths it embodied–were increasingly taken up by the Israeli media to depict Israel’s involvementin Africa.In the early years of this involvement, the Israeli experts were often depicted

in the press as brave and generous men, bringing the light of civilization to the‘Dark Continent’ (Lotem 1973, 342–364). Since many experts and adviserstravelled to Africa with their spouses and children, they often settled in thelarger cities (Kreinin 1964, 163). Still, while some journalists revelled in theimage of the expert as a devoted family man, other accounts often fosteredthe representation of the solitary Israeli – a selfless white man leaving hisfamily in the city and travelling, alone, to the depths of the jungle, where heworks alongside the natives.To be sure, from the very start, the Israeli presence in Africa hinged on a

delicate balance between altruism and self-interest, between ‘the noblecause’ (Conrad 2006, 9) and the bare ambition. This ambiguity is reflected,for example, in Golda Meir’s request from the directors of Solel-Bone,Israel’s leading construction company in those years, which became involvedin numerous projects all over Africa: ‘I don’t want you to lose money there’,Meir explained, ‘but for heaven’s sake, not a huge profit’ (quoted in Efrat2004, 2: 610). The question of profit also interested individuals, who oftenagreed to work in Africa not because they believed in the Israeli mission toenlighten Africa, but rather because they could not resist the material benefits– the large salary and the luxury of a sizeable villa with servants. In 1962Moshe Dayan, then minister of agriculture, toured the Israeli missions inWest Africa. On his return, he provoked a scandal when he compared theIsraeli advisers in Africa to other white officials, remnants of the previouscolonial administrations. The Israelis, Dayan said, condemn colonialism,but they themselves live ‘in a typical colonial style’ (Ben-Porat 1961).

7 ‘And you, Ogeneration, beholdthe word of the Lord.Have I been awilderness to Israel,or a land of thickdarkness?’ (EnglishStandard Version).8 Avi-Shaul’s versionwas reprinted wellinto the 1990s. Latertranslations havemade a point ofcorrecting his title –that is, by choosingone of the two morecommon Hebrewwords for ‘darkness.’These include OfiraRahat’s 1999 lev ha-hasheha (the same asHartavy’s); AvrahamYavin’s 1999 lev ha-afela; and the Lapids’aforementioned 2008be-lev ha-afela (whichactually distorts thetitle by adding apreposition: In theHeart of Darkness).

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GoldaMeir denied this vehemently, but when a high-ranking Israeli generalvisited Africa in 1969, in order to examine the living conditions of the IDFpersonnel, he returned to Israel stunned. ‘The social, moral and culturaldimensions of life there are in some cases so severely negative that thevisitor is shocked and embarrassed’, he wrote in his damning report: ‘Onecannot but wonder how it is that decent Israeli folks, IDF officers, have degen-erated to such an extent.’ Much of the report focused on the Israeli families,describing how the wives become immersed in gossip and intrigue.9 Yet, inother cases, the emphasis was once again on the solitary figure of the Israeliofficer, expert or adviser, who has somehow deviated from the Israeli collec-tive and embarked on a personal journey of selfishness and greed. ‘The gold-rush frenzy of Israelis in Nigeria’, read a headline in Ha’aretz in 1965. Thepiece, by the journalist Shabtai Teveth, described the story of AlexHacohen, a director in a joint Israeli–Nigerian company, who used his pro-fessional contacts to make a fortune for himself:

The legend of AlexHacohen, if that name could be applied to such a negative and sha-

meful affair, is a force which works in the souls of some Israelis in Nigeria – a negativefactor which must be recognized immediately. After all, what is happening in Nigeriais beginning to reverberate in other Western African states. These ‘independent Israe-

lis’ stand in stark contrast to the nature of the aid given by Israel to developingcountries, because they threaten to destroy – unless immediately restrained – theheart of the Israeli assistance, which is its righteousness. (Teveth 1965)

The ‘legend’ is rooted not only in the ability to produce a legendary Africanfortune (note how Africa transforms the Israeli into the old, greedy, diasporic‘Jew’), but also in the solitary presence of the ‘independent Israeli’, a renegadeadventurer who has deserted the official Israeli apparatus. This is precisely themyth of Kurtz: having ‘no restraint’ (Conrad 2006, 51), Kurtz thrived withinthe system before setting out to exploit it for personal glory and gain – thussinking in corruption.Condemning Hacohen/Kurtz, Teveth idealizes the Israeli aid projects –

assuming Israel’s military involvement in Africa to be virtuous. The darkernature of Israel’s intervention in Africa gradually emerged in the early1970s, particularly in relation to Israel’s activities in Uganda: what hadalready been a significant locale in Zionist mythology became a centralarena for Israeli military and intelligence experts. These played a significantrole in the rise of Idi Amin Dada, who seized the presidency in 1972. Follow-ing a short but intense love affair with Israel, Amin suddenly severed diplo-matic ties and expelled all Israelis (Levey 2012, 150–152). Israel’s shockand humiliation – which was only avenged during the dramatic Entebberaid (1976) – was reflected in the Israeli media’s depiction of GeneralBaruch ‘Burka’ Bar-Lev, who was described as Amin’s closest adviser

9 Lieutenant-ColonelY. Tadmor, ‘Be-ayothevratiot, hinuhiyotu-moraliot be-mishlahot tzahal be-afrika’ (Social,educational andmorale problems inIDF missions inAfrica), June 1969,IDF Archive, 1671/92/43.

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during the coup and its aftermath. Various reports presented Bar-Lev as anIsraeli Svengali who ‘made’ Idi Amin, but also as a Kurtz-like figure who, sur-rounded by the cruel, cannibalistic African rites, degenerates into a barbaricstate and finally ‘goes native’ (Nakdimon 1976). Depicting him as a renegade,the press presented this debauchery as a distinctive, exceptional case – a sca-pegoat of sorts, whose sins merely whitewashes the collective Israeliconsciousness.

Gorodish’s ‘Literary Solution’

In the most powerful example of this narrative – and one in which Conrad’snovella is explicitly and repeatedly evoked – the role of Kurtz was attributedto Major-General Shmuel Gonen (popularly known by his original surname,Gorodish). Born to an observant Jewish family, Gorodish was educated in aJerusalem yeshiva before joining the anti-British underground movement.After 1948, he rose through the ranks of the IDF’s Armoured Corps. Hebecame an Israeli household name after the 1967 war, in which he com-manded the 7th Brigade, leading his troops of tanks to the Suez Canal.Ironically, it was the journalist Shabtai Teveth – who both coined and con-demned the ‘legend of Alex Hacohen’ – who was in many ways responsiblefor perpetuating the legend of Gorodish, typical of the Israeli cult of IDF gen-erals after the 1967 war. Gorodish’s speech at the end of the war (whichincluded the famous line, ‘We looked death straight in the face, and deathlowered its eyes’) cemented his image as a mythical figure, larger than life(Gan 2009). Tough and demanding, combining traditional religious edu-cation with the military courage of the ‘New Jew’, Gorodish was portrayedas a strategic genius. In 1973 he was appointed the commander of IDF’sSouthern Command.His fall, like his rise, was extremely swift: it came in October 1973, when his

response to the Egyptian offensive which began on Yom Kippur was deemed afailure; he was quickly replaced by a more veteran commander. The humilia-tion deepened after a National Commission of Inquiry set up to investigatefailings in the war declared that Gorodish did not fulfill his duties adequately.In response, Moshe Dayan, the defence minister, removed Gorodish from allcommand. The disgrace was now complete: no other public figure embodied,so perfectly, Israel’s changing mood – from the euphoria of 1967 to the gloomof 1973.Having retired from the army, Gorodish began a new career as an indepen-

dent arms dealer. In 1978 he befriended Jean-Bédel Bokassa, president of theCentral African Republic, who gave him an exclusive franchise for diggingdiamonds. Numerous articles in the Israeli press described this new venture.

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‘Diamonds lure the General’, read a typical headline: ‘Gorodish plans tobecome the African Emperor’s diamond king.’ ‘I have reached places whereno white man had trodden before’, explained Gorodish, declaring that herequired money to fund a legal campaign to clear his name (Ha-olam haze1978). However, the promise soon faded, especially after Bokassa wasdethroned in 1979 amid horrific allegations of child murder and cannibalism.The newspapers now reported on Gorodish’s grave financial difficulties. ‘Thegeneral’s diamond dream vanished somewhere in the jungles of CentralAfrica’, noted a headline in 1981 (Ha-elyon 1981).In 1987, marking the twenty-year anniversary of the 1967 war, Adam

Baruch – an extremely influential journalist and editor, credited with theintroduction of New Journalism into Israel – published a twelve-page articlein Yediot Aharonot, describing his journey to Bangui in search of Gorodish.‘Digging for diamonds, alone, lonely, solitary, isolated’, declared the subtitle.Well aware of the cultural resonances of his journey, Baruch writes, ‘I said tomyself, I am going to Bangui. Heart of Darkness. He’s there. What is this, aJoseph Conrad story?’ (1987).In many ways, this is precisely what Baruch set out to write: like Marlow,

sitting on board the Nellie, the Israeli journalist – writing in the newspaper’sflagship, the popular weekend magazine – carries his readers to Central Africaand to a surreal encounter with a solitary figure immersed in fantasies of gran-deur and horror. The article had a powerful effect, even inspiring a successfultheatrical production, Hillel Mittelpunkt’s Gorodish (1993). No wonder thatBaruch returned again and again to his African journey, revisiting and expli-cating its relationship to Conrad’s tale. A few days after Gorodish’s death in1991, Baruch wrote: ‘An author like Joseph Conrad would have turned youinto a parable. At universities they would have analysed you as “the Anti-Hero in Modern Fiction”’:

There is magnificence in Mister Kurtz, the hero of Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, who

inspired the character in the film Apocalypse Now. Cinema and fiction could havedone the same with Shmuel Gorodish. The stuff is all there.But in real life, on the surface, there was wretchedness, mainly wretchedness. I tried,

with all my might, as I was staying with him in Bungui, to separate Gorodish’s lifefrom the wonderful literature that could have been written about him. I tried, butreality pevailed. Gorodish in Bangui was half zombie. (Baruch 1991)

The reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic version of the novella(1979) is highly relevant: bothMarlon Brando’s Kurtz and Gorodish are char-ismatic generals who had been destined for greatness but, far away from civi-lization, fell from grace. Nevertheless, while Coppola’s version relocatesConrad’s plot to Vietnam, Baruch’s texts emphasize the mythical resonancesof Africa: the continent’s human and topographical landscapes play a central

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role in Baruch’s rewriting of the Kurtz legend. Baruch noted that ‘Africa, hisown heart of darkness, offered [Gorodish] a “literary” solution: he wouldreturn one day from this place, a place no one has returned from… andprocure justice’ (Baruch 1992). Yet Africa and Conrad offered Baruchhimself a ‘“literary” solution.’ In his final piece about Gorodish, Baruchacknowledged that his conversations with the disgraced general in Africamarked the climax of his career: ‘They were intended to generate something“a little more” than journalism. What? Perhaps literature, perhaps a moralityplay’ (2004, 17).If the original 1987 article is a bit more (perhaps even a great deal more)

than journalism, it is still ‘a little less’ than literature – first and foremostbecause it functions as a miniaturized and hence almost parodic version ofConrad’s novella. While Marlow spends several weeks sailing from Europeto Africa, Baruch’s flight from Paris to Bangui takes less than ten hours.Marlow spends months waiting for rivets that allow him to fix the steamerand sail up the river to encounter Kurtz; Baruch meets Gorodish at theairport and spends only three days in Africa.Travelling up the river, Marlow encounters the horrors of the colonial

apparatus. Baruch, in contrast, moves within a postcolonial frameworkwhich replaces Conrad’s linear progress with a circular, tautological narra-tive: ‘We spent three days in Bungui. The city is surrounded by nothing,spaces of nothing, mud huts, straw villages, roads, smoldering fires.’ In thisflattened landscape, the Sofitel hotel, where Baruch is staying, functions as awhite, dreamlike western bubble (‘The hotel is Europe, it is culture’) butalso as a microcosm of postcolonial fluidity, whose actors – armed guards,prostitutes, businessmen, horny French soldiers – move effortlessly betweeninterior and exterior: ‘The traffic in the lobby is one of brokerage, bargaining,lobbying.’ The tension between rigid separation and fluidity is embodied inBaruch’s description of the hotel’s garden: ‘The pool seems to interface theriver. Across the river is the forest. Across the forest is the border withZaire. In the morning, the sun breaks in the water, reflecting turbid light.The light does not traverse the area. Between the ground and the sky: gas,fog, humidity itself’ (1987). The description positions the pool as a highly sty-lized, postmodern, postcolonial version of Conrad’s River Congo.Notwithstanding these obvious differences, Baruch’s texts invite a close

comparison between the two ‘anti-heroes.’ On arriving in Africa, Marlowlearns that Kurtz is ‘a very remarkable person’ (Conrad 2006, 19); ‘AllEurope contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (49). Marlow wonders, then,whether Kurtz ‘would climb to the top after all’ (31). Similarly, Baruch’spoint of departure is the illustrious image of Gorodish as a brilliant general,shaped by different worlds (first the yeshiva, then the army), and destinedto reach the top. In both cases, however, the promise has been broken andthe two men find themselves isolated at the heart of Africa. ‘Going up that

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river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’, recallsMarlow (33). Kurtz, like the landscape, undergoes a process of degeneration:drawn to a primordial reality, he presides ‘at certain midnight dances endingwith unspeakable rites, which…were offered up to him – do you understand?– to Mr Kurtz himself’ (50). While Kurtz is immersed in a mythical prehistory,Gorodish, too, is trapped in the past – in his case, of the Yom Kippur War:‘Minute by minute, hour by hour… It was the only thing he chose to speakabout, years later, in Africa’ (Baruch 1987). Nurturing fantasies of greatness,of fabulous wealth and revenge, both men are described as living-dead whocling to aspects of their pasts, particularly to texts that anticipate their fall –Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Suppression of SavageCustoms, Gorodish’s Yom Kippur War logs. Both Marlow and Baruch arethus shocked and distressed to encounter their hallowed heroes, now‘hollow at the core’ (Conrad 2006, 58).Significantly, while Conrad’s novella suggests that the ‘heart of darkness’ is

located not only in the colonial periphery but also in the metropolitan centreitself, Baruch’s version blurs even further the gap between dark Africa and therational West (in this case, ‘white’ Israel). Like Kurtz, Gorodish also stood atthe centre of a cult, in which the general was depicted as a ‘man-god’ (Baruch2004, 27). Yet these ‘unspeakable rites’ were held in late-1960s Israel, manyyears before Gorodish found himself in Africa. Indeed, it was in Israel, withthe Yom Kippur War, that Gorodish’s rapid decline began: ‘From his dismis-sal until his journey to Africa, Gorodish walked around like a ghost holding abriefcase’ (26). ‘I would walk down the street and no one would greet me’, hesaid to Baruch. ‘I was all alone’ (Baruch 1987). Africa, in other words, onlydeepened the sense of frustration and isolation that first emerged at home.Here, and elsewhere in interviews with Gorodish, Israel itself becomes thejungle. ‘At first I felt better in the African forest than here’, said Gorodishduring a rare visit to Israel in 1983. ‘There, in the African jungle, therewere fewer wild beasts than here in Israel’ (Haber 1983).Africa thus emerges from Baruch’s accounts as a setting, a backdrop, props

– precisely the terms employed in Achebe’s critique of Heart of Darkness.While critics continue to debate whether Achebe’s reading does justice tothe complexity of Conrad’s novella, it certainly applies to Baruch’s Africa,which is merely a screen onto which he projects the neuroses and desires ofthe Israeli psyche, depicting the break-up of one petty Israeli mind – thoughone which reflects the gloomy disillusionment which enwrapped Israelisafter the shock of the 1973 war. Of course, Baruch is the first to acknowledgehis own instrumental usage of Africa. Surrounded by the hotel’s protectivebubble, yet brimming with self-awareness – both of his own condition andof the western tradition of representing Africa – Baruch repeatedly stressesthe performative quality of his journey, played out against the Africanscenery: ‘I sit for three days and wait for his show to begin. Then it starts.

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A presentation of pain’ (1987). While the theatrical production with which webegan, Senunit at Mayumba Beach, flirted with Conrad’s novella and thusoffered a playful link between Herzl’s African visions and young Israel’s ideal-ism, Baruch’s self-reflexivity employs Heart of Darkness to depict the moraland historical failings of the Zionist project.Gorodish himself died of a heart attack in Milan, but one can forgive

Ma’ariv’s journalists when they wrote, in an article commemorating thirtyyears of the Yom Kippur War, that ‘Gorodish died in exile in Africa inOctober 1991’ (Rappoport and Yarkoni 2003): there is no doubt thatdeath in Africa, like Kurtz’s death, would have provided a more appropriate‘literary solution’ to the story of the overwrought Israeli general – and, indeed,to the ongoing story of Israel itself, proceeding in a path which seems to leadinto the heart of an immense darkness.

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