commit 51388ee650a27513a55a79aa066b07521ba798b7
parent df01b20acddd32b467512296f0b262e13e027ed5
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:52:32 -0800
Swap Waking Lions presentation for final paper
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 293 insertions(+), 283 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/reading/illusion-of-return.md b/content/reading/illusion-of-return.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
+++
title = "The Novel of Palestinian Disillusionment"
date = 2024-11-01T17:25:51-07:00
-updated = 2024-12-14
+updated = 2024-12-14T15:09:50-08:00
[extra]
book = "The Illusion of Return"
author = "Samir El-Youssef"
@@ -12,9 +12,10 @@ rating = "★★★☆☆"
**Author's Note:** I write everything in a conversational tone, so I
doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review
was originally a presentation. It is one of two I gave in Russell
-Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel], the second of which [you can
-read here]. It was first written in [iA Presenter]. The title I have
-given the review here on the website was taken from our syllabus.
+Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. It was first written in [iA
+Presenter]. The title I have given the review here on the website was
+taken from our syllabus. For another artifact of my work in the class,
+check out my review of [Waking Lions].
## Let's begin
~~Alright close your laptops and let's do this for real.~~ To get you up
@@ -219,7 +220,7 @@ reconcile this position with the reality of Israel—a return that worked?
What, if anything, makes the case of the Jews different?
[Zionism and the Novel]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=COMPLIT37Q
-[you can read here]: @/reading/waking-lions.md
[iA Presenter]: https://ia.net/presenter
+[Waking Lions]: @/reading/waking-lions.md
[HISTORY81B]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=HISTORY81B
[*The War of Return*]: @/reading/war-of-return/index.md
diff --git a/content/reading/waking-lions.md b/content/reading/waking-lions.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
+++
-title = "The Detective Novel: Interior Life and Refugees"
+title = "Waking the Public to Waking Lions"
date = 2024-12-14T13:53:42-08:00
+updated = 2024-12-14T15:48:19-08:00
[extra]
book = "Waking Lions"
author = "Ayelet Gundar-Goshen"
@@ -8,283 +9,291 @@ finished = 2024-11-28
rating = "★★★★☆"
+++
-**Author's Note:** I write everything in a conversational tone, so I
-doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review
-was originally a presentation. It is the second of two I gave in Russell
-Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. It was first written in [iA
-Presenter]. The title I have given the review here on the website was
-adapted from our syllabus. You can read a similar transcript of the first
-presentation I gave in my review of [The Illusion of Return].
-
-## A Brief Something to Note Before We Begin
-Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is at Stanford! She's a lecturer and
-artist-in-residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. I met her on
-Tuesday. And, her most recent novel is set in Palo Alto and deals with
-similar themes to the book we're discussing today.
-
-Which are what?
-
-## What is this book about?
-Nominally, it's something of a murder mystery. But unlike a typical
-murder mystery, we the reader know "whodunnit" the whole time.
-
-So perhaps it's closer to a different genre that I'm quite excited about
-because I just really solidified its existence in my mind recently: a
-thriller. We know the great secret, and we're watching its consequences
-unravel and spread out.
-
-There are aspects of a drama here. We have family dynamics on display,
-with subelements of romantic, paternal, and maternal relationships.
-There are career struggles: the rising star banished to the desert, and
-now with his secret double-life (though this doesn't get too much focus)
-he's even on the edge of getting fired from this provincial post. And in
-a true return to form for this class there's the possibility of an
-affair.
-
-But dive beneath this upper crust of the text, and you can see that the
-novel has profound political implications. Because this is a book that
-is, at its core, about gray areas.
-
-> That one battered Eritrean had called her an angel and one
-> grief-stricken Bedouin had called her a devil, and that both of them
-> were wrong, had to be wrong. Because neither angels nor devils
-> existed. Of that Eitan was convinced. People existed.
-
-Here, Ayelet discusses impurity of character, that no person can fit
-neatly into the fantastical archetypes of angel and devil. Sirkit is no
-angel—she is, among other injustices, forcing the doctor into this
-illegal practice against his will—but is no devil either—that same
-illegal hospital has saved real human lives.
-
-> People generally assumed that someone like him had made a choice
-> somewhere in the past... One road turned right. The other left. If he
-> turned right, he’d choose evil. If left – good. The directions
-> themselves weren’t important. What was important was the crossroads;
-> that is, the existence of the moment when a person stands before two
-> clear, opposing paths and chooses one over the other.
-
-This passage comes in a deeply fascinating portion of the book: a
-section dedicated to exploring the history of a very bad man. The
-Eritreans Eitan encounters all work at a restaurant, and the owner of
-that restaurant is a drug-pusher, abuser of their cheap labor, and a
-rapist. Not a good man. The author has this to say about him.
-
-She then says that this is false. That good and evil are not like a
-crossroads. That they're like "goat paths," winding and overlapping
-trails that snake through the desert, taking a patient and trained eye
-to separate them from the windings of rocks and sands the wind naturally
-forms. There's no one choice: we are just meandering on goat paths that
-at one point or another may align with our paradigms of good and evil,
-black and white.
-
-This is expressed in the text through the issue of
-
-## Intercommunal Relations
-And specifically, the Eritrean refugee issue in Israel and the
-overlapping layers that exposes within society.
-
-We witness a few different communities in the text, and I think it's
-super fascinating to break them down.
-
-### The Communities
-1. Jews
- 1. Ashkenazim
- 2. Mizrahim
- 3. Ethiopians
-2. Eritreans
-3. Bedouins
-4. Egyptians
-
-What makes it super fascinating is that **all of these groups** are
-perpetuating complex and interleaving harms on **all of the groups**.
-Ayelet leaves none out, it's fantastic.
-
-Bottom-up:
-
-1. The Egyptians enforce the border with Israel on their side. They
- shoot at Eritreans trying to cross over illegally by foot, as all
- Eritreans in Israel do, which is the genesis of the popular joke
- referenced in the novel that the Eritreans are the "world champions
- of the 500-meter race," so named after the range of Egyptian rifles.
- These are Arabs, who speak Arabic, shooting at Africans trying to
- enter Israel to achieve the Afro-Asiatic equivalent of the American
- Dream.
-2. The Bedouins are a different and distinct Arab people. They live in
- Israel, one of three major Arab communities also including the
- Arab-Palestinian-Israelis and the Druze. Due to their migratory
- way of life, they live in corrugated metal semi-temporary structures
- largely outside both the protection and supervision of the State. In
- this book, they aggravate the Egyptians by acting as smugglers of
- Eritreans across the border, the Eritreans by perpetuating abuses
- against them both on the journey from Africa to Asia and after in
- Israel—exploiting their more established status in Israeli society to
- beat down on them—as well as the Jews by running a significant,
- often-violent criminal element in the desert.
-
- > They don’t help us and we don’t help them.
-
- This is Sirkit commenting on the relationship of the Eritrean and
- Bedouin communities. The Jewish-Bedouin frustration can be seen in
- the commentary of the police, which is consistently negative, and
- specifically the easy dismissal from the get-go that Asum's
- death—which sparks the conflict of the novel—was probably done by
- some random Bedouin and thus unsolvable. A nameless victim and a
- nameless murderer, both members of transitory and peripheral
- communities.
-3. The Eritreans—and this is important—are African, so really the only
- people from a context removed from the Middle East, but they are
- Arabic-speaking Muslims. They have a distinct culture, and another
- language (Tigrinya), but they are also culturally compatible and
- mutually intelligible with the Bedouins and the Egyptians. Their
- transgression toward the Jews and the Egyptians is the same:
- territorial violation, though to the latter it is significantly more
- temporary. The Eritreans are imposing themselves on unwilling hosts.
- Against the Bedouins, they have a different sort of territorial
- transgression, and that's of class territory: they have taken up
- residence in the bottom rung of society, alongside the Bedouin,
- forcing them to share a conceptual (and occasionally physical) space
- that once they had full control over.
-4. And of course the Jews. I've highlighted three important subdivisions
- of the Jewish community in Israel here to acknowledge that there is,
- in addition to the inter-communal harm we're discussing, also
- intra-communal harm as well, but actually primarily to emphasize the
- following: in Israeli society, Mizrahim are considered Jews, not
- Arabs, and Ethiopian Jews are considered Jews, not
- Africans/Eritreans. There is visual similarity frankly between all of
- these groups, but it's important to note that group dynamics don't
- play out according to the Western conception of similarity.
-
- > Both were Arabs, so they were identical. Both aroused a combination
- > of wariness and shame in her. First wariness, then shame. Their
- > dark faces, which actually resembled the faces of the people she’d
- > grown up with, and yet looked different.... She didn’t like feeling
- > that way, but it was how she felt. That they had less intelligence
- > and more hatred. That they were pathetic because they’d lost, but
- > more dangerous because of it, and even though that seemed
- > contradictory, it actually wasn’t. Like a dog you’ve beaten that
- > you now both ridicule and fear. An Arab dog.
-
- This is Liat, a Mizrahi Jew, talking about Arabs.
-
- The Jews perpetuate harm on the Egyptians in the obvious way, and vice
- versa. Against the Bedouins by their inadequate accommodation of their
- lifestyle in the workings of the State. And against the Eritreans
- through deportation and their status as illegal aliens.
-
-Everyone is harming each other. It's not simple. None of these groups
-are good guys, and none are bad guys. That Ayelet is able to capture
-this so thoroughly is a testament to her ability. It is a message we
-desperately need.
-
-## Side Explorations
-There are, in addition to this core track, also some very cool tangents
-in Waking Lions.
-
-### Relationships
-Ayelet contrasts in the text two models of marital relationship: that of
-Sirkit and Asum with that of Liat and Eitan.
-
-Sirkit and Asum's relationship takes place entirely before we, the
-reader, arrive but we get a pretty good understanding of it by the end.
-They had three kids back in Eritrea, two of whom died in childbirth and
-one of whom was killed by a soldier, perhaps while they were fleeing or
-in an act that instigated their emigration. Asum has, since the
-inception of the relationship, been physically abusive. He both hit
-Sirkit consistently and would burn her with cigarette butts. When Asum
-was hit by Eitan in his car, he had taken Sirkit out to beat her in the
-desert. Sirkit resented him, and is somewhat happy that he died, while
-also resenting Eitan in some capacities for having the gall to remove
-her agency from her liberation.
-
-I haven't finished my own thinking and thesis-generation on Liat and
-Eitan, because I think it's bigger than just this text: I think Liat and
-Eitan have an explicitly paradigmatic Zionist relationship. Israel is a
-deeply family-oriented country. The statistic that's often cited here is
-that it's the only highly-developed country with a birth rate well above
-the replacement rate, but I think it goes far beyond numbers. (Though
-while we're talking numbers Israel also does by far the most IVF of
-anywhere in the world, by a factor of I think 2-3 times.) Marriage and
-children are a huge aspect of Israeli society, mile-markers on the
-Israeli path through life, and I want to do more research on this to
-find its instigation. It's here that I actually disagree with the
-previous presenter's analysis of Liat and Eitan's relationship, and
-define the exact dynamic that I think defines the Zionist relationship:
-the previous presenter alleged that Liat dominated the relationship,
-perhaps due to her detective's tendencies to know everything about
-everyone, and that Eitan's feelings toward Sirkit were his searching for
-freedom from this domination. I would counter that's it's the
-opposite—their relationship is one of mutual, total dedication.
-
-> Liat’s eyes changed constantly.... And for almost fifteen years he had
-> been judging himself by the scales of justice in those eyes. A measure
-> of right and wrong unmatched in its precision.
-
-> She could say in total honesty that she still loved her man. And he
-> loved her.... Embarrassing incidents might happen to other couples,
-> but not to her and Eitan.
-
-The reason why Eitan is so devastated by the total upheaval of his life
-is not because of the legal consequences of revealing what was
-transpiring, but because he was terrified to his core that Liat would
-look at him differently. It happens later in the book when she flees to
-her mother's house, but is then repaired. The reason with Liat is so
-devastated by the estrangement of her husband is because of the huge
-role he plays in her own narrative of her life.
-
-There is also perhaps a lens one could apply to these two relationships
-that involves national development and increasing rights/modernity,
-paralleling Eitan's perception of the Eritreans as less-than, but given
-that the differences in their relationship are written as true and not
-just perceived, I think that's a dead end.
-
-### Lions
-I had a moment while reading the book like when a character in a movie
-turns to the screen and says "What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?"
-and so I went back through the book and picked out what I figured to be
-important references to this figure that appears in the title.
-
-> She knew that any other woman would have started checking up on him
-> long ago. And she knew that she, who checked up on and investigated
-> others on a daily basis, she, of all people, would never do that. She
-> wasn’t willing to look at him with those eyes of doubt. To look for
-> signs, traces. She wasn’t willing because if she began doing that now,
-> she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop later. On safari in Kenya,
-> after their wedding, the guide had told them that once a lion tastes
-> human flesh, it won’t ever want to hunt anything else. Perhaps it
-> wasn’t true, just a story for tourists, but her lioness’s instincts
-> knew there was no greater temptation, no hunt more tantalizing, than
-> the ambush of your loved ones.
-
-> Lions roared inside him all night. He turned onto his side. Tried to
-> think about Itamar, about Yaheli.... When she finally lifted the
-> blanket and lay down beside him in the long chaos of the night, he
-> drowned in the blue-black of her hair and kissed her silent lips, and
-> he didn’t think about angels or devils. Or about people either.
-
-In the first quote, the lion is Liat's investigatory instincts, which
-she refuses to turn inwards on her own family. In the second, the lion
-is Eitan's adulterous desire for Sirkit.
-
-## A Question
-
-> Because that which hath been is that which shall be, and today, like
-> yesterday, the earth would carry on...
-
-Here, Eitan observes after hitting Asum in his SUV how the world hasn't
-left its axis. The rest of the book ensues, and then ends with the quote
-below:
-
-> How beautiful the earth is when it moves properly. How pleasant to
-> move with it. To forget that any other movement ever existed. That a
-> different movement is even possible.
-
-Ultimately, our protagonist Eitan escapes from his crimes unpunished.
-Asum's murder goes unsolved, as does that of the restaurant owner. Eitan
-is made famous in the media as a doctor who volunteered to help the
-refugee community, perhaps illegally but certainly nobly.
-
-How do you interpret Eitan's ultimate judgement, or lack thereof?
+**Author's Note:** This review is an adaptation of the final paper I
+wrote for Russell Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. For
+another artifact of my work in the class, check out my review of [The
+Illusion of Return].
+
+## Abstract
+This paper seeks to investigate Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel Waking
+Lions as a work of engaged literature. A thorough analysis of her
+writing is conducted to extract the specific political positions she
+advocates. The analysis of the political commentary contained in her
+fiction is then paired and contrasted with contemporary anthropological
+scholarship on the issue of Eritrean migrants in Israel to build a
+deeper understanding of the context in which the book was created and
+where it now stands, approaching a decade after publication. The paper
+ultimately claims that Gundar-Goshen’s writing opens a wide view into
+the everyday strife and overlapping conflicts and harms of Israel’s
+myriad communities and urges a remediation of the Eritrean migrant
+crisis in Israel through integration and acceptance. The novel’s framing
+places the issues at the core of the text beyond the scope of the
+question of Zionism: rather, the continued implementation of Zionism is
+what has given rise to the status quo, thus necessitating Gundar-Goshen
+look beyond the philosophy—toward human values and compassion—to find
+the source of the mandate to aid the Eritreans.
+
+This dissection of Waking Lions is important precisely because the book
+has been treated as an unimportant work by the scholarly community. The
+text doesn’t touch the question of the Palestinians, and thus is
+sidelined. But just as is seen with the communities in the book, nothing
+is black and white: Israel is more than its conflict with the
+Palestinians. Waking Lions’ unflinching spotlighting of the myriad
+internal issues faced by the diverse Israeli polity make it one of the
+most important texts to come out of the country in recent years.
+
+## The Text as an Engaged Work
+Waking Lions is not only engaged literature insofar as all texts are
+engaged literature, dealing with subjects that are covered by the broad
+tent of political opinion, but instead goes above and beyond in
+provoking a political conversation around, and interrogating the
+political ramifications and engagements of, the Eritrean refugee issue
+in Israel. This is by design. Gundar-Goshen’s intention in creating this
+work of fiction was to make her political lamentations appear more
+compelling to a broader audience by disguising them in the contours of
+characters with depth and dimension and emotion that readers can
+recognize from their own lives. A political diatribe with specific
+policy criticisms and recommendations will only be consumed by a very
+specific subset of people. A work that engages more directly with the
+universal instinct of storytelling can better evangelize its message.
+This is how Waking Lions was crafted from its inception.
+
+An important component of Waking Lions’ political engagement is the
+length to which Gundar-Goshen goes to impress upon the reader the
+physical realities of Eritrean migrants in Israel, seeking to highlight
+their suffering through its personification in the character of Sirkit.
+Sirkit, the Eritrean woman at the center of the novel, is a complex
+figure—at once despised for her manipulations of Dr. Eitan Green and yet
+seemingly using her Machiavellian abuses for the betterment of the lives
+of overlooked refugees. It is only after forming a relationship with
+Sirkit that the reader is introduced to the details of her living
+conditions: a caravan, one cramped room filled with 8 mattresses and
+dirty dishes, parked behind the gas station where its residents
+work.[^1] Sirkit herself scrubs floors during the day. None of the
+Eritreans who cram themselves together into the caravan to sleep on the
+floor night after night are paid the minimum wage nor given the
+traditional benefits of employment. Additional emotionally difficult
+information is held even further, with the reasons for Sirkit’s flight
+from Eritrea hinted at only in the very last chapter of the novel. Here,
+in her internal monologue, she refers to the African nation as “the land
+of the dead children.”[^2] She reflects on a “well near the village that
+one day, simply had no more water,” on soldiers that stole their flour,
+on the trek over land to Egypt, on abusive Bedouin smugglers, and on
+Israel, the place where “she stopped. From [which] she would not
+move.”[^3] The strategic delay in the delivery of this information is
+done to counter the jaded desensitization of the receiving audience.
+There is the age-old adage: “one death is a tragedy, a million is a
+statistic.” By giving the physical conditions of the Eritreans a
+familiar face in the form of Sirkit, the theoretical plight of a people
+is turned into the tangible plight of a person.
+
+Beyond the individual suffering, the systemization of the Eritrean
+struggle in the Jewish State is given an embodied form in the text
+through Eitan’s visit to the Holot Detention Center. Having come to
+visit Sirkit, Eitan looks out across the vast desert yard and observes:
+“Any one of those people could be Sirkit.”[^4] This is an explicit
+declaration of the above determination that Sirkit is a stand-in for the
+plight of Eritreans in Israel more broadly—Gundar-Goshen states that
+Sirkit is equivalent to the other Eritreans in Holot, and thus that all
+the detainees are as human as the book has portrayed her to be. It is
+also a further description of the dehumanization that Eritreans are
+subjected to at the hands of the Israeli government. Eitan continues:
+“They looked as alike as a herd of sheep. Of cows…. When he looked at
+them together, a crowded collection of bodies, he felt that they had
+lost every drop of selfhood, and all the small differences that made
+each of them who they were had been eclipsed by that large mass of
+identical flesh… the overcrowded space stripped them of their
+personalities and made them a single entity—Eritrean women…. They were
+Eritrean women waiting to be deported…”[^5] In his brief visit to the
+Holot Detention Center, Eitan is used as a tool to convey the banal
+brutality of the destruction of Eritrean individuality in the national
+system.
+
+The ultimate resolution of the book’s moral challenge through Sirkit and
+Eitan’s deception reveals Gundar-Goshen’s preference for how to resolve
+the political quandary of Eritrean migrants in Israel. The roiling truth
+of the story behind the illegal hospital in the desert—Eitan’s initial
+crime of vehicular manslaughter, Sirkit’s blackmail, the robbery of
+hospital materials, peripheral involvement with the Bedouin criminal
+underworld, hints of adultery, and everything else that ultimately
+comprises the narrative of Waking Lions—is smoothed over. Sirkit does
+this of her own initiative. Speaking with Eitan’s wife, Liat, she papers
+over the reality of the situation that had brought his family and
+marriage so close to collapse: “Before the Bedouins had surprised them,
+Eitan had gone to treat her injuries. He’d left Yaheli’s bed and driven
+two and a quarter hours to get there. Only an angel would do something
+like that.”[^6] With the full context Gundar-Goshen provided during the
+action, the additional layers are revealed. Eitan drove down to perform
+the surgery in part because of his romantic feelings toward Sirkit as
+well as her continued power over him due to the potential for her
+testimony. But in the end this is resolved—his service to the Eritreans
+is simplified: “He felt guilty about the silence she had imposed on him
+concerning Zakai’s bribes. He wanted to atone…. It was illegal. And
+dangerous…. And [Liat] realized suddenly why he had been so interested
+in the investigation of that Eritrean’s death. Those people weren’t just
+a newspaper article for him. He knew them. He was helping them.”[^7]
+Gundar-Goshen does briefly broaden the scope to include some of the
+other narratives in Israeli discourse, describing a café scene after
+Eitan and Sirkit’s revisionist story hits the news: “Several people
+began arguing. We can’t have all of Africa coming here. If those
+bleeding hearts have their way, we’ll end up without a country.”[^8] But
+this broadening is done primarily for the purpose of foregrounding the
+opposite narrative—her narrative— as expressed by a woman who approaches
+Eitan to say, “We need more people like you in this country.”[^9]
+Through Liat’s acceptance of the morality of her husband’s actions and
+the Israeli public’s endorsement, Gundar-Goshen lends her own voice to
+the idea that Eritreans in Israel should be accepted, appeased, and
+integrated. Her political preferences, expressed through these varied
+characters, are paired with an additional pithy quip, a sort of
+condemnation of the idea that the hard work her politics would mandate
+can be ignored. It is the final line in the novel, and it comes from the
+mind of Eitan Green, newly freed to return to his old life
+and—apparently—bury his head in the sand: “How beautiful the earth is
+when it moves properly. How pleasant to move with it. To forget that any
+other movement ever existed. That a different movement is even
+possible.”[^10]
+
+## Clashing Against Reality
+Gundar-Goshen’s political commentary through Waking Lions of course
+exists in the context of Israeli reality. This has continued to evolve
+quite rapidly in the seven years since the publication of her work of
+engaged literature. As recently as last year, there was violence in the
+streets of Tel Aviv between different Eritrean factions resulting in the
+injury of over 100 individuals as well as significant arrests. The
+conditions in Eritrea that led so many to choose “liminality in Israel
+over forced conscription (often until death) in Eritrea or ethnic
+cleansing by Arab groups in Darfur” are the same or worse as they were
+at the time Gundar-Goshen released her novel to the world.[^11] Migrants
+largely remain in limbo, governed under the conflicting mandates of the
+Prevention of Infiltration Law and the 1951 Refugee Convention.
+
+Aspects of Gundar-Goshen’s humanitarian ideology have received broader
+adoption. The Holot Detention Center, a location that played a
+significant role in the psyche of the Eritreans of Waking Lions, was
+shuttered in 2018.[^12] The Deposit Law, which mandated 20% of asylum
+seekers’ salary be deposited in a bank account only accessible at the
+airport when leaving the country, was struck down by the Israeli Supreme
+Court in 2020.[^13] Eritreans have developed their own community
+centers, educational structures, and institutions that “attest to the
+agency of the… community in Israel.”[^14] Migrants are building lives in
+the country, living on visas that need renewal every 2-3 months.[^15]
+This itself is a massive political victory for Gundar-Goshen’s school of
+thought: as Waking Lions conveys, the daily lives “of Eritreans in
+Israel are not apolitical.”[^16] Their continued existence in Israel is
+a testament to the political success of the ideology expressed in
+Gundar-Goshen’s work of engaged literature.
+
+In spite of these developments, Israeli society remains broadly hostile
+to the presence of the Eritrean migrants in precisely the ways that
+Gundar-Goshen opposed in Waking Lions. The country is governed by an
+extreme right-wing coalition which harbors significant anti-Eritrean
+sentiment, though internal and external factors have made continued
+attempts to address the migrant crisis low on its list of priorities.
+The anti-migrant position resulted in the Prime Minister reneging on a
+negotiated settlement with the UN refugee agency to give permanent
+status to around half of asylum seekers in Israel in exchange for
+resettling the other half in other countries.[^17] Such a compromise was
+perceived as too soft and harshly criticized. Integration of Eritrean
+migrants as full members of the Israeli polity, as citizens, is
+perceived as undesirable. Emigration is encouraged, and the mass
+departure of Eritrean migrants remains the state’s preferred outcome.
+
+The specific interplay of the international system in the Eritrean
+refugee crisis in Israel is a particularly rich topic for dissection. In
+many ways, the sovereign Israeli system is set up in direct opposition
+to the presence of Eritrean migrants, but is countered by international
+refugee law that exists “precisely because states are often inclined to
+act differently than how the law prescribes.”[^18] The particularly
+proactive role that international governance plays in the day-to-day
+experience of Eritrean migrants in Israel is made greater by the
+already-enhanced focus of the international community on the Jewish
+nation—a fact which the community has at times used to its advantage.
+Eritrean society is not traditionally organized around the concept of
+race or color, but rather ethnolinguistic groups and tribal
+affiliation.[^19] In most migratory scenarios, individuals who may be
+racialized as Black “attempt to highlight their immigrant background or
+national origin to escape negative stereotypes” associated with this new
+identity.[^20] The Eritrean community in Israel has become an exception
+to this trend, opting to make the strategic decision to self-identify as
+“Black.” This particular language is intended to garner support from
+abroad by contextualizing the experience of Eritrean migrants in Israel
+in a foreign framework, so as to make it more intelligible in the
+international arena and increase pressure on the Israeli state to halt
+deportations. The role of nonnative forces in the Eritrean-Israeli
+crisis goes largely undiscussed in Waking Lions, to its detriment.
+
+## Conclusions
+Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions paints a colorful picture of a
+pressing, contemporary Israeli issue, presenting the reader with a clear
+call to action through its expert personification of the problem. The
+narrative is thoroughly grounded in modern Israel, making the
+intentional decision to place the question of Zionism squarely in the
+past. The Jewish State already exists—Gundar-Goshen’s narrative
+interprets the Eritrean migrant crisis within its borders as a question
+to be answered by the generic State portion of the Zionist dream, not
+the Jewish (and by extension Zionist) part. The novel implores its
+audience to take action to embrace and integrate Eritreans into the
+fabric of Israeli society. Its detailed description of the suffering of
+the migrant community, in desperate poverty and constant fear of state
+action, is gracefully described with its day-to-day complexities—its
+members are not pure good, nor evil—while ensuring that it is clear that
+such suffering is a moral failing of the state. Gundar-Goshen believes
+this can be solved.
+
+It is in turn a failing of the scholarly community that this is the
+first paper to seriously engage with Waking Lions. The discussion of
+international conflicts, and their portrayal in literature, is flashier.
+Such analysis allows the author of a paper to connect with the oldest of
+human traditions: myths of wars and conquests waged throughout the eons.
+It is, bluntly, dramatic and fun. In the Israeli context in particular,
+there is no shortage of conflicts and fictions about them to dissect;
+the Palestinian issue in particular provides a sure and stable base for
+study. It is, however, a poor academic that allows themselves to fall
+prey to sampling bias. Israel is far more than its conflict with the
+Palestinians. Indeed, for the Eritreans under constant threat of
+deportation—and, for that matter, Dr. Eitan Green—the matters
+highlighted in Waking Lions take precedence. The dialogue in this work
+of engaged literature must be given space, instead of letting the
+Palestinian issue take all the oxygen. With an opportunity to thrive, to
+engage with and impact a large audience, Gundar-Goshen’s novel could
+catalyze real progress on one of Israel’s most serious internal
+conflicts.
+
+---
+
+[^1]: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, *Waking Lions* (London: Pushkin Press,
+ 2017), pt. 2 chap. 3.
+[^2]: Ibid., pt. 2 chap. 16.
+[^3]: Ibid.
+[^4]: Ibid.
+[^5]: Ibid.
+[^6]: Ibid., pt. 2 chap. 15.
+[^7]: Ibid.
+[^8]: Ibid., pt. 2 chap. 16.
+[^9]: Ibid.
+[^10]: Ibid.
+[^11]: David Clinton Wills, "A Home at the End of the World: Eritrean
+ and Sudanese Asylum Seekers in Tel Aviv, Israel," *Sanglap:
+ Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry* 3, no. 2 (2017):
+ 321-349,
+ [https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/223][sanglap].
+[^12]: Ibid.
+[^13]: Itamar Dubinsky, "Digital Diaspora: Eritrean Asylum Seekers'
+ Cyberactivism in Israel," *African Diaspora* 12, no. 1-2 (2020):
+ 89-116: 10.1163/18725465-bja10002
+[^14]: Ibid.
+[^15]: Clinton Wills, "A Home at the End of the World"
+[^16]: Dubinsky, "Digital Diaspora"
+[^17]: James Yap, Hilina Fessahaie, and Enbal Singer, "Populism's Global
+ Impact on Immigrants and Refugees: The Perspective of Eritrean
+ Refugees in Europe and Israel," *Maryland Journal of
+ International Law* 35 (2020): 189-201
+[^18]: Dubinsky, "Digital Diaspora"
+[^19]: Amanuel Isak Tewolde, "Becoming Black: Racial Formation of
+ Eritrean Migrants in Israel," *African Diaspora* 13, no. 1-2
+ (2021): 183-203, 10.1163/18725465-bja10006
+[^20]: Ibid.
[Zionism and the Novel]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=COMPLIT37Q
-[iA Presenter]: https://ia.net/presenter
[The Illusion of Return]: @/reading/illusion-of-return.md
+[sanglap]: https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/223
