Modern Hebrew literature, which served as a midwife to both Zionism and the state of Israel, has become, in recent Israeli novels, its pathologist. Carmi Gillon, a familiar public figure in Israel, now writes fiction about Israel's unraveling. A retired security official often asked by the media to interpret political events, he served as director of Israel's internal security service, the Shin Bet. It was during his tenure, in 1995, that a Jewish extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Gillon has described that assassination as a personal and institutional failure. Twenty-five years later, he published Vicious Messiah (2020) and Vicious Secret (2021). In the former, Jewish extremists murder Arabs and Reform Jews to incite civil war and Armageddon. In the latter, those terrorists become ministers and gain control of the Shin Bet itself. These novels join more than two dozen other Israeli novels published since the turn of the millennium, in which the Jewish state is recast from solution to problem, and often as enemy.

In many novels about tyranny that question the nature of political power before and since Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the secret police appear as the main instrument of civic oppression. A figure of internal control—Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a classic case—typically appears as oppressor rather than hero, let alone author. That a former head of internal security should write dystopian fiction is therefore more than biographical curiosity. It signals how far the fear of democratic collapse has moved toward the center of Israeli political culture.

Gillon is not the first writer, not even among the security establishment, to imagine that Israel might become a non-democratic state. Such scenarios appeared earlier in Hebrew fiction, the focus of this book, and in political reflections by thinkers such as the non-Zionist Hannah Arendt and the Zionist Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Central to this book is Leibowitz, "the moral voice of Israel," who warned as early as 1968 that Israeli military rule over Palestinians would necessarily lead to a "secret-police state." Reading Gillon's novels with and through Leibowitz allows me to demonstrate the cunning of history, and to trace the intellectual and political itinerary of the anti-Occupation Israeli-Jewish Left. Reading them together allows me to follow the shifting of words, ideas, and paradigms in Israeli political culture.

Utopia Undone offers a cultural, intellectual, and literary history of one genre in Hebrew-Israeli fiction: the literary dystopia, from its emergence in the 1980s to the present. Dystopia, for my purposes here, is a work of narrative prose that depicts in detail a future society defined by an intentionally unjust and oppressive regime. This distinguishes it from post-apocalyptic fiction, in which the "bad place" may follow catastrophe or collapse and is not necessarily ruled by man-made, engineered suffering.

Dystopian fiction offers a cautionary tale. It criticizes real-world political forces by describing their innate dangers, by asking "if this goes on," and by taking those forces to their logical end, materialized in the future. Utopian stories criticize the present by imagining a better social reality and structure. The two genres are now often read together, alongside neighboring forms such as the anti-utopia and what Margaret Atwood has called "ustopia," as tools for thinking about how power organizes fear and oppression.

As dystopia has come to cultural prominence around the globe, the question arises: what is culturally and historically specific to the Hebrew dystopia, and what does it share with classical Anglophone dystopias, with non-Hebrew dystopias in general, and with recent global cultural trends? Erika Gottlieb has suggested, in an influential study, a distinction between Western dystopias written as cautionary tales against tyrannical regimes, and Eastern dystopias written under them, and therefore closer to testimony. Building on her study, I argue that the Hebrew dystopia functions in a unique, hybrid mode. It warns against an ever less democratic drift. It also testifies to a real-world dystopia in Palestine, sometimes drawing explicit links between the two.

Dystopias are often described as jeremiads. Do they function differently when written in Hebrew, using the language, and often the figure, of the prophet Jeremiah?

I read these novels through a double lens: modern Hebrew literary history and critical theory, and, in particular, the conceptual vocabulary of utopian studies. The history of the Hebrew dystopia should be read against Zionism's, Israel's, and modern Hebrew literature's utopian origins. Zionism often tells its own origin story through a novel. Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (Old-New Land), a utopian fiction from 1902, gave Tel Aviv its name. For decades after 1948, Hebrew fiction criticized Israeli policies and politics while treating the state itself as a fait accompli. Writers attacked policies, leaders, and moral failures, but not the premise of the state's existence itself. Their quarrel was with direction, not destination.

That changed in 1984, the Orwellian year. Amos Kenan's The Road to Ein Harod and Benjamin Tammuz's Jeremiah's Inn imagined not reform but dissolution. Military coup. Theocratic takeover. Civil war. The state shifted from disappointing shelter to source of threat.

The book analyzes fourteen novels published between 1984 and 2021, and traces their reception and political afterlives through 2024. This fiction marks a fundamental shift in Hebrew literature's political imagination, from critiquing the state's policies to imagining its dissolution, from treating the state as flawed shelter to diagnosing it as source of threat. Modern Hebrew literature wrote a nation into being. Now it documents that nation's unraveling. Hebrew literature, once midwife, becomes pathologist.

This study traces Leibowitz's hypothesis in three phases. Warning (1984–2002): Kenan, Tammuz, Ben-Ner, and Castel-Bloom imagine how occupation might corrode democratic institutions. Testimony (2002–2004): Kashua shows that for Palestinian citizens of Israel, conditions that Jewish writers cast as future threat already describe the present. Acknowledgment (2009–2021): Gillon marks a turn inward, as a figure from within the security establishment writes from observed transformation rather than speculation.

My method is historical and contextual. I read these novels in the company of the texts and materials that surrounded them at the time: other fiction and nonfiction by the same writers, contemporary reviews, press debates, political commentary, and author interviews. I follow how particular books were received, argued over, dismissed, and later reread, using archives at the National Library of Israel and newspaper collections. I focus on moments of public contestation when dystopian formulations leave the page and enter political language—through a review that sparks debate, an excerpt that becomes a media reference point, or a line that reappears in public space.

Sometimes the warnings escaped the page entirely. David Grossman's essays from these same years provide a parallel record of moral erosion. Amos Kenan's words from The Road to Ein Harod appeared as graffiti on a Tel Aviv wall: "To think that it was I who drove the Arabs out of here." These moments show when fiction became public knowledge. The deeper question is why such knowledge changed nothing.

What makes this tradition unusual is its proximity to its subject. Many writers who imagine state dissolution also participated in the state's creation. Kenan fought in 1948, witnessed the state's violent emergence, and lived to write its undoing. Gillon directed security operations meant to preserve the state, then wrote fiction diagnosing why preservation might fail. Not historical distance, but double witnessing: state-building and state-dissolution imagined within a single lifetime.

These novels reveal that liberal Zionism's contradictions were present from the beginning. Liberal Zionism appears in these books as a vocabulary that has lost its purchase, unable to navigate between democratic ideals and the realities of occupation. The language no longer works.

The novels trace specific mechanisms of democratic erosion. Military coups. Theocratic takeovers. Bureaucratic normalization of emergency. The security state consuming civil society. Together these produce what I call double temporality, a collapse in which future threats and present conditions become impossible to distinguish. A related concept, differential temporality, captures who inhabits which timeline. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the dystopian conditions that Jewish writers imagine as a future threat already describe structural present.

The 1980s mark the collapse of Labor Zionist hegemony: a second Likud victory in 1981, the Lebanon War's moral crisis, and Ariel Sharon's rise as Defense Minister. Amos Kenan's The Road to Ein Harod (1984), Benjamin Tammuz's Jeremiah's Inn (1984), and Yitzhak Ben-Ner's Angels Are Coming (1987) respond to this rupture by imagining, for the first time in Hebrew fiction, the state's actual dissolution. Kenan depicts a military junta hunting leftist Jews; Tammuz stages theocratic capture forcing secular life underground; Ben-Ner depicts messianic expectation detached from redemptive outcome. Together, these novels shift Hebrew literature from critique presuming state permanence to narration treating the state as vulnerable—from disappointing shelter to source of threat.

The Oslo years promised peace but delivered the Rabin assassination (1995) and the Second Intifada's eruption (2000). Orly Castel-Bloom's evolution from Dolly City (1992) to Human Parts (2002) registers this collapse through formal transformation: avant-garde surrealism yields to documentary realism. In Dolly City, the grotesque medicalized body—cut open, reengineered, obsessively protected—becomes metaphor for a society at war with itself. By Human Parts, written during suicide bombings, Castel-Bloom's prose fragments alongside the social fabric it depicts. Her trajectory parallels Israeli literature's movement from experimental possibility to the normalization of catastrophe as routine.

The Second Intifada exposed Palestinian citizens of Israel to intensified suspicion and structural exclusion. Sayed Kashua's Dancing Arabs (2002) and Let It Be Morning (2004) reveal that for Palestinian citizens, dystopia is not future threat but structural present. In Let It Be Morning, a village wakes surrounded by IDF tanks, isolated without explanation—dystopia rendered as administrative procedure. Kashua's restrained prose documents routine exclusion through the quiet mechanisms of checkpoints, withheld information, and citizenship without voice. His novels transform Hebrew dystopia from speculative warning to present-tense testimony, revealing the 1984 "turn" as belated recognition of conditions Palestinians had long inhabited.

Netanyahu's consolidation of power and the 2014 Gaza war form the backdrop for novels tracing occupation's methods migrating from periphery to center. Igal Sarna's 2023 (2014) reverses Zionist teleology: Jews flee a destroyed Tel Aviv. Ilana Bernstein's East City (2013) depicts surveillance and control mechanisms extending across Israeli society. Avivit Mishmari's The Old Man Lost His Mind (2013) uses dementia as governing metaphor for national disorientation. Netanyahu's libel suit against Sarna confirmed fiction's political reach. These novels document how occupation's institutional logic reshapes the occupier—Leibowitz's prophecy migrating from territories into metropolis.

Messianic nationalism's institutional presence accelerates: the 2015 election consolidates religious-nationalist coalition power. Yishai Sarid's The Third (2015) and Dror Burstein's Muck (2016) map this process. In The Third, King Yehoaz builds the Third Temple and imprisons God inside—a literalization of redemption theology turned self-consuming. In Muck, Jerusalem dissolves under accumulated historical weight; a prophet-protagonist cannot distinguish vision from psychosis. Both novels depict theocracy emerging not through dramatic revolution but through gradual sanctification of violence and the absorption of political language into biblical discourse.

By 2020, the patterns traced across four decades have become visible. Kobi Niv's In the End We All Die (2019) depicts Israel destroyed and Jewish refugees adrift on a Hudson River garbage barge. Carmi Gillon's Vicious Messiah (2020) and Vicious Secret (2021) mark a shift in who produces dystopian fiction: a former Shin Bet director writing about the security apparatus he once led. When security officials author the genre, warning yields to acknowledgment. Gillon's novels document what Leibowitz prophesied: occupation has reshaped the occupier from within.

For Hebrew Literary Studies: The book provides sustained analysis of dystopian fiction as a coherent tradition. It reframes the genre not as marginal speculation but as a mode through which Hebrew literature registers political transformation.

For Dystopian Studies: Often organized around Anglophone archives, dystopian studies here encounters a tradition where the pressure is institutional: democracy's slow evacuation through procedure. Double temporality offers a model for traditions where sacred time remains political grammar.

For Israel/Palestine Studies: The book treats literature as a site where institutional transformation becomes legible through form, reception, and circulation. It shows how dystopia registers the migration of occupation's methods inward.

The book builds on Hannan Hever's Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon (NYU 2002) by extending his analysis from nation-building to nation-undoing. Where Hever shows literature constructing national identity, this study traces literature imagining national dissolution.

It provides the Hebrew counterpart to Wessam Elmeligi's Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction (Routledge 2023), enabling comparative analysis of how neighboring literatures use dystopian form to process political crisis. While Elmeligi examines authoritarianism and postcolonial trauma, this study focuses on democratic erosion under prolonged occupation.

Unlike Ned Curthoys and Isabelle Hesse's Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada (Edinburgh 2022)—an edited collection examining multiple genres post-2000—this single-author monograph offers sustained analysis of dystopian fiction specifically across four decades, allowing for deeper formal analysis and historical contextualization.

The book complements Rachel S. Harris's An Ideological Death (Northwestern 2014), which uses suicide to examine challenges to Zionist myths. While Harris traces ideological crisis through one theme, this study analyzes an entire genre's emergence and evolution.

Primary audiences include scholars in Hebrew literature, Jewish studies, and Middle Eastern studies, as well as the growing field of dystopian and utopian studies. The book addresses current debates about literature's relationship to political crisis, trauma theory, and settler colonialism.

Secondary audiences include political scientists studying Israel/Palestine and historians of modern Jewish thought.

For course adoption, the book serves graduate seminars in modern Hebrew literature, Israeli culture, comparative dystopian fiction, and trauma studies. Individual chapters work for undergraduate courses on Israeli society, Jewish literature, or political fiction. The chronological structure and theoretical clarity make it accessible to advanced undergraduates while offering original scholarship for specialists.

Itay Eisinger is Lecturer in Hebrew at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches modern Hebrew language, Israeli literature, and Jewish culture. He received his PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin (2020), where his dissertation "The Dystopian Turn in Hebrew Literature" formed the basis for this book. His research examines how contemporary Hebrew fiction diagnoses political transformation through formal innovation. He has presented his work at the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Israel Studies, and the Modern Language Association.

Status: Complete manuscript of approximately 88,000 words available for review

Sample chapters: Available upon request

Timeline: Ready for immediate editorial process

Translations: All translations from Hebrew are my own unless otherwise noted

Documentation: Extensive endnotes; bibliography of primary sources in Hebrew and English

Research draws from multiple archives including the National Library of Israel, contemporary newspaper reviews from Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, and Maariv (1984–2024), and interviews with living authors (Kashua, Bernstein, Sarid). This documentary evidence grounds the analysis in actual archival material rather than speculation.

1. Amos Kenan — The Road to Ein Harod [HaDerekh Le-Ein Harod] (1984)

2. Benjamin Tammuz — Jeremiah's Inn [Pundak Yirmiyahu] (1984)

3. Yitzhak Ben-Ner — Angels Are Coming [Mal'akhim Ba'im] (1987)

4. Orly Castel-Bloom — Dolly City (1992)

5. Orly Castel-Bloom — Human Parts [Halakim Enoshiim] (2002)

6. Sayed Kashua — Dancing Arabs [Aravim Rokdim] (2002)

7. Sayed Kashua — Let It Be Morning [Vayehi Boker] (2004)

8. Ilana Bernstein — East City [Ir Mizrah] (2013)

9. Avivit Mishmari — The Old Man Lost His Mind [HaZaken Yatza MiDa'ato] (2013)

10. Igal Sarna — 2023 (2014)

11. Yishai Sarid — The Third [HaShlishi] (2015)

12. Dror Burstein — Muck [Refesh] (2016)

13. Kobi Niv — In the End We All Die [BeSof Kulanu Metim] (2019)

14. Carmi Gillon — Vicious Messiah [Mashiach Achzar] (2020)