UTOPIA UNDONE
Hebrew Literature from the Kibbutz to Gaza
Book Proposal
Itay Eisinger, PhD
Lecturer in Hebrew, University of California, Davis
INTRODUCTION
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 the structural present.