Sensual Zionism: Is That "Desire" or "Love"?

A new book, written by Boaz Neumann, assistant professor in the Department of History, Tel Aviv University, is out and is described as an "innovative study" in that it

...examines the responses of early-twentieth-century pioneers to "the Land" of Palestine...Neumann argues for something else that historians have yet to identify - desire. Desire for the Land and a visceral identification with it begin to explain the pioneer experience and its impact on Israeli history and collective memory, as well as on Israelis' abiding connection to the Land of Israel...For Neumann, the Zionist revolution was an existential revolution: for the pioneers, to be in the Land of Israel was to be!

The main chapter headings read:

• Pioneers and Pioneerism
• Desire and Rebirth
• Dissolving Boundaries
• Articulating the Physical Territory of the Land
• Articulating the Pioneer Body
• Pioneer Language: The Conquest of Hebrew

"Desire"?

Or love of the homeland?

Well, the theme has been researched previously:

- "Reimagining Herzl and other Zionist sex symbols" by M. Berkowitz, Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London.
- "Zionism as an Erotic Revolution" by David Biale

and it could be worse or more ridiculous:

Circumcising Zionism, Queering Diaspora: Reviving Albert Memmi's Penis by Jarrod Hayes at Wasafiri, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007.

How ridiculuous?

Try this:

...Memmi's retrieval of the Jewish diaspora as queer helps to imagine the undoing of Zionism as a political project (as opposed to queering the Israeli state) by allowing the rhizomatic connections of diaspora to return in the process of returning to origins in a homeland of the mind (as opposed to a physical territory already inhabited by Palestinians). Memmi thus allows us to carry forward Gopinath's queering of diaspora by helping us to tease out the queer potential of the very concept of diaspora itself.

While Memmi's revival of his penis relies on the same phallic genealogy Helmreich alludes to, his Jewissance entails spilling his seed rather differently. Indeed, it is not through heterosexual reproduction that he plants the seeds for a Zionist state; rather, the promised land flows forth like milk and honey every time he touches himself ‘to verify [the] definitive mark [of the Orient]’. J and D Boyarin retrieve a feminised diasporic anti-Zionism by performing ‘the double mark of the male Jew’, that is, their circumcision and head-covering, thereby undoing the body/mind opposition...

And you thought that the recent pinkwashing controversy was silly.

^