National Hatred, Female Subjectivity, and the Boundaries of Cultural Discourse

Abstract

In light of a study in Israel, which found that 28% of secular girls and 63% of religious girls expressed strong hatred toward Arabs (Cal and Maislees 1989), this paper explores the difference in emotional experience between the two groups of girls. Through in‐depth interviews, it examines the meaning of national hatred as knowledge produced within a particular cultural discourse. In the case of the religious girls, feelings of hatred are produced through defensive emotion work aimed at securing the position of female religious subjectivity. The experience of the secular girls shows that when no single discourse is afforded privileged status, dissonant forms of knowledge stimulate the transformation of hatred into understanding and taking the role of the other. In both cases, the paper demonstrates the interplay between national discourse (secular and religious), emotional experience (of hatred), and the construction of (women's) subjectivity.

The Intensification of Hating: A Theory

“…Niza Yanay (1995Yanay ( , 1996Yanay ( , 2002 coded 200 letters sent to targets of hate (Tempkin and Yanay, 1989) to look at strategies perpetrators used to express themselves and admonish their objects of hatred. In this research, Temkin and Yanay found that the haters commonly wrote about their desire to exclude the members of the Israeli Zionist party from the larger collective of Israel and Jewish identity all together.…”

Understanding Collective Hatred

“…In another study (Yanay, 1996), I demonstrated the interplay between types of national discourse (secular and religious), emotional experience (of hatred), and the construction of (women's) subjectivity. This was based on in-depth interviews with nearly 50 Jewish adolescent girls, half of them secular (found in survey research to have the lowest rates of hatred towards Arabs), and half belonging to the national religious movement (found in survey research to have the highest rates of hatred toward Arabs).…”

“…This article explores this fantasmatic "conversion offer" in order to demonstrate the hidden workings of collective hatred and its ambivalent mechanisms. Based on previous work (Yanay, 1989(Yanay, , 1995(Yanay, , 1996, this article claims that collective hatred signifies a failure to mediate between similarity and difference, closeness and separation, isolation and connectedness, at the same time that national and religious groups aspire to be included and be recognized as part of humanity.Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, hatred has become very topical. The concept has been circulated from the White House and the media to our streets, homes, and hearts.…”

“…Conflicting attitudes, embedded in the polyvocality of the secular Zionist discourse, provoked "deep emotional acting" (Hochscild, 1983), which blended fear and anger, but also understanding ("we were also terrorists once") and sensitivity ("they want their own State"). Recognizing their ambivalence, the secular girls felt that "no matter how different the Palestinians are, they also share mutual experiences and needs with the Jews simply by the virtue of being human" (Yanay, 1996).…”

A national cautionary tale: Russian women newcomers to Israel portrayed*

“… 22 Pertinent in this regard is Niza Yanay's study of secular and religious girls' feelings towards Arabs in which she suggests that ‘two main motifs dominate the [religious] girls’ expressions of fear and hate: the street as a place of danger and the body as the locus of injury' (Yanay 1996: 29). …”