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Zionism as the Ulyssification of Abraham

Been discussing with Aharon about the images of Ulysses and Abraham that Levinas presents in "The Trace of the Other". The Abrahamic promised land is a land-to-come (as a Nietzschean Kinderland), nothing like an Ithaca, a return to the past, but a projection to the future. Of course the idea of a promised land appeals to a past promise and Aharon remarks that promises are always tied to the past. But there is no Ithaca in the Abrahamic story, it is about leaving, evading, going somewhere else - a bit like the Deleuzian portrayal of the Anglo-American voyage as opposed to that where a point of departure and return is set once and for all. There is a one-way-ness about Abraham, to the point where memories of the land left have to be exorcized as some sort of immemorable, as Silvia Benso puts in the opening pages of her beautiful The face of Things (SUNY Press, 2000). Just like Moses, perhaps again searching for a Kinderland, the land of departure has to be forgotten and provides no guide, no attraction force - origins are to be betrayed. Abraham, in a sense, is the anarchaic version of Ulysses as there is no Odyssey in his endeavors, the promised land, however understood, is something to come, a destination to be fulfilled and not the attraction of the past in the future.

It then seems like Zionism is the Ulyssification of the Abrahamic legend. The promised land becomes a Motherland (or rather a Grandfather-land); no longer a voyage of evasion but one of return. The association of the promised land with a geography is precisely the European rendition of the Abrahamic story - especially when the nations started having their Ulysses, their ones to bring something back. Zionism then sounds deeply European in the sense of purging of Abraham - of the one way travelers - among nationals with a (Ulysses-like) passport. The promised land is not a geographical land, and if it is it should be far more like Patagonia, Uganda or Antarctica. The transformation of it in the land of the past was probably brewed in Europe for millennia, but the final element was given by the suitable-for-Europeans solution for the (European) Jewish problem through Zionism

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