Waking the Public to Waking Lions

Author’s Note: This review is an adaptation of the final paper I wrote for Russell Berman’s wonderful Zionism and the Novel. For another artifact of my work in the class, check out my review of The Illusion of Return.

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel Waking Lions as a work of engaged literature. A thorough analysis of her writing is conducted to extract the specific political positions she advocates. The analysis of the political commentary contained in her fiction is then paired and contrasted with contemporary anthropological scholarship on the issue of Eritrean migrants in Israel to build a deeper understanding of the context in which the book was created and where it now stands, approaching a decade after publication. The paper ultimately claims that Gundar-Goshen’s writing opens a wide view into the everyday strife and overlapping conflicts and harms of Israel’s myriad communities and urges a remediation of the Eritrean migrant crisis in Israel through integration and acceptance. The novel’s framing places the issues at the core of the text beyond the scope of the question of Zionism: rather, the continued implementation of Zionism is what has given rise to the status quo, thus necessitating Gundar-Goshen look beyond the philosophy—toward human values and compassion—to find the source of the mandate to aid the Eritreans.

This dissection of Waking Lions is important precisely because the book has been treated as an unimportant work by the scholarly community. The text doesn’t touch the question of the Palestinians, and thus is sidelined. But just as is seen with the communities in the book, nothing is black and white: Israel is more than its conflict with the Palestinians. Waking Lions’ unflinching spotlighting of the myriad internal issues faced by the diverse Israeli polity make it one of the most important texts to come out of the country in recent years.

The Text as an Engaged Work

Waking Lions is not only engaged literature insofar as all texts are engaged literature, dealing with subjects that are covered by the broad tent of political opinion, but instead goes above and beyond in provoking a political conversation around, and interrogating the political ramifications and engagements of, the Eritrean refugee issue in Israel. This is by design. Gundar-Goshen’s intention in creating this work of fiction was to make her political lamentations appear more compelling to a broader audience by disguising them in the contours of characters with depth and dimension and emotion that readers can recognize from their own lives. A political diatribe with specific policy criticisms and recommendations will only be consumed by a very specific subset of people. A work that engages more directly with the universal instinct of storytelling can better evangelize its message. This is how Waking Lions was crafted from its inception.

An important component of Waking Lions’ political engagement is the length to which Gundar-Goshen goes to impress upon the reader the physical realities of Eritrean migrants in Israel, seeking to highlight their suffering through its personification in the character of Sirkit. Sirkit, the Eritrean woman at the center of the novel, is a complex figure—at once despised for her manipulations of Dr. Eitan Green and yet seemingly using her Machiavellian abuses for the betterment of the lives of overlooked refugees. It is only after forming a relationship with Sirkit that the reader is introduced to the details of her living conditions: a caravan, one cramped room filled with 8 mattresses and dirty dishes, parked behind the gas station where its residents work.¹ Sirkit herself scrubs floors during the day. None of the Eritreans who cram themselves together into the caravan to sleep on the floor night after night are paid the minimum wage nor given the traditional benefits of employment. Additional emotionally difficult information is held even further, with the reasons for Sirkit’s flight from Eritrea hinted at only in the very last chapter of the novel. Here, in her internal monologue, she refers to the African nation as “the land of the dead children.”² She reflects on a “well near the village that one day, simply had no more water,” on soldiers that stole their flour, on the trek over land to Egypt, on abusive Bedouin smugglers, and on Israel, the place where “she stopped. From [which] she would not move.”³ The strategic delay in the delivery of this information is done to counter the jaded desensitization of the receiving audience. There is the age-old adage: “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” By giving the physical conditions of the Eritreans a familiar face in the form of Sirkit, the theoretical plight of a people is turned into the tangible plight of a person.

Beyond the individual suffering, the systemization of the Eritrean struggle in the Jewish State is given an embodied form in the text through Eitan’s visit to the Holot Detention Center. Having come to visit Sirkit, Eitan looks out across the vast desert yard and observes: “Any one of those people could be Sirkit.”⁴ This is an explicit declaration of the above determination that Sirkit is a stand-in for the plight of Eritreans in Israel more broadly—Gundar-Goshen states that Sirkit is equivalent to the other Eritreans in Holot, and thus that all the detainees are as human as the book has portrayed her to be. It is also a further description of the dehumanization that Eritreans are subjected to at the hands of the Israeli government. Eitan continues: “They looked as alike as a herd of sheep. Of cows…. When he looked at them together, a crowded collection of bodies, he felt that they had lost every drop of selfhood, and all the small differences that made each of them who they were had been eclipsed by that large mass of identical flesh… the overcrowded space stripped them of their personalities and made them a single entity—Eritrean women…. They were Eritrean women waiting to be deported…”⁵ In his brief visit to the Holot Detention Center, Eitan is used as a tool to convey the banal brutality of the destruction of Eritrean individuality in the national system.

The ultimate resolution of the book’s moral challenge through Sirkit and Eitan’s deception reveals Gundar-Goshen’s preference for how to resolve the political quandary of Eritrean migrants in Israel. The roiling truth of the story behind the illegal hospital in the desert—Eitan’s initial crime of vehicular manslaughter, Sirkit’s blackmail, the robbery of hospital materials, peripheral involvement with the Bedouin criminal underworld, hints of adultery, and everything else that ultimately comprises the narrative of Waking Lions—is smoothed over. Sirkit does this of her own initiative. Speaking with Eitan’s wife, Liat, she papers over the reality of the situation that had brought his family and marriage so close to collapse: “Before the Bedouins had surprised them, Eitan had gone to treat her injuries. He’d left Yaheli’s bed and driven two and a quarter hours to get there. Only an angel would do something like that.”⁶ With the full context Gundar-Goshen provided during the action, the additional layers are revealed. Eitan drove down to perform the surgery in part because of his romantic feelings toward Sirkit as well as her continued power over him due to the potential for her testimony. But in the end this is resolved—his service to the Eritreans is simplified: “He felt guilty about the silence she had imposed on him concerning Zakai’s bribes. He wanted to atone…. It was illegal. And dangerous…. And [Liat] realized suddenly why he had been so interested in the investigation of that Eritrean’s death. Those people weren’t just a newspaper article for him. He knew them. He was helping them.”⁷ Gundar-Goshen does briefly broaden the scope to include some of the other narratives in Israeli discourse, describing a café scene after Eitan and Sirkit’s revisionist story hits the news: “Several people began arguing. We can’t have all of Africa coming here. If those bleeding hearts have their way, we’ll end up without a country.”⁸ But this broadening is done primarily for the purpose of foregrounding the opposite narrative—her narrative— as expressed by a woman who approaches Eitan to say, “We need more people like you in this country.”⁹ Through Liat’s acceptance of the morality of her husband’s actions and the Israeli public’s endorsement, Gundar-Goshen lends her own voice to the idea that Eritreans in Israel should be accepted, appeased, and integrated. Her political preferences, expressed through these varied characters, are paired with an additional pithy quip, a sort of condemnation of the idea that the hard work her politics would mandate can be ignored. It is the final line in the novel, and it comes from the mind of Eitan Green, newly freed to return to his old life and—apparently—bury his head in the sand: “How beautiful the earth is when it moves properly. How pleasant to move with it. To forget that any other movement ever existed. That a different movement is even possible.”¹⁰

Clashing Against Reality

Gundar-Goshen’s political commentary through Waking Lions of course exists in the context of Israeli reality. This has continued to evolve quite rapidly in the seven years since the publication of her work of engaged literature. As recently as last year, there was violence in the streets of Tel Aviv between different Eritrean factions resulting in the injury of over 100 individuals as well as significant arrests. The conditions in Eritrea that led so many to choose “liminality in Israel over forced conscription (often until death) in Eritrea or ethnic cleansing by Arab groups in Darfur” are the same or worse as they were at the time Gundar-Goshen released her novel to the world.¹¹ Migrants largely remain in limbo, governed under the conflicting mandates of the Prevention of Infiltration Law and the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Aspects of Gundar-Goshen’s humanitarian ideology have received broader adoption. The Holot Detention Center, a location that played a significant role in the psyche of the Eritreans of Waking Lions, was shuttered in 2018.¹² The Deposit Law, which mandated 20% of asylum seekers’ salary be deposited in a bank account only accessible at the airport when leaving the country, was struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2020.¹³ Eritreans have developed their own community centers, educational structures, and institutions that “attest to the agency of the… community in Israel.”¹⁴ Migrants are building lives in the country, living on visas that need renewal every 2-3 months.¹⁵ This itself is a massive political victory for Gundar-Goshen’s school of thought: as Waking Lions conveys, the daily lives “of Eritreans in Israel are not apolitical.”¹⁶ Their continued existence in Israel is a testament to the political success of the ideology expressed in Gundar-Goshen’s work of engaged literature.

In spite of these developments, Israeli society remains broadly hostile to the presence of the Eritrean migrants in precisely the ways that Gundar-Goshen opposed in Waking Lions. The country is governed by an extreme right-wing coalition which harbors significant anti-Eritrean sentiment, though internal and external factors have made continued attempts to address the migrant crisis low on its list of priorities. The anti-migrant position resulted in the Prime Minister reneging on a negotiated settlement with the UN refugee agency to give permanent status to around half of asylum seekers in Israel in exchange for resettling the other half in other countries.¹⁷ Such a compromise was perceived as too soft and harshly criticized. Integration of Eritrean migrants as full members of the Israeli polity, as citizens, is perceived as undesirable. Emigration is encouraged, and the mass departure of Eritrean migrants remains the state’s preferred outcome.

The specific interplay of the international system in the Eritrean refugee crisis in Israel is a particularly rich topic for dissection. In many ways, the sovereign Israeli system is set up in direct opposition to the presence of Eritrean migrants, but is countered by international refugee law that exists “precisely because states are often inclined to act differently than how the law prescribes.”¹⁸ The particularly proactive role that international governance plays in the day-to-day experience of Eritrean migrants in Israel is made greater by the already-enhanced focus of the international community on the Jewish nation—a fact which the community has at times used to its advantage. Eritrean society is not traditionally organized around the concept of race or color, but rather ethnolinguistic groups and tribal affiliation.¹⁹ In most migratory scenarios, individuals who may be racialized as Black “attempt to highlight their immigrant background or national origin to escape negative stereotypes” associated with this new identity.²⁰ The Eritrean community in Israel has become an exception to this trend, opting to make the strategic decision to self-identify as “Black.” This particular language is intended to garner support from abroad by contextualizing the experience of Eritrean migrants in Israel in a foreign framework, so as to make it more intelligible in the international arena and increase pressure on the Israeli state to halt deportations. The role of nonnative forces in the Eritrean-Israeli crisis goes largely undiscussed in Waking Lions, to its detriment.

Conclusions

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions paints a colorful picture of a pressing, contemporary Israeli issue, presenting the reader with a clear call to action through its expert personification of the problem. The narrative is thoroughly grounded in modern Israel, making the intentional decision to place the question of Zionism squarely in the past. The Jewish State already exists—Gundar-Goshen’s narrative interprets the Eritrean migrant crisis within its borders as a question to be answered by the generic State portion of the Zionist dream, not the Jewish (and by extension Zionist) part. The novel implores its audience to take action to embrace and integrate Eritreans into the fabric of Israeli society. Its detailed description of the suffering of the migrant community, in desperate poverty and constant fear of state action, is gracefully described with its day-to-day complexities—its members are not pure good, nor evil—while ensuring that it is clear that such suffering is a moral failing of the state. Gundar-Goshen believes this can be solved.

It is in turn a failing of the scholarly community that this is the first paper to seriously engage with Waking Lions. The discussion of international conflicts, and their portrayal in literature, is flashier. Such analysis allows the author of a paper to connect with the oldest of human traditions: myths of wars and conquests waged throughout the eons. It is, bluntly, dramatic and fun. In the Israeli context in particular, there is no shortage of conflicts and fictions about them to dissect; the Palestinian issue in particular provides a sure and stable base for study. It is, however, a poor academic that allows themselves to fall prey to sampling bias. Israel is far more than its conflict with the Palestinians. Indeed, for the Eritreans under constant threat of deportation—and, for that matter, Dr. Eitan Green—the matters highlighted in Waking Lions take precedence. The dialogue in this work of engaged literature must be given space, instead of letting the Palestinian issue take all the oxygen. With an opportunity to thrive, to engage with and impact a large audience, Gundar-Goshen’s novel could catalyze real progress on one of Israel’s most serious internal conflicts.