Fragmentary Returns: Revisioning Contemporary Militarized Homelands in Israel and the United States

"Fragmentary Returns: Revisioning Contemporary Militarized Homelands in Israel and the United States" traces the rhetoric of homeland and return across contemporary media forms in Israel and the U.S. in order to investigate the ways that Jewish diaspora has shifted since 1948. Through an examination of Nicole Krauss's novel Great House (2010); Miriam Libicki's graphic memoir, jobnik!: an american girl's adventures in the israeli army (2008); the digital game PeaceMaker (2007); and Zochrot.org, a radical Israeli activist website, I argue that emerging media forms reveal that homeland and return have become tied to militarized and often sacralized processes of territorial possession and retaliation. This conception of homeland---and the technologies that facilitate its policies of securitization---haunts the rhetorics of border politics and war in Israel and in the United States.;This project contends that spatial and networked media forms have a unique ability to intervene in exclusionary depictions of land-based memory in Israel/Palestine. While often created and utilized by military institutions, these forms can be harnessed to resist dangerous practices of return and retaliation. Chapter one uses Great House, a novel written in conventional print form, to posit the theoretical frame through which to examine the post-1945 desire for return to a pre-ruptured state of origins in Europe, the United States, and Israel. Chapter two shows how jobnik!, a graphic narrative, utilizes spatial representations of bordered and militarized homelands to evoke the failure of ultimate return to the Promised Land as a state of redemption or at-home-ness. Chapter three focuses on Peace Maker, a digital game, as a case study of the potential of games, first, to reveal political discourses that perpetuate intractable political conflict; and, second, to resist militarized spaces and exclusionary identities. Finally, chapter four argues that Zochrot.org, a radical Israeli activist website, uses networked elements to create palimpsestic assemblages of Jewish and Palestinian history before the Nakba in order to frame homeland as a place and practice: an active movement within a geographical space that is used to connect experiences of longing, displacement, and memory in order to create livable, inclusive spaces.