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Judas Iscariot, Between Betrayer and Betrayed: The Critique of Israeli Sovereignty in Yigal Mossinsohn's Novel Judas

Abstract:This article attempts to explore the role of betrayer and betrayal as a literary, political, and critical position in Israeli author Yigal Mossinsohn's (1917–94) novel Judas (1962). Mossinsohn situates Judas Iscariot at the heart of the Jewish national project and presents him not as a betrayer but as an obedient man ordered by his commander to turn Jesus in as a means of changing the balance of political power in occupied Canaan. The presentation of the Christian betrayal narrative in the framework of a plot revolving around political intrigue associated with the aspiration for autonomous Jewish sovereignty enables a reading of Mossinsohn's novel as an exploration of the meanings and ramifications of betrayal against the context of the Israeli political and ideological reality in which it was written. Mossinsohn's novel fosters an unresolvable tension between the desire to present an active and effective model of political betrayal and its failure—the failure to burrow an escape route out of what this article refers to as "the Israeli industry of saints." This industry renders betrayal an inherent part of a prescribed Zionist redemption narrative. In the novel, the failure of betrayal is rooted in the fact that it does not have a world-changing effect and does not constitute a point of departure for the imagining of alternative forms of political and social relations. Therefore, what may seem in Mossinsohn's novel to be a necessary position of betrayal, which harshly criticizes the political underpinnings of Israeli sovereignty, is eventually replaced by a less treacherous impasse into which the betrayer is sucked against his will.