Mythic Countries Of Wakanda, Narnia, Palestine Get New Neighbor In Leftist Imagination: Pre-Netanyahu Israel

“It belongs much more in our comic-book, cartoon-show milieu than in anything resembling human reality.”

Somewhere  in the Levant, July 9 – Realms located in the world of the imaginary such as Middle Earth, Krypton, and Eternia gained a new member in recent years: the Israel that so many insist existed before the Labor Party lost its power, and when everything in the land was more pleasant, more honest, more unified, and of course simpler.

Recent polls of inhabitants of the fantasy multiverse that includes Wakanda, Narnia, Palestine, Fredonia, Vulgaria, and other figmentary places indicate that since approximately 2009, they have noticed the addition to their fictional neighborhood of a place that the Asheknazi elite of Israel has evoked more and more as their political and cultural power wanes: the wholesome, closer-to-perfect Israel that existed before Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its right-wing or Mizrahi allies and predecessors asserted themselves beyond their blue-collar, second-class, barbaric station, and before rising economic prosperity obviated the socialist bureaucracy that cemented those secular Ashkenazim in positions of influence.

“I guess there’s room for everyone,” surmised Prince Adam of Eternia. “Imagination is limitless. So there’s plenty enough space in our worlds for an idealized, Labor-Party-hegemony, morally uncompromised Israel that would still exist if those rotten right-wingers had never convinced enough voters to choose them instead. The realm of black-and-white heroes vs. villains belongs much more in our comic-book, cartoon-show milieu than in anything resembling human reality.”

“What I find interesting,” added Peter Pan, “is the difference between the idealized Never-Never-Land that Israel’s dwindling cultural ‘elite’ clique sees as the nation’s past and the one that certain slices of white Americans see when they look at, say, the 1950’s – but more importantly, the way the dominant cultural media take totally divergent approaches to the two.”

“To illustrate,” he continued, “whereas American and Western media in general now take constant pains to remind audiences that the prosperity and simplicity they perceive of that era in fact featured horrific discrimination and marginalization of large swaths of the population; in Israel, the dominant cultural media treat what they see as the ‘encroachment’ of those once in the political minority as a threat, even a moral stain. Unless it’s Arab political power, in which case, well, that trumps even Jewish sovereignty and safety.”

“I have to say I’m glad I’m here in Narnia and not the imagined idyll of Israel’s secular left wing,” confessed Aslan. “That sounds like the most cloyingly insufferable, condescending, casually racist place in nonexistence.”

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