Nativist Hebrew poetry written in the twentieth century in Eretz Israel and in the State of Israel took upon itself a central role in realizing, through culture, the Zionist national project of settling the territory and establishing a national identity. The journey to implementing the national collective’s goal of inheriting the earth is revealed in the work of Esther Raab, Haim Goury and Moshe Dor not as an unquestioned flow, natural and free, but rather as an attempt by these nativist national poets to obscure the obstacles and hurdles peppering this quest.
“From the Beginning” follows the efforts invested by the nativist poets to overcome the obstacles arising from the conflict at the core of local poetry: the Eretz-Israeli and Israeli colonial relations to the territory even as it claims natural and unmediated connection to the land. Opposing the chronological narrative of the evolution of this poetry as a continuous, coherent sequence with nativist poetry as its basis, the book suggests exposing the energy invested in creating the illusion of a culture that is both a coherent, uninterrupted continuity from ancient nativism, but at one and the same time a chasm from the past and the creation of a new kind of nativism within the new Jewish space.