המקרה המוזר של "אמצע הלילה בכפר": חזות וצליל פלסטיניים במרחב הישראלי

The article analyzes the positioning of Israeli culture vis-à-vis the Arab or Palestinian space. Is there a difference between visual subjectivity based on disjunction from the surroundings in order to watch and dominate, and audio subjectivity which is more open to the cultural influences of these surroundings? This question is investigated via semiotic analysis of the song “Midnight in the Village” written and performed by Harel Mouyal, comparing the song’s audio messages with the accompanying video-clip’s visual messages. The video presents a classic Zionist visual image: a man moving with his masculine group through frontier space in order to dominate it. Conversely, the song and the melody present the voice of a confused first-person speaker, and bear witness to loneliness, passivity, and visual disorientation while assimilating Palestinian sounds. Besides the difference in genre between the visual image of the “new Jew” and the “rock aesthetics” which demand first-person expressions of “authentic” feelings, the contradictions between the song and the video demonstrate the relative effectiveness of the Zionist visual separatism vis-à-vis the Arab and Palestinian space, as opposed to the polyphonic character of the Hebrew soundscapes.