The Idea of Israel (14 page)

For the Israeli public, these dissident Jews should have symbolised everything Zionism was proud of. Many were young, handsome members of kibbutzim who had served in the élite units of the army. Although there were only a handful of them, the society as a whole was bewildered that such members could subscribe to such revolutionary and counter-Zionist ideas.

Aside from the specifics of these splinter groups, it is Matzpen that is most important within the context of the history of ideas that I wish to chart here. Matzpen’s positions were very much the same as those put forward by the challengers of the future. I myself can attest that while I had not read any Matzpen publications prior to writing my books challenging the Israeli version of the 1948 war and depicting Zionism as a colonialist movement, I was amazed to discover – when, in 1997, Akiva Orr handed me the book
Peace, Peace and There Is No Peace
, along with several issues of Matzpen’s official publication – the degree to which we shared the same analysis and prognosis.

This holds true for other works that appeared in the 1990s as well. They, too, would reflect Matzpen’s views of Zionism as colonialism and of 1948 as a catastrophe, and would share the movement’s critique of Israeli policies towards Arab Jews, the Palestinian minority, and the occupied territories. The later critics had neither access to the archives nor an interest in scholarly academic work, and yet the end result would be the same. More than anything else, the courage displayed by the members of Matzpen was inspiring. These young men and women could be seen in small groups, carrying provocative banners and not being deterred by the prospect of verbal or even physical assault by bystanders or the police. Through that commitment and determination, they showed the way for the few who, still today, do not give up regardless of the opposition.

Few members of the academy belonged to this group. But in the 1970s there emerged academics who found themselves developing similar doubts about Zionism. They differed from the earlier activists in that their trigger for questioning the idea of Israel was not some specific formative event or a personal epiphany. Their beliefs began to be shaken when their professional research exposed the false assumptions and historical fabrications on which the idea of Israel was based.

The Pioneering Academics

In the wake of the groundbreaking work by these pioneering activists, there appeared the first voices from within the Israeli academy expressing profound doubts about the nature of the state, its ideology and policies. Until the war of October 1973 – sometimes called the Yom Kippur War – academia was obedient, highly patriotic and overwhelmingly Zionist. Dissenting teachers paid less of a price than did activists in terms of imprisonment or public condemnation, but being a lonely voice in the wilderness made such academics feel quite marginalised and out of place in the Israeli universities.

One such voice was Uriel Tal. A professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, Tal wrote extensively on Jewish secularisation in modern times but also voiced consternation about the way Israeli academia was being pressed into the service of the nation and of Zionism.
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In a series of lectures delivered to colleagues in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University in the 1980s, Tal posed some poignant questions about the newly formed discipline in Israeli academia known as Jewish studies. Since the 1970s every university had a department of Jewish history; some had gone further and opened Eretz Israel history or studies departments, which taught and researched according to a specific disciplinary logic and methodology. Tal objected to any insistence that the study of Zionism, Judaism, and the history of the Land of Israel required both ideological loyalty and particular methodological tools. He sought instead a universal approach towards all these topics. To his mind, there
was no such discipline as ‘Jewish history’ – there was only history – and whatever history’s methodologies, theories and tools were, they should apply equally to the study of an African, European or Jewish past and present.

Tal failed in this quixotic quest. Universities continued the zealous cultivation of the ‘disciplines’ of Jewish and Eretz Israel studies. The politicised academic structure, displaying continued indifference to what was going on in the rest of the world, remained impenetrable to any genuine interdisciplinary influence, let alone any comparative studies. Zionism and the Zionist version of Judaism continued to be taught and researched as unique case studies that lay outside the framework of general historiography.

Nevertheless, what Tal had noticed in mid-1980s Israel soon became obvious. Formerly acclaimed Israeli scholars working on Israel and Zionism started to lose their prestige abroad and became regarded as propagandists for the national narrative. A short while later, international criticism began to have an impact within Israeli academia itself. Tal’s critique had been shaped by his interaction with the academic world outside Israel, but most of the early academic challengers were less engaged than he was in philosophical or theoretical criticisms of Israeli academia. Their problem with the national academy was that it was indifferent to the predicaments of the society around it; predicaments that began to surface forcefully after the 1973 war.

That war is a turning-point in its own right. The Syrian–Egyptian surprise attack that month on the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, which had been under Israeli control since 1967, shook the earth beneath the feet of many Israelis. The aftershocks reached the academy before they affected Israeli culture as a whole. The war ended a period of euphoria and consensus in Israeli society and exposed cracks in Israel’s moral smugness. In many ways, it served to prod academics and others to embark on an introspective search for answers to a number of troubling questions about the moral validity of the state, including both past and present policies, and eventually to revisit the essence and implications of the idea of Israel itself.

Until the third day of the war, the sense among generals, politicians and indeed the general public was that Israel was lost. There was even serious discussion of the possibility of using nuclear weapons as a last resort in case the United States would not come to Israel’s aid. By this time, Syrian forces were deep inside the Golan Heights, while Egyptian forces had advanced into the Sinai Peninsula; dozens of Israeli soldiers had been captured, and the famously invincible Israeli Air Force found it difficult to operate against the enemy’s antiaircraft system. An American airlift and a successful strategy in the north tipped the balance later on, but these did not lessen the sense of insecurity and suspicion about the leadership’s ability to sustain the Jewish state. In the early days of the debacle, the Labour government, headed by Golda Meir, was handed the blame. Although a committee of inquiry absolved politicians such as Meir and her minister of defence, Moshe Dayan, from responsibility for the failure and cast the blame on the army and the intelligence chiefs, the electorate thought differently. In order to save the Labour Party from defeat in the elections of 1974, the 1967 war hero Yitzhak Rabin was brought back from Washington, where he had been serving as ambassador, and he indeed won the election for Labour. But in 1977 Labour ran his rival, Shimon Peres, who was easily defeated by Menachem Begin and his Likud Party.

But this was more than just a changing of the guard. The war traumatised the society, and many Israelis lost, albeit for a short moment, their sense of perpetual invincibility – not only because of the army’s poor performance on the battlefield, but also because of the raising of doubts about Israeli policy among traditional supporters of the state in the world at large. By itself, the 1973 war was not enough to cause loyal adherents of the idea of Israel to doubt the whole plot. Earlier developments had already planted these doubts in a few corners of the public mind even before the war. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, the state’s highest officials and ministers had become entangled in highly publicised cases of personal corruption. Most of those suspected and later indicted were members of the ruling Labour Party. As a result, the founding movement of the State began to lose its prestige and its hegemony – politically, socially and culturally – for the Jews of Israel.

But the war did stand at the gateway to two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, that exposed some basic Zionist truisms as doubtful at best and as fallacies at worst. In the relative calm after 1973, these tensions brought to the fore certain demons that had been safely hidden away, the most important of which was the claim that the state was a successful melting pot in which a new Jewish identity had been forged. What became apparent was that the society was ridden with tensions between various cultural and ethnic groups, and was only precariously cemented together by the lack of peace and the continual sense of crisis.

It was at this time that social and cultural undercurrents of dissatisfaction and antagonism in Israeli society began to erupt. These were transformed into social protests against the evils inflicted by the state on deprived Jewish communities, mostly North African in origin. Young and vociferous activists tried to emulate the dissent voiced by African Americans and so, in the early 1970s, established their own Black Panther movement, led by a group of extraordinary young men.

Reuven Abargel, who was born in Morocco, arrived in Israel in 1950 at the age of three. His family settled in Musrara, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem from which the residents had been evicted in 1948; in those days, it served as a buffer zone between Jordanian East Jerusalem and Israeli West Jerusalem. It was a slum, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. Occasionally the respective armies exchanged fire.

Abargel spent some time outside the neighbourhood and was educated in a kibbutz in the Negev. When he came back, he, like so many other youngsters, lived on the margins of the law and normative society. Seeing his family’s poverty and lack of hope, in 1971 he decided jointly with friends from the neighbourhood to found a protest movement that would demand government investment in the educational, transportation, and housing infrastructure in the poor neighbourhoods.
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Abargel’s friend Charlie Biton, who also arrived in Israel in 1950, came from Casablanca at the age of two; his family, too, had been thrown into the slum of Musrara. Other friends from the neighbourhood included Saadia Marciano and Kochavi
Shemesh. Together with another ten friends, and with the help of social workers who operated a community centre in the neighbourhood, they founded the Israeli Black Panthers.

The movement demanded a new and fairer distribution of the economic resources of the state and a share in the definition of its cultural identity. The protesters failed to move the Israeli left but attracted the attention of the right, which skilfully manipulated their protest into a mass movement that brought Menachem Begin to power in 1977. In this shifting landscape, the Israeli left lost the working classes, the natural constituency for such movements in the West. In addition, some of its adherents in academia began to drift away from Socialist Zionism and began to view critically their former political home. In particular, they saw the Labour Party’s defeat at the polls in May 1977 as an indication of the potential failure of the Zionist project as a whole.

Meanwhile, protests and discontent continued against the ongoing discrimination against Israeli Jews of North African origin, whose second generation expressed grievances against the Ashkenazi-dominated national memory. They pointed to the exclusion of the North African experience from the collective story of early statehood. The protests exposed the deep-rooted racism played out in practice within the ideal of Israel as a ‘melting pot’ society. They highlighted the continual institutional discrimination against the Mizrachi Jews.
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When academics joined this protest movement in the footsteps of activists on the ground, they not only investigated the discrimination in their own time but also sought its roots in the early years of statehood.

The first group of academics to respond to Mizrachi grievances operated at the University of Haifa. The university itself had been established in 1963 as a branch of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem but gained its independence in 1972. This was an ideal place for novel thinking, located along a ridge of Mount Carmel – where it became a familiar feature of the northern scenery, with its eerie thirty-floor tower designed by the communist Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer during the tenure of the legendary megalomaniac mayor Abba Hushi. The university boasted a fresh and
innovative department of sociology, and until they were tamed, these sociologists challenged the orthodox methodology and Zionist commitment of the leading Israeli sociologists of the day.

One of their main targets, and the best known among their former Hebrew University professors, was Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt. A Polish Jew who emigrated to Palestine at an early age, he was groomed to be the doyen of Israeli sociology under Martin Buber. He introduced the theory of modernisation as both an academic pastime and a guidebook for future Israeli government policies towards anyone who was neither Western nor modern. The theory was that anyone who encounters a Western society is, at the end of the day, bound to be Westernised, which is to say to be modernised and introduced to the world of economic progress, social stability and liberal democracy. Nevertheless, such an integration cannot be expected to happen voluntarily or autonomously – the new recruits must be coached into becoming modern.
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When that theory became policy in the 1950s, it signified that the state had the power first to define who was and who was not modern, and then to choose the means by which to modernise them. These means included de-Arabising Mizrachi Jews, secularising Orthodox Jews, and breaking traditional practices of rural or immigrant societies while at the same time compensating or rewarding these people by locating them at the social and geographical margins of the society until the process of modernisation was successfully completed.