The Idea of Israel (2 page)

When the
idea
of Israel was challenged from within, it meant that the
ideal
of Zionism was deciphered as an ideology, and thus became a far more tangible and feasible target for critical evaluation. This is what happened to a group of Israelis during the 1990s in what I characterise here as Israel’s post-Zionist moment.

The challengers focused on the origins of the idea in order to ascertain its present status and interpretation. Political and social processes motivated this search, leading those who embarked on the journey to look beyond current debates about social and economic policies or the fate of the territories occupied in 1967. Their search went deeper into the past.

The journey ended as abruptly as it erupted. After less than a decade, it was branded by the state and by large segments of the Jewish Israeli population as dangerous, indeed suicidal – a trip that would end in Israel losing its international legitimacy and moral backing. Post-Zionism, as the journey was defined by most of its observers and students, became anti-Semitism in the eyes of its enemies. In 2000 it was defeated and nearly disappeared.

This book examines that journey. It charts the departure from the Zionist comfort zone, the arrival at the destination, and the frequent return trip to the comfort zone. Mainly it was an intellectual journey, taken by dozens of academics, a few journalists and numerous artists, who visited the past by delving into national and private archives and by listening empathetically and attentively, for the first time in their lives, to people who regarded themselves as victims of Zionism. They wrote books and articles, made documentary and feature films,
composed poems and novels. The common ground was History, a reappraisal of the past so as to understand the present.

Each post-Zionist embarked on the journey for different reasons, yet all were moved by the changing reality around them – a reality that, subsequent to 1967, had been forcing them to consider disturbing questions about their state’s conduct present and past. The scholars among them were the last to ask questions, having finally been encouraged to do so by trends in Western academia in the 1990s, where it had become standard practice to pose critical questions about nationalism, state policies and hegemonic cultural positions. Multi-ethnic, multicultural and at times postmodern Western academia showed these local challengers how to deconstruct the impact of power – Zionist ideology – on knowledge embodied in allegedly scientific and objective research. As we shall see, those who delved deep into these questions came to understand their own role, as producers of knowledge, in creating the very reality that disturbed them. Hence they came to challenge the very hegemonic versions of the past that they themselves had researched, learned and taught.

The post-Zionist historians were not mere observers but became part of the process. As a result, their challenge was more noticeable and, for a time, more effective. They participated in global critical practices that encouraged them to adopt a more relativist approach to the history, sociology and national ideology of the State of Israel. Some also found useful the new genre of postcolonial studies as a means of exploring cultural oppression and the attempts to counter it within Israeli Jewish society; others preferred to approach Zionism, Israel and the struggle against them as a purely colonialist situation. Whichever approach they took, they risked incurring the wrath of peers, relatives and eventually the state for being unwilling to accept the prevalent view of Zionism as a just, democratic movement of national liberation. This wrath would lead to their demise.

The historians, sociologists, artists and playwrights who in the 1990s chose to represent victims of the Zionist movement and, later, the State of Israel and to give them a voice did so either because they themselves belonged to a victimised group or because they decided to risk the comfort zone in which they resided and represent the
colonised, occupied and oppressed. For them, the idea of Israel had now clearly come to be seen as an omnipotent text that dictated life and death on the ground. The question was, Could it be rewritten? Pondering this question was therefore not an indulgent intellectual pastime; it was an intensely real engagement with an existential situation.

As already mentioned, that challenge is described in this book as post-Zionist. Some would prefer to depict this movement as anti-Zionist; others regard it as a softer version of Zionism. Some post-Zionists were in fact anti-Zionists. But regardless of how far the challengers travelled down that road, they were all searching for an alternative to Zionism. Most of them, not having found one, returned to the ideology’s warm embrace; few have become even more anti-Zionist. Some post-Zionists disagreed with their depiction as such, and some who claimed to be post-Zionists were not recognised as such. Clearly the definition is fluid and contentious, but we use it here for lack of a better alternative.

What is uncontended, however, is what was challenged: the consensual Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel. That consensual interpretation is referred to herein as classical Zionism. Our challengers are the post-Zionists, and the reaction to their challenge is described here as neo-Zionism – the wish to strengthen classical Zionism and provide an unwaveringly patriotic interpretation of the idea of Israel so that it would be immune to such challenges in the future.

Thus did the pendulum swing from Zionism to post-Zionism and thence to neo-Zionism. It can swing again. The political map presents these vacillations very clearly. Classical Zionism was the ideology to which successive governments in Israel, both left and right, subscribed until 1993. Thereafter for a short period, at least until Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 and possibly until 1999, there was an attempt at a more liberal, possibly even a post-Zionist, approach. Ever since, and until today, a neo-Zionist policy has taken its place.

At the end of day, in other words, the idea was more powerful than its challengers. Its power did not lie in coercion and intimidation; it won legitimacy mainly through acceptance of the idea as being the
reality. Its power to regulate everyday life is achieved through invisible means – the very means the challengers sought to expose. Its firm grip ensures widespread support among Israeli Jews – from the worker in the street to the professor in the ivory tower. And this is what makes it such an intriguing case study, not only for assessing the future of Israel but for better understanding the relations between power and knowledge in seemingly democratic societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Methodology and Structure

Methodologically, this book examines the idea of Israel, the challenge and the response, primarily as they appeared in the academic production of knowledge. As I am a historian, this book focuses on the history of the production of and challenge to the idea. That the challenge occurred mainly in academia but also took place elsewhere, most importantly in local cinema and television, enables me to scrutinise the idea of Israel both as a scholarly claim and as a fictional representation. More often than not, the gap between the two is narrow. An almost identical narrative is spun in both these representations of reality, even though allegedly they are diametrically opposed. The uniformity of representation exemplifies the potent grip of the idea; meanwhile, the nation narrates its story and proves its validity through academia, media and the arts and is challenged in these same arenas.

Documentary films occupy a territory between the academic’s claim to objectivity and the film-maker’s licence to imagine and fictionalise. Documentaries played an important role in the post-Zionist challenge; long after the academic challengers had lost heart, the documentary film-makers continued, as they do to this very day, to criticise openly and courageously the idea of Israel.

When an idea has the power to include or exclude you in the common good of a state, when it can determine your status as enemy or friend, when it is conveyed both as an academic truth and as a compelling movie plot, it is very difficult to escape its influence or
dissociate yourself from it. In particular, it is difficult to venture on such an endeavour if you are offered a privileged position in the tale. Risking the privileges, or being unwilling to lose them, is also part of the story recounted in this book.

This book begins with an attempt to chart what was challenged: the Zionist narrative and discourse. The first chapter opens with the representation of the idea of Israel in mainstream Zionist scholarship as the ultimate and most successful project of modernity and enlightenment. Thus a challenge to such a representation does not merely contest a national narrative but also, and perhaps more significantly, a paradigmatic narrative of excellence and uniqueness. To examine this will help us appreciate the distance the challengers had to travel within their own society. Paradoxically, this representation was accompanied by a strong belief in the importance of objective, empirical, scientific research. In confronting the idea, therefore, one either could claim that the facts on the ground did not match the self-congratulatory representation, or could arrive at a better understanding of how the same facts can be manipulated so as to produce differing narratives such as those formulated by the Zionists on the one hand and the Palestinians on the other.

Zionism in this book appears as a discourse. I use ‘discourse’ in the same way as did Edward Said when discussing the representation of the Orient in the West. In many ways, the Zionist discourse on the Palestinians is both Orientalist and colonialist – at least, this is how the challengers chose to depict it.
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In order to set the stage for the challenge of the 1990s, I devote the second chapter of the book to the place of the Palestinians in the Zionist discourse. The challengers proposed a total reversal in the common depiction of the Palestinians and Palestine in Israeli Jewish discourse. They suggested transforming the Palestinians from villains into victims and, in some films, even into heroes. In this way, the Zionists became both victimisers and culprits. No wonder some of those who responded angrily to this challenge, whose ideas are covered later in the book, deemed such reversals as evidence of self-hate and mental derangement.

The initial two chapters’ general description of the Zionist narrative is followed by a focused analysis of mainstream Zionism’s
representation of the year 1948, the genesis of the state, in both scholarly and cinematic form. I focus on this year for two reasons. First, the history – and even more so the historiography – of 1948 became a core issue in the post-Zionist challenge. Second, 1948 is the fulcrum for all the debates described in this book: the year represents either the culmination of preceding historical processes or the explanation for everything that happened subsequently. The discussion of what took place in 1948 feeds the historiographical debate about the essence of the Zionist project up to 1948, as well as informing the conversation about the desired solution for the Israel/Palestine question.

The fourth chapter is a tribute to Israel’s early Jewish critics of Zionism, who both directly and indirectly influenced the post-Zionist challenge in the 1990s. Although for the most part they were isolated and marginalised in their society, in hindsight one can more fully appreciate their impact on the 1990s, when the challenge matured into a wide-ranging intellectual and cultural phenomenon. The post-Zionist challenge of that decade was the continuation of the brave work and action of certain admirable individuals, some of whom were academics and others journalists of a sort, who in light of their own universalist, humanist approach to life strove single-handedly to critique the truisms of Zionism.

Those early voices were one of three factors that contributed to the emergence of the debate. The second was, as mentioned, the new global, and in particular Western, ideas about power and knowledge. Third, and perhaps most important, were the dramatic socio-economic and political developments on the ground after 1967 and in particular after 1973. A relative calm on Israel’s borders exposed the fault lines within the society. Social and economic disparities, ethnic divisions, ideological debates and a deep divide between secular and religious Jews permitted dissent to surface, after its having been silenced for many years.

These developments are described in the fifth chapter, which presents the findings of the Israeli historians – known as the ‘new historians’ – who set out to challenge the Zionist narrative concerning 1948. They were inspired neither by new theories of historiography nor concepts of knowledge production. Rather, owing
to the surrounding social and political upheaval, they read with fresh eyes the newly declassified documents in the archives, even as most of the historians who read the very same documents saw in them no evidence that would force a rewrite of the Zionist version of events.

Global influences were of greater relevance to the developments of the 1990s.
Chapter 6
exposes the more profound theoretical discussion that inspired those individuals, consisting mainly of sociologists, who expanded this research chronologically back to the early days of Zionism and forward into the 1950s and thematically to the predicament of Mizrachi Jews, to the Palestinians in Israel, to issues concerning gender, and to the manipulation of Holocaust memory within Israel. Like colleagues of theirs around the world at the end of the twentieth century, these sociologists were interested in the question of how power – be it defined as ideology, political position or identity – affects the production of purportedly scientific and objective knowledge. And, as was the case elsewhere in the world, they answered this query in new and exciting ways.

I then focus more narrowly on this challenge by looking at the role played by the Holocaust in the construction and marketing of the idea of Israel. The book’s seventh chapter examines the challenge to the manipulation of the Holocaust memory in the Jewish state – a challenge that touched raw nerves in the society. It exposed not only a Jewish leadership reluctant to do its utmost to save Europe’s Jews from impeding genocide but also the alliances upheld by certain Zionist leaders with Nazism until the Nazis’ true plan for the extermination of the Jews was revealed. By describing the maltreatment of Holocaust survivors, the challengers demonstrated that in the name of their tragedy, the idea of Israel was sold as the ultimate answer to the catastrophe that befell the European Jews in the Second World War. In addition, they showed that much of what Israel had done since its creation, including its less savoury actions against the Palestinians, was justified by invoking the memory of the Holocaust. Some of the challengers regarded with horror the possibility that the manipulation of the memory had created a society that failed to understand the universal lesson suggested by the horrific event and
had instead turned itself into a nationalist, expansionist entity bent on intimidation of the region as a whole.