The Idea of Israel (21 page)

The territorial restructuring of the land has centered around an all-encompassing and expansionist
Judaisation
(de-Arabisation) program adopted by the nascent Israeli state, following the 1947–49 flight and expulsion of close to 800,000 Palestinians. This created big ‘gaps’ in the geography of the land, which the authorities were quick to fill with Jewish settlements inhabited by migrants and refugees who entered the country en masse during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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There are many other examples. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, who was working at the leftist Zionist institute of Givat Haviva as a historian of the state of Israel, wrote that ‘the military regime imposed on the Arabs in Israel became a tool for political, economic and cultural control of the state in the lives of the Arab minority’.
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Dan Rabinowitz, an anthropologist from Tel Aviv University, wrote extensively on the need to adopt the term ‘the Palestinians in Israel’ as a replacement for the Israeli establishment’s term ‘Arabs in Israel’, which was meant to rob the minority of its Palestinian roots and identity. He also took a critical stance on the flourishing of workshops and NGOs in the 1980s and 1990s, which ‘at close examination, however, reveals the key aspects … were designed primarily for Israeli consumption. Palestinian participants and moderators thus tend to become objectified, mere illustrations in an all-Israeli debate which takes place, as it were, above the Palestinian’s head.’
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Hillel Cohen, a historian from the Hebrew University, was one of the first to write about the internal Palestinian refugees inside Israel – those who lost their homes and became refugees in their own country. Yoav Peled, a political scientist from Tel Aviv University, wrote on the need to recognise the just side of the Palestinian demands in the negotiations, including that of the right of return.
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The study of gender and feminism was also part of this new post-Zionist energy. In many ways it was the most impressive import from America, a culture that more often than not had a negative impact on Israeli society. In the case of post-Zionism, however, it opened up constructive and crucial vistas of research and commitment for local scholars. As a result, during the late 1970s, under the strong influence of gender studies, feminist activism, and politics, a feminist movement emerged in Israel as well.

The feminist movement grew in parallel to the American feminist movement and was greatly influenced by it. One of the main propellants was an American Jewish activist, Marcia Freedman. She was born in the United States in 1938, emigrated to Israel in 1967, and
immediately became involved in left Zionist politics. A new party called Ratz, dedicated to peace and civil rights and founded by the female politician Shulamit Aloni, invited Freedman to become a candidate. Both women did well in the 1973 elections, and Freedman became a member of the Knesset. With other women, she founded the first refuge for battered women in Israel; she and other women members of the Knesset were also responsible for progressive legislation on gender equality and women’s issues. Freedman came out of the closet as a lesbian at around that time – one of the first women to do so in Israel. In recent years she has divided her time between Israel and the United States.
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Preceding the establishment in the 1980s of the first women’s studies programme in an Israeli university, Israeli NGOs were intensely active, united in the wish to push forward a progressive feminist agenda but divided on the strategy for doing so. The resulting feminist research addressed a variety of topics and included the rewriting of women’s history in the Zionist movement and in Israel, highlighting the misogynist attitude of the society and state in the 1950s, and the discovery of unknown stories of feminists in the pre-state period and the early years of the state.

Another import from America was queer theory. Scholarship on gay and lesbian politics now began to develop in Israeli academia and to become fused into the post-Zionist agenda. The academics who were involved in introducing these issues to the scholarly community, such as the sociologist Yuval Yonay from the University of Haifa, also wrote extensively on the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. But in many cases the focus on gay and lesbian rights inside Israel was not associated with the oppression of other groups within the state. Nevertheless, the raising of gay issues was a revolutionary development, given the hostile attitude of Judaism to homosexuality.
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The first public activist on this issue was a German Jew named Theo Meinz, who came out openly as a gay man in 1956.
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For many years, gays had to be content with being active within the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, founded in 1972, as any other reference was forbidden in Israel. But the 1980s saw a flourishing of NGOs and university study modules that investigated
gay issues, thus adding to the sense of pluralism in the local academy and society.

Unfortunately this new openness was later used by mainstream academia to deflect any attempt to criticise it for complicity in the occupation or the oppression of the Palestinians. The Israeli academic establishment attempted to fend off calls for an academic boycott of Israel earlier in the 2000s by turning to gay and lesbian lobbying groups around the world – a move that was later dubbed ‘pinkwashing’. Broadcasting Tel Aviv as the most gay-friendly city in the West (a title it wins frequently) was one of the main campaigns supported by the government in order to undercut the boycott. Quite a few groups, including some powerful ones in the United States, refused to partake in the ‘Brand Israel’ campaign and were fully aware that while life may go on happily for gays in Tel Aviv, a few kilometres away millions of people are incarcerated in the huge megaprison of the West Bank and the ghetto of Gaza.

More familiar areas of inquiry developed impressively in the 1990s, such as political economy. Scholars such as Michael Shalev and Shimshon Bichler, joined the critical sociologists in pointing to the economic interests and materialist realities that lay behind the ideological project – not only in the 1948 war, but also thereafter. They were followed by others, such as Dalit Baum, who described the economic realities and benefits behind the continued occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
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As the group of challengers grew, the chronological and thematic scope of the research expanded enormously. Earlier, even ancient, periods were now revisited, as bold, new, and previously taboo themes were tackled. The ancient past was revisited under the influence of critical theories on nationalism as an invented, engineered story that told us more about the nature of modern Zionism than about what really happened in those distant years. Baruch Kimmerling opened the way through his exposure of the invented tale of two thousand years of exile, and how it was used to justify the colonisation of Palestine.
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Yael Zerubavel, an Israeli historian who taught in the United States, added to this the intriguing insight that the ancient stories of
heroism, such as Masada, that were the fulcrum of the Zionist metanarrative, were actually tales of defeat and total failure, as were many later acts of heroism.
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Similar but probably even more outrageous from a Zionist point of view was the anger voiced by the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda about Zionism’s chosen and revered ancestors: the Jewish rebels against Rome.
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As Zerubavel rightly commented, their rebellion ended in total failure. Ben-Yehuda went further: he called them a bunch of thieves and murderers, and cast a blaming finger at the Zionist archaeologists for providing what he saw as false scholarly scaffolding for that narrative. Shlomo Sand and Gabriel Piterberg, each in his own way, would later shed more light on how the past, even the biblical one, served to create a society suffused with romantic nationalism in the eyes of Sand and a settler colonialist society in the eyes of Piterberg.
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The more recent past, such as the centuries preceding the emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, has not been extensively revisited, but in this respect the work of Amnon Raz-Karkozkin should be mentioned. (In fact, Raz-Karkozkin, who regarded himself as an anti-Zionist, was quite unhappy about the term ‘post-Zionism’ but nonetheless took part in many of the workshops, conferences and publications that pushed the academic critique of Zionism.) In a two-part article published in the main venue for post-Zionist critique during the 1990s,
Theory and Criticism
(founded in 1991 at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), he explored what he called ‘the Zionist denial of Exile’.
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The first part shows how the depiction of Jewish life in Europe as exilic since the end of Roman times was used in order to deny the Palestinians’ right to their homeland; the second part examines the distortions created by this depiction, as Jewish life in Europe did not centre on or relate to Palestine. Raz-Karkozkin also examines in this article how this idea of Jewish life in history as a life of exile determined the negative attitude of Zionism towards the Arab Jews, who, from the Zionist-narrated perspective, unnecessarily extended the exile longer than anyone else. Some years later, a professor from the University of Haifa, Gur Elroi, would demonstrate the mundanity of the motives of most of the settlers who came to Palestine – their emigration had nothing to do with the
establishment’s narration of their journey as a wish to return home from their exilic life in Europe.
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The Mandatory period was a topic frequently revisited. Historians and sociologists, such as Zeev Sternhell, belittled the role of socialism in the Zionist project in Palestine and depicted it as romantic nationalism.
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A more positive approach was taken by historians who showed that the natural instinct of Palestinians and settlers was to coexist and collaborate on the basis of class association in industrial struggles – an instinct crushed by the Zionist trade unions. Lev Greenberg examined the joint industrial action of drivers; David De Vries examined the industrial action of junior clerks; Deborah S. Bernstein described in detail the policies of the Zionist trade unions.
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In addition to all of this, militarism – never before deemed relevant in Israeli academia – emerged as a new field of study. It began with a close look, provided by a couple who began their work in the Haifa group mentioned earlier. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld worked as a team to expose the mammoth growth of the military industry in Israel, claiming that it had arrested overall economic growth over the years.
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They were followed by a young sociologist, Uri Ben-Eliezer, then a member of the department of sociology in Tel Aviv, who depicted the militarisation of Israel not only as an inevitable product of the state’s precarious existence in the midst of a hostile world but also as a means of obtaining the wholehearted commitment of every citizen to the state, which is why women are still recruited and men are called for reserve duty until the age of fifty-five.
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The work on militarism later focused on two aspects. The first was the state and pre-state history, which showed how from very early on, the use of military force was more than tactical – that it was part of the ideology. The formative years were the 1950s, when ‘special forces’ units were created to punish and challenge Palestinian refugees who were trying to return clandestinely to their homeland, and who later organised themselves into guerrilla units, leading to the official founding of Fatah in the mid-1960s). The aura of these special forces – the most important of which was Unit 101, whose commander was Ariel Sharon – transformed them into the main
core group from which Israel’s most famous leaders, such as Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, were recruited. Their world view would turn Israel into an extremely active and aggressive agent on the regional scene, espousing the belief that the language of military power was the best means of ensuring the state’s existence and success.

Yagil Levy, a sociologist now at the Open University of Israel, associated militarism with the treatment of new Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.
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His work showed that the decisions of where to settle new arrivals and how to integrate them into Israeli society were made not only by politicians but also by generals. Locating them on the borders of the Arab world served more than one purpose: confronting them with Arab hostility would help to de-Arabise them; they would serve as a human presence on the long borders that Israel shared with its ‘enemies’, and recruiting them into the army was regarded as the best means of ‘Israelising’ them.

Indeed, identifying the nexus between education and the militarisation of the society was part of the new post-Zionist agenda. Hagit Gur-Ziv, Rela Mazali, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Diana Dolev and many others examined the impact of militarism on the educational system and reached some dismal conclusions about the possibility for change from within Israeli society in regard to issues of peace, democracy and equality.
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Their works exposed the highly militarised space that Israeli Jews inhabited from cradle to grave.

Not only was the army examined at close range – academia, too, became a new object of inquiry. The analysis of its role was provided mainly by Israeli graduates of the New School, a university in New York’s Greenwich Village that became the alma mater of progressive social scientists around the world. One such graduate, Uri Ram, was particularly influential in the new post-Zionist approach to methodology. He was one of the first to introduce post-structuralism and postmodernism to the local academic scene. For more than a decade, he has taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
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