The Idea of Israel (37 page)

As the programme also clearly conveyed, until May 1948 there was a paucity of fighters on the other side. In a segment that explored the case of Haifa, which was mostly based on eyewitness accounts, one could detect a more critical approach than could be gleaned from the account in Morris’s book, which talks about flight, not expulsion.
But eyewitness accounts, together with rare documentary footage, showed an act of expulsion in Haifa. A tale about Golda Meir’s visit to the city and her uncharacteristic shock at what had been done to the Palestinian population there reinforced the impression that it was not an isolated occurrence. Apparently it reminded her of pogroms and made her consider, for a brief moment, the Palestinian tragedy and particularly the Zionist role in bringing it about. But this soul-searching did not last long, nor did it transform the future prime minister’s later anti-Palestinian stances.

Finally, on the 1948 war itself, the episodes showed how the houses of the Palestinian urban population were taken over, immediately after their eviction or flight, by Jewish immigrants. Unmentioned, however, was the story of rural Palestine, a major issue in the descriptions put forward by Israel’s ‘new historians’ and documented in the works of Palestinian historians, as well as constituting a major theme in Palestinian novels and poems. Here in
Tkuma
there was no reference to the obliteration of villages and the takeover of their lands, either for existing Jewish settlements or for the construction of new settlements atop their ruins, settlements that quite often bear Hebraicised versions of the old Arab names.

Considerable footage was devoted to the peace efforts after the 1948 war, the very mention of which was a novelty of sorts. In the collective Israeli memory, nothing happened between the warring parties from the time of the armistice arrangements until Oslo in 1993. Having once been attacked as a ‘deceiver’ by one of Israel’s leading historians for suggesting that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, did not seek peace with the Arab world after the 1948 war, I was therefore pleasantly surprised to hear the narrator assert that this was indeed Ben-Gurion’s position, reflecting the description in my book
The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951
, which had been published few years earlier. Nonetheless, the same narration ended not with the view (held by Morris, Avi Shlaim, and myself) that we missed out on peace because of Israel’s intransigence, but rather with the view offered by the mainstream Zionist historian Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington and then the president of Tel Aviv University, who claimed that peace was ‘elusive’.
²²

In sum, while these episodes relating to the 1948 war did indicate some of the findings of the ‘new historians’, and did show a desire to present the other side’s point of view, it must be pointed out that these revelations and sensitivities were expressed within a mainstream Zionist general framework. They were not the main issue. The sequences dealt mainly with Israeli perceptions of the events of 1948. The viewer thus took in the Palestinian point of view and the Palestinian disaster in only small doses.

There was an overall tone of sadness in the 1948 chapters. Melancholy music accompanied them, and the Jewish eyewitnesses were carefully chosen to present a unified tragic voice. In fact, the 1948 war as presented in the programme was first and foremost a tragic event in the history of the Jewish people. True, this was a very different approach from that taken in previous documentary films, which tended to look at 1948 as a miraculous year of joy tinged with sadness. But the sadness conveyed by
Tkuma
was not about the cruelty or futility of war; it was about the need to sacrifice one’s sons for the homeland. In the same vein as liberal Zionism’s assertion that what happened to the Palestinian people was a small injustice inflicted to rectify a greater injustice (the Jewish Holocaust in Europe), the final impression left by the series was that the main tragedy of 1948 was what befell the Jewish community in Palestine. The Palestinian tragedy of 1948 was dwarfed by the personal stories of loss and bereavement on the Jewish side. Again, as with liberal Zionism’s construction of the use of force – a response resorted to only reluctantly, in the face of Arab hostility – the films showed a Jewish tendency to ponder the consequences of a just war, in the mode of the soldiers who ‘shoot and weep afterwards’, if I may again repeat the phrase that emerged as a major theme in collections of conversations among Israeli soldiers following the 1967 war. One suspects that a different director might have chosen footage that would have shown triumphant smiles and warlike enthusiasm on the faces of Israeli soldiers after they had occupyied and destroyed yet another Palestinian village. Instead, viewers of
Tkuma
saw the tormented face of a highly moral, civilised society that found itself, through no fault of its own, in the midst of war. I know of no other
national televised representation of such events that devotes so much footage and energy to moral agonising over what, in truth, was a quite common crime against humanity.

Moreover, there seems to be a clear method in the way the Palestinian and Jewish eyewitnesses were chosen. The eyewitnesses on both sides ostensibly represented the rank and file, ordinary people. In reality, this was not so. On the Israeli side, the witnesses were highly articulate, usually senior officers, who described with great eloquence and sensitivity what they went through. The Palestinian witnesses, on the other hand, who were usually old men and almost invariably Israeli Arabs (not one had actually lived all his life in a refugee camp), presented clouded memories, often in broken Hebrew, usually in slogans, and not always coherently. This, I feel, was no coincidence. Even if unconscious, the selection represented a means of depreciating the Palestinian point of view. Had someone wished to create it, a very different impression of the Palestinian side could have emerged.

The segments of
Tkuma
that dealt with the 1950s, particularly the state’s attitude towards the Jews from Arab countries as well as towards the Palestinian citizens of Israel, likewise presented a partially post-Zionist view. The Zionist role in encouraging the local Jewish communities in the Arab world to leave for Israel was barely touched upon, though the illusions spread by the Zionist messengers were sufficiently conveyed. The main issue dealt with here was the absorption, or the lack thereof, of the immigrants after their arrival in Israel. The way the newcomers were treated by the more veteran Israelis clearly conveyed their negative attitude towards anything Arab – an attitude soon translated into colonialist policies in education and welfare. The process of geographic, social, and occupational marginalisation was strongly projected through the stories of individuals who eventually succeeded in carving out better lives for themselves. The message was: Israel was still the land of open opportunities.

With respect to this issue, there was one genuinely new piece of evidence in the film. I think very few Israelis knew that the general compensation Israel received from Germany was unevenly distributed among Jewish citizens of the state. The reparations, as they were
called, raised the average standard of living of the Ashkenazi Jews but did not help the
Mizrachim
at all, thus further widening the socio-economic gap between them. An Iraqi Jew in the program tells how he noticed the material improvements in the public life of Tel Aviv – people wearing new clothing, more food in the stores, automobiles, new amusement places – whereas in his own neighbourhood, all he could see was stagnation and continued deprivation.

For me, the most acute reference in this segment on immigrant absorption – the one that made the greatest impact, and which I think encapsulated the essence of the Mizrachi immigrant experience – was a statement by a Yemeni Jewish woman who arrived in Israel in the 1950s. When reunited in front of the TV cameras with the Ashkenazi woman who had been her teacher forty years earlier, she asked why her teacher had chosen to work with such a deprived and marginalised group. ‘Was it because you were a Zionist, or because you felt it was your obligation as a human being?’ she wanted to know. The response from her former teacher was confused and unclear, but it gave the impression that ideology had been a stronger motivation than humanity and, as such, had led to some tough treatment of the newcomers by the earlier Zionist settlers.

In other footage, it appears that other Mizrachi Jews felt that the Zionist discourse concealed acts of manipulation and dishonesty. The episode on the Palestinian citizens of Israel, titled ‘The Pessoptimist’, after Emile Habibi’s book
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
, was by far the best segment of the entire series, the only one that did not play the game of ‘balancing’.
²³
Here, the director clearly did not feel compelled to show ‘another side’ to the story of discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel, but instead communicated the impression that there was no other side, that there were no extenuating circumstances for the abuse and maltreatment inflicted during the eighteen years of ‘emergency rule’ imposed on the Palestinian citizens (1949–66). The viewers watched the expulsion of villagers from their homes in the name of security considerations in the early 1950s. Military governors admitted that they were kings who harassed the local population with impunity on a daily basis. What was missing from the analysis in ‘The Pessoptimist’, unfortunately, was
the connection with the situation of the Palestinians in Israel in the 1990s; this chapter conveyed a picture of an almost inevitable process of modernisation and Israelisation of the local Palestinian minority. In any case, this segment, together with another one on Israeli behaviour during the First Intifada, provoked a political upheaval and caused the prominent Israeli singer Yehoram Gaon to resign as the chief narrator of the segments lest he seem to be supporting Palestinian fighters.

Interestingly, though
Tkuma
largely ignored the Zionist right (it was the Zionist left that it held responsible for the expulsions, massacres, discrimination, and manipulations involving the Arabs), Likud spearheaded the protests against what it termed a ‘post-Zionist’ programme. Indeed, Likud appointed itself guardian of national virtues, assuming responsibility for what the nation did and does. Thus, according to the Likud minister of communications at the time, Limor Livnat, it was necessary that all these deeds be presented as just and moral. The director-general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Uri Porat, promised to screen an additional four segments that would balance the ‘distorted’ picture of the past. One of the reasons for the government’s wrath was the fact that the programme enjoyed very high ratings and the post-screening video cassettes were selling well. Although the Ministry of Education forbade
Tkuma
’s inclusion in the curriculum, there was a growing demand from high schools for copies to screen in the classroom, officially or unofficially.

In those days, the increased interest was not surprising. To adopt a wholly Zionist perspective on the past was seen as not only anachronistic but boring. Teachers and students alike wanted a refreshing angle, especially an angle that might provide an answer to the question of why Israelis found it so difficult to rejoice on their fiftieth anniversary. Indeed, it would seem that rather than celebrate their country’s jubilee, Israelis preferred to deliberate on the connection between their history and the present. The deliberation was painful and left little room for rejoicing. It forced the Israelis to abandon the pious posture so dear to both secular and religious Jews.
Tkuma
threw into sharp relief the contrast between the programme’s name – ‘Rebirth’ – and the reality of the nation after fifty years of existence,
a reality that was unstable and insecure, since state and society had failed to reconcile with the people whom they expelled, whose land they took, and whose culture they destroyed. As became clear at the beginning of the next century, it would take more than a television programme with a mildly post-Zionist critique to make reconciliation possible.

ELEVEN

The Triumph of Neo-Zionism

The post-Zionists reject Zionism as a valid ideology and insist it does not fit the needs of our times … [T]hey do not necessarily adopt the old anti-Zionist position. For them the social, political and cultural problems Israelis and Jews abroad face cannot be tackled within the Zionist discourse and cannot be solved through the current Zionist political and ideological agenda.

– Adi Ofir, founder and first editor,
Theory and Criticism
¹

If the Second Intifada did not totally obliterate post-Zionism, it definitely sent it underground. Even before, the members of this school found it hard to infiltrate academia, but now they shun the term.

– Neri Livneh, journalist,
Haaretz
²

You couldn’t mistake the atmosphere that enveloped Independence Day this year: It was an atmosphere of satisfaction … [W]hat best explains this optimistic mood is the invalidation of post-Zionism. Since the start of the 1990s, Israel was under heavy attack by the post-Zionists. For some twenty years they enjoyed the halo of being fashionable, of being at one with the times. For all that they claimed we were ugly, they were beautiful. For all that they claimed we were evil, they were good. For all that they portrayed us as South Africa, they portrayed themselves as Nelson Mandela.

The post-Zionists’ systematic attacks on the Jewish national home, on the Jewish national movement and against the Jewish people won them global acclaim. Their unconscious cooperation with anti-Semites, old and new, made them the darlings of international academia and the world media …