The Idea of Israel (38 page)

Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Israelis are now being exposed – whether they know it or not – to the enormous gap between the (human) dimensions of Israeli injustice and the (inhuman) intensity of the brutality that surrounds it. This gap has opened people’s eyes and explains some of the things we’ve had to do and the immense accomplishment we’ve achieved. It has made post-Zionism obsolete, explains the feeling of deep pride that we felt on Independence Day, and defines the challenge that we face in our 66th year.

– Ari Shavit, senior correspondent,
Haaretz
, on Israel’s Independence Day, 2013
³

The Appearance of Neo-Zionism

In the mid-1990s a young American Jewish scholar by the name of Yoram Hazony founded a new institution, the Shalem Center, a think tank (and now a college) intended to confront what he saw as the dangers posed by post-Zionism. At one point, Hazony served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s ghost writer and was part of his team of advisers. In 1996 Shalem published the first issue of its journal,
Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation
. Money came from the prime minister’s office (and from conservative US funders), as did some of the centre’s senior writers and fellows.

Hazony expressed his vision of the corrupting force of post-Zionism in
Azure
in the summer of 1996:

By now post-Zionist truths have become so self-evident as to constitute an Israeli ‘political correctness’ justifying – let no one be surprised – the censorship of opposing views … [N]owhere has the strange fruit of post-Zionist policy been more apparent than in the Foreign Ministry … The Jewish state is first and foremost a political idea. Armies may menace it physically, but it is on the level of ideas that the gravest threats are registered.

Azure
provided the ideological infrastructure for a new era in the history of the State of Israel, in which the idea of Israel would be interpreted as an existential struggle against the Palestinians, particularly those who were Israeli citizens, as well as against the enemies from within, which is to say, whoever would be deemed a post-Zionist. The first struggle would be conducted in the Knesset and the second in academia. But the battlefield also extended to foreign policy – aggression towards the state’s neighbours and the Palestinians under occupation – and towards the educational system and the media.

Ofir Haivry, the editor of the new journal, explained that his team hoped to set up in the near future a Zionist academia and media, since these realms had, from his point of view, been overtaken by post-Zionists. At the time, the centre and its members looked esoteric at best and pathetic at worst. Within a decade, however, their agenda had become the idea of Israel in the twenty-first century. Not only was it a far cry from post-Zionism; it was also a very different animal from the Liberal or Labour Zionism that had informed the idea in the previous century. The gist of it is quite familiar today: a highly nationalistic, racist and dogmatic version of Zionist values overrule all other values in the society, and any attempt to challenge that interpretation of the idea of Israel is considered unpatriotic and in fact treasonous.

The Impact of Post-Zionism

Let us examine first if indeed post-Zionism was as prevalent and hegemonic as the founders of the Shalem Center and their supporters asserted it was. As mentioned in the two previous chapters, the post-Zionist interpretation of Israel’s past and present was widely
filmed and broadcast. But merely the fact that it had been adopted by the knowledge producers was not an indication that their message was widely accepted in 1996 by the knowledge consumers. We now know, in 2014, that it was in fact basically rejected by the vast majority of them, though we did not know this at the time.

In general, it would be fair to say that the novels, plays and films that seriously transcended the Zionist narrative and its negative portrayal of Arabs did not become part of the Israeli canon, even in the heyday of post-Zionism. They did not represent a dominant cultural position, and their producers were not among the leaders of the Israeli cultural scene. Nonetheless, the ‘new historians’, poets, writers, film-makers, and playwrights did operate within the system that produced and shaped the country’s cultural identiy, and they could conceivably have affected the society had they been able to persist with their critique beyond 2000.

The continuing scholarly debate, joined by other cultural producers, signalled not merely a scholarly rift but an identity crisis in a society that had been exposed to the possibility of peace in 1993. Peace had the potential to undermine the national consensus, which was based on the need to act jointly against common enemies. Relative economic success and security had already led deprived groups to demand a fairer share, just as it encouraged the Palestinians in Israel to lay bare the tension between the country’s pretence of being a democracy and its insistence on remaining a Jewish state. Genuine peace demanded a radical change in the Israeli mentality and in the basic Jewish views about Arabs, specifically Palestinians. So a small number of people, with access to the public via the universities, schools, press, and movie screens, began to offer starting points for such a transformation. The point of departure was the acknowledgement that reality could be interpreted in a non-Zionist way, or at least that Israel’s cultural identity must be more pluralistic.

The cultural identity of a society is shaped by historical and contemporary reality as well as by how this reality is interpreted by those who control sociopolitical power. By the time of this exceptional chapter in Israel’s history, the nation’s cultural identity could be characterised as a cultural product, shaped by the heritage and
human geography of the land of Palestine and by the conscious national (that is to say, Zionist) attempt to change the identity of that land. From the very beginning, Zionism rejected the Palestinian identity of Palestine and successfuly used force and power to Judaise it. However, certain people and groups challenged the Zionist identity: Palestinians, some of the Jews who had been brought in from the Arab countries, and a small number of individuals, such as this writer, who were born in the country after the establishment of the state and who voiced their dissent in the 1990s.

The Zionist identity of the land and the society was continuously the challenged not because of ‘new historians’ or anti-Zionist novelists. The political demands of the deprived groups, the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the frozen peace accord all contributed to a process capable of turning Zionism into either an anachronism or a concept that could be implemented only through an aggressive policy such as that adopted by the settlers. These processes of challenge began in 1977, when the hegemony of the Ashkenazi élite was questioned; they continued with the 1982 Lebanon War and the First Intifada; and they culminated with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the May 1996 election, which brought a tougher kind of Zionism – the Likud version – back to power.

So yes, there was some truth in what the Shalem Center insisted on, but what they described was not the reality but rather a possible path that Israeli Jewish society could have chosen in the mid-1990s. But it did not do so. Not only was the path not taken, but those who pointed to it were gradually silenced and crushed. And in fact, it was not Hazony and his colleagues who began the counter-attack; instead, it was the Liberal Zionists who took the lead in closing the minds of those whose job and duty it was to produce knowledge for the benefit of the society as a whole.

Initial Reactions

From the perspective of mainstream Zionists, the post-Zionist interpretation of the past had gained a large following within Israeli
universities and centres of cultural production by the 1990s. It was further believed that although every known historian in the Zionist camp had been recruited to refute the post-Zionist version of the past, it won legitimacy in the Western world. At the time, it was also wrongly assumed that because of its relative academic success, post-Zionism won over large segments of the Israeli public as well. For the briefest moment in the state’s history, its parliament discussed post-Zionist legal initiatives that all, in one way or another, pointed towards a transformation of Israel from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens. These suggestions had no chance of being endorsed by the parliament, but it was not forbidden by law to present them. As a result, at this peculiar juncture, these initiatives were put on the Knesset’s agenda. But that chain of events was a rare exception. The rule was that the critical, and therefore far more pro-Palestinian, evaluation of past and present has not led to the wide acceptance of a non-Zionist, let alone an anti-Zionist, vision of the future.

When it became clear that a sizeable number of Israeli academics were not toeing the ideological line, mainstream academic institutions and persons began to react. As the dominant group, these mainstreamers could best be called, in hindsight, classical Zionists. Later they would be challenged not only by post-Zionist scholars but also by neo-Zionist academics, the kind associated with the Shalem Center, which helped to define their boundaries in a clearer way.

Classical Zionists were those who were neither non- or anti-Zionist Jews in Israel nor fundamentalist or ultra-Orthodox Jews. Ever since 1948, and even when classical Zionism’s political fortunes had run down as they did in the 1970s, mid-1990s, and early twenty-first century, they continued to occupy a prominent, indeed a hegemonic, presence as a socio-ideological group within Israeli academia and media. Many, if not a majority, of those who controlled the academic and polemicist venues in Israel defined themselves as Zionists who were utterly opposed to ‘both extremes’ of the Israeli political spectrum.

For a long period there was no need for articulators of the classical Zionist view to clarify their positions on the past. It was the appearance of what was dubbed post-Zionist scholarship that forced
the gatekeepers of classical Zionism to reassert their historiographical interpretations as well as their moral convictions. Collective memory and moral self-perception are closely linked, and it is no wonder that the post-Zionist critique on the past triggered a public debate from which much can be learned about classical Zionism’s position on history. This position fed the policies of the first Netanyahu government, as well as the Barak, Sharon and Olmert governments, which takes us to the spring of 2009. Several members of the classical Zionist camp have remarked, albeit disparagingly, that the only merit they saw in post-Zionist scholarship was that it compelled them to redefine, clarify, and update their understanding of the Zionist and Israeli past.

The first scholars to attack the post-Zionist position did so in a very angry way. They denounced the new works as a purely ideological attempt to de-Zionise Israel or as a typical intellectual manoeuvre by self-hating Jews in the service of the enemy. Yoav Gelber, the head of the Herzl Institute for the Research and Study of Zionism at the University of Haifa, likened me and my colleagues to collaborators with the Nazis. Similar views were voiced by a leading liberal jurist, and for a while Israel’s minister of education, Amnon Rubinstein, who already in 1995 wrote in
Haaretz
that post-Zionists were Holocaust deniers and haters of Israel who wished to eradicate Zionism.
⁴
Their work was ‘an onslaught on the very essence and right of existence of the Jewish people and homeland … it is not an academic work but a frontal ideological attack’. Another liberal professor of culture, Nissim Calderon, supported Rubinstein’s view and described the latter’s article and subsequent book on the topic,
From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism
, as representing the enlightenment (Zionism) in its war against the darkness of post-Zionism.
⁵

The attack intensified in the latter part of the 1990s. The post-Zionist scholars were not simply attacking Zionism; they were, in the words of two of Israel’s most prominent scholars, determined to end academic discourse in Israel altogether. These two, Anita Shapira, the doyen of Israeli historiography, and Moshe Lissak, the state’s leading sociologist, depicted post-Zionism as a corrupting
method and theory.
⁶
They joined a group of Israeli historians and sociologists who in 2003 published a huge volume under the title
An Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague
.
⁷
In it, post-Zionists were depicted as self-hating Jews and bad scholars, who were intentionally or unintentionally cooperating with anti-Semites. Elhanan Yakira, of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University, devoted an entire book to establishing the connection between Holocaust deniers, old and new anti-Semites, and post-Zionism; it bears the dramatic title
Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel
.
⁸

It took some time, but Zionist academia did decide it needed to bring down the influence of post-Zionism. It was seen, in the words of a self-recruiter for the mission in the late 1990s – one of the shining new knights of Zionism, David Ohana – as a salvage operation. (The title of his book, too, is rather dramatic:
The Last Israelis
.)
⁹
The rescue operation was meant to salvage Zionism from both its neo-Zionist enemies on the right, and its post-Zionist foes on the left. This rescue operation was done in the name of liberalism and humanism as well as Zionism. In the eyes of these self-appointed rescuers, Zionism was a national movement, humanist, liberal, socialist, which brought modernisation and progress to primitive Palestine, caused the desert to bloom, rebuilt the ruined cities of the Land, and introduced modern agriculture and industry for the benefit of everyone, Arabs and Jews alike. In this version, Zionism was resisted due to a combination of Islamic fanaticism, pro-Arab British colonialism, and the local culture of political violence. Against all odds, and despite a most cruel local resistance, Zionism remained loyal to humanist precepts of individual and collective behaviour and stretched its hand, unrelentingly, to its Arab neighbours, who kept rejecting it. Against all odds, the Zionists also miraculously established a state in the face of a hostile Arab world – a state that, notwithstanding an objective shortage of space and means, absorbed one million Jews who had been expelled from the Arab world and offered them progress and integration in the only democracy in the Middle East. It was a defensive state, trying to contain ever-growing Arab hostility and world apathy; it was a state which took in Jews from more than a hundred
diasporas, gathered them in, and made of them a single, new Jewish people. It was a moral and just movement of redemption, which unfortunately found other people on its homeland, but nonetheless offered them a share in a better future, which they foolishly rejected. This idyllic picture, so runs the reconstruction, was undermined and riven by the evil consequences of the 1967 war and the political earthquake of 1977 that brought the Zionist right to power. After and because of 1967, the state may have developed negative features, such as territorial expansionism and religious fanaticism on the right, and self-doubt and hatred on the extreme left. But it was a reversible development, which could be stopped by returning to old and traditional Zionist values of humanism, democracy and liberalism.