The Idea of Israel (7 page)

In the mid-1970s, the Israeli Orientalist Yehoshua Porath published two volumes, which later appeared in English, about the emergence and history of the Palestinian national movement between 1918 and 1939.
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He was the first to refer to the people who lived in Palestine before 1948 as Palestinians. This was a novelty. Despite the famous remark by Golda Meir that there was no such a thing as the Palestinian people, they have been referred to ever since as Palestinians, including in discussions of the period before 1948.

Palestinians appear in Porath’s book as petty politicians of a clannish society, concerned only about their own interests and united solely by their negation of Zionism. Porath’s books make an ideal case
study for Edward Said’s model of Western Orientalism. Although they do recognise the existence of the Palestinians as a people before 1948, the local population is described in one-dimensional terms as primitive, moved only by tradition, religious fanaticism, and a shifty urban élite. Nowhere in these works is the proposition that the Palestinians were, at least in their eyes, struggling against a colonialist movement mentioned or explored.

Yehoshafat Harkabi, a head of military intelligence during the 1950s, who moved to academia in the 1970s, wrote a more contemporary history of the PLO and came to the conclusion that it was purely a terror organisation determined to destroy the State of Israel: ‘The objective which has been proclaimed day and night by the Arab leaders is the liquidation of the state of Israel’, he wrote in 1974. This position left no space for Arab leaders’ various debates about Zionism ever since 1882.
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A decade later, however, some of his students – and in the 1990s, towards the end of his life, he himself – developed a new approach that differentiated between the different PLO positions towards Israel. One student of Harkabi’s, Matti Steinberg, who also came to academia from the security and intelligence world, employed theoretical tools to show that pragmatism was an inevitable development in organisations like the PLO, and he advocated dialogue with the movement.
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Other of Harkabi’s students, such as Moshe Shemesh, Avraham Sela and Shaul Mishal, to mention but a few, adopted similar views.
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Their analysis was less demonising and more informative, at least about the history of the PLO since its inception and until their own time.

The Palestinians in Israel: Between Orientalism and Terrorism

The Palestinian minority in Israel was first researched by nonprofessional writers who wished to present either the official Israeli line or the individual grievances of members of the community. This genre continued to be pursued, mainly by Israelis involved in one way or another in shaping policy towards the Palestinian minority. But even the more academic works that appeared in the late 1970s
were not devoid of ideological leanings and biases, even though their methodology was professional and their reliance on factual infrastructure more solid. Broadly defined, their research lay on a spectrum between Zionist and anti-Zionist positions.

Among those scholars who wrote within the framework of Zionism, the paradigm of modernisation was their favourite theoretical point of departure. If we apply for a moment Noam Chomsky’s analysis of how academics in the West in general and in the United States in particular relate to hegemonic ideology, we have here a rare example not merely of academic bowing to an interpretation of past and present realities in such a way as to satisfy the powers that be but also of basing the interpretation on a solid theoretical infrastructure for the validity of the ideology. As social scientists, they were not only loyal to Zionism for emotional and utilitarian reasons but also convinced that the theory of modernisation validated the ideology – in this case, reinforcing the attitude towards the Palestinian minority in Israel.
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The Palestinian minority was regarded as a potentially subversive element and hence was put under severe military rule. In the euphoric mood that sprang up after the 1948 war, politicians and generals, who regarded the minority community as a ‘fifth column’ and a grave security risk, were willing to let military rule continue and even contemplated the Palestinians’ forceful removal from the state.
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But change came with the end of the Ben-Gurion era. Ben-Gurion was supremely paranoid in regard to the future of the minority; following his disappearance from the political scene, the politicians abolished the straightforward military rule that had been imposed on the Palestinian minority and substituted it for a more complex matrix of discrimination, dispossession and colonisation.

Meanwhile, academics were developing hopeful scenarios for the future. In both its self- and its external image, Israel had become a new regional superpower, ruling over vast areas of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Academically, this translated into a sense of mission.

But the ‘mission’ was not easy. One of the most progressive of those who chose the Palestinians in Israel as his subject matter, Sammy Smooha, wrote at that time:

The cultural differences between Jews and Arabs in Israel are due to stark differences in fundamental values … there are significant differences in ways of thinking, personal traits, impulses for achievements, patterns of leisure, etc.
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In short, the Jewish community was a progressive, modern society, whereas the Palestinian minority was a primitive one. Modernisation was slow and could lead either to a clash of civilisations that, owing to the imbalance of power, would end in the demise of the Palestinian minority in Israel or to its integration within a modern society. Smooha predicted that the latter scenario was the more likely. To his credit, in later works he moved away from this essentialist, Orientalist depiction of Palestinian society and cast as much blame on Israel’s discriminatory policies as on the intrinsic problems of Arab society and culture – before joining everyone else after 2000 and returning to his earlier point of departure in his 1978 book
Israel: Pluralism and Conflict
, which, after trials and tribulations and attempts to think out of the box, the prediction that the Palestinian minority would be Israelised, but with great difficulties, became his main mantra about the Palestinian minority in Israel. In brief, it was a non-modern group that recognised the superiority of modern Jewish society and wished to integrate into it but was hindered by, on the one hand, the Arab nationalism around it and, on the other, Jewish racism in Israeli society.
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Smooha’s articles from that period indicate that, both inside and outside Israeli academia, the Palestinian minority was considered not only to be primitive and non-modern but, as shown through surveys among Jewish citizens at that time, also one that would never become modern unless it was de-Palestinised and de-Arabised.
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The dominance of the modernisation theory as the principal prism through which the reality of the Palestinian minority should be viewed was facilitated by the august presence within Israeli academia of one of the world’s renowned theorists on modernisation, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, a favourite target of the new sociology. His students at the Hebrew University presented the Palestinians in Israel as a classic case study of a successfully modernised and Westernised community
in transition and added scholarly weight to the more ideological aspirations of the political élite towards this sizeable minority.
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Their basic assumption was that the community at large was a traditional society that was modernised through its incorporation within the State of Israel. More specifically, it was seen as a society in ‘transition’ between traditional and modern phases. These academic observers were looking for quantifiable evidence of the transformation of an Arab society and its adoption of a Western way of life.

This methodology was also applied to the
Mizrachim
. Both were conceived as ideal subjects for the study of modernisation and Westernisation and as proof of one of the more successful implementations of these enterprises. Thus, for instance, Israeli sociologists attributed the lower fertility rates of the
Mizrachim
after their arrival in Israel as ‘adopting modern Western patterns of fertility’, which rescued them from the fate of remaining primitive and poor. The subsequent increase in fertility rates was seen as a sad failure of modernisation among some segments of the Mizrachi Jews.
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This school of thought would have a large number of successors, who followed the search for modernisation with a more focused examination of the minority community’s chances for ‘Israelisation’ versus ‘Palestinisation’. Successful Westernisation was equated with a collective acceptance of being part of the Jewish state; whereas adherence to a Palestinian national identity was considered a failure. The problem with this approach was that it was not clear that the political élite in Israel in fact wished to Israelise the Palestinians in the state: a great number of them harboured a vision of a pure, ethnically Jewish state, and, more important, there was a risk that successful modernisation could, perhaps paradoxically, have led to further Palestinisation of the Arabs in Israel. As the theorists among these researchers knew only too well, if you modernise a society, you also increase its politicisation and nationalisation. Thus arose a bizarre model of modernisation, which saw Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state as a positive outcome of the process and yet regarded modernisation as questionable if it produced an impulse among the Palestinians in Israel to continue their struggle in the name of Palestinian nationalism and against the Zionisation of the country.

A more cautious approach was developed in the 1970s by Israeli anthropologists, who, like their peers in the overall field of Middle Eastern studies, condemned the accelerated modernisation that undermined the rural areas while not providing adequate infrastructure elsewhere. Nevertheless, mainstream anthropological efforts came under severe criticism from non-Zionist scholars – criticism that in some instances seems valid. These anthropologists developed intimate relationships with the Palestinians themselves, spoke quite good Arabic, and sometimes became truly close to the culture and the region. They, too, became ostracised – condemned as traitors during the neo-Zionist epoch that commenced in 2000 and still exists today.

It should be noted that the modernisation approach continues to be used, albeit more marginally, in research on the Palestinians in Israel, although it has been challenged, initially, in the early 1970s, by Palestinians doing research abroad as well as interested scholars who began to appreciate the value in a closer examination of this case study.
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What was entirely absent from even the most advanced social-science research on the Palestinian minority in Israel was their history: how did the indigenous population of the land, once an almost absolute majority, become a minority? As the official Palestinian and Zionist narratives both associated the refugees only with the events of 1948, this community – about 10 per cent of the Palestinian population in Mandatory Palestine – was forgotten, its connection to the events of 1948 disregarded.

But it was not only the role of Israel’s Palestinians in the events of 1948 that was hidden; in their entirety, the historical events were depicted and narrated in a very particular way. The mainstream Zionist depiction of 1948 and the denial of Palestinian suffering during it remained the locus of the idea of Israel before it was challenged in the 1990s. And when that challenge was successfully defeated, the society and the state reverted to the mainstream affirmation of the Zionist narrative of 1948 and the denial of that of the Palestinians.

The 1948 chapter is the core of the story of Israel, both as the culmination of two thousand years of exile, abnormality and the danger
of extinction, all of which ended in 1948, and also as the redemption, the renaissance and the success story of the modern, liberated Jews in their own homeland. To tackle this as a fable, or worse, as an intentional fabrication, would trigger the most significant challenge to date of the moral basis and validity of the idea of Israel.

THREE

The War of 1948 in Word and Image

Israel’s victory in the war was a miracle performed by divine authority, by a God who has not deserted his people in their hour of need. In a generation that saw the destruction of the magnificent Jewish civilisation in Europe, God has comforted his people … [T]his is a new period for the sons of Israel to celebrate their liberty in their own homeland.

In front of our eyes the huge miracle of Israel’s redemption is recurring. We are witnessing the huge victories of Israel’s army which are engaging in one campaign after the other against their many enemies. The spirit of the
Hashmonaim
[the Maccabees who fought the Greeks in ancient times] is reawakening. We have occupied every piece of the Holy Land.
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– Netanel Lorch, historian

T
he preceding paragraphs are found in the history book on 1948 that was used as the main professional text in Israel for many years –
The Edge of the Sword
. As we see, this account, although secular, nonetheless allows for the possibility that the outcome of the war was a matter of divine authority. It summarises well the way the war was researched and presented by the university departments charged with the teaching of Zionist history. For these
departments, the events of 1948 were the culmination of the teleological process of redemption and renaissance of the Jewish people. Thus, the role of the historian was limited to the reconstruction of this miracle that had begun with the awakening of the national movement in the 1880s and had ended with the 1948 ‘war of liberation’ against the British. The Israeli terminology employed to characterise the war was carefully constructed so as to confer upon Zionism the status of a Third World liberation movement rather than a war against the Palestinians. Indeed, the two terms used above to refer to the 1948 war do not indicate any direct conflict with the Palestinians or with the neighbouring Arab states; rather, the narrative is of ‘independence’ from the British (
azma’ut
) and ‘liberation’ from the yoke of the diaspora (
shihrur
).