by Ilan Pappe
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.10 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.
The most significant challenge to the idea of Israel came from the Mizrachi scholars, many of whom were sociologists, as well as political activists. These Jews had come from Arab and Muslim countries during the 1950s and continually felt discriminated against by the European Jews. This perception of discrimination fuelled their journey into the past and played a role in their rise to power. In their eyes, the idea of Israel was European, Westernised and colonial; absent a transformation into European Jews themselves, it was an Israel in which they could play only a marginal role. Chapter 8 of this book is devoted to the scholarly challenge by and for Mizrachi Jews.
Issues that are mentioned only briefly in the sixth chapter of this book – the scholarly debate on 1948, the Mizrachi Jews, Holocaust memory, among others – did not remain the sole concern of academics. The media became an important venue for such debates, forcing both sides to articulate their respective positions in a more accessible, and at times more simplified and explicit, form. From there the challenge spread to other cultural domains: music, the visual arts, literature. In the ninth chapter, I discuss how this debate contributed to shaping Israeli cultural representations of the idea of Israel. Chapter 10 will revisit these post-Zionist representations on stage and screen.
This book’s final section looks at reactions to the post-Zionist challenge and the resultant emergence of a more extreme version of Zionism in the twenty-first century, which has lodged in the heart of the Israeli production of knowledge. I have chosen to name this development the triumph of neo-Zionism. In addition to presenting a general description of it in Chapter 11, I devote Chapter 12 to its manifestations in the new research being conducted on 1948 within Israeli academia. A postscript to this book takes into account the recent upheavals in the Arab world, the stagnation of the peace process, and new developments in the study of Zionism – with particular attention to the emergence of the settler colonialist paradigm – in order to achieve some grasp of future trends in the struggle, inside and outside, over the idea of Israel.
PART I
The Scholarly and Fictional Idea of Israel
ONE
The ‘Objective’ History of the Land and the People
The Objective Zionist Historian
There is a tale that is 66.5 per cent true about Ben-Zion Dinur (né Dinaburg), the doyen of early Zionist historiography in Palestine and one-time minister of education. In 1937, two weeks before the arrival of the Peel Commission, which was charged with finding a solution to the conflict in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community, approached Dinur to ask whether the respectable historian could produce some research proving that Jews had occupied the region continuously from 70 CE, the time of the Roman exile, to 1882, the arrival of the first Zionists. I could, said the historian, but this task involves many periods and requires a range of expertise, and will probably take a decade or so to complete. ‘You do not understand,’ replied Ben-Gurion. ‘The Peel Commission is coming in two weeks’ time. Reach your conclusion by then, and afterwards you can have a whole decade to prove it!’
From early on, the leaders of the Zionist movement prized scholarly and professional historiography. Whether we choose to define Zionism as a national movement or a colonialist project, it is obvious that establishing its history academically and publicly has always been essential to its survival. Zionism was driven by a wish to rewrite the history of Palestine, and that of the Jewish people, in a way that proved scientifically the Jewish claim to ‘the Land of Israel’. As the modern Israeli state came into being, historiography was needed to market the new country as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, to explain the dispossession of the indigenous people who had so recently occupied the land, and to condemn their long struggle to dispossess the Jews of a supposed birthright.
In the pre-1882 Zionist narrative, Palestine was an empty homeland waiting to be redeemed by the exiled Jews. It was a new Germany, Poland or Russia when those places became inhospitable. The early Zionists adapted a patriotic German song about a new Reich to show what ‘empty’ Palestine became for them:
There where the cedar kisses the sky,
And where the Jordan quickly flows by,
There where the ashes of my father lie,
In that exalted Reich, on sea and sand,
Is my beloved, true fatherland.1
A youth encyclopaedia on the history of Eretz Israel, written by the best scholars in the land in the 1970s, depicted the pre-1882 territory as ‘The Empty Land’. The cover showed a lonely cedar yearning towards the sky on a barren hill, very much as in the poem above.2 But the land would not be re-appropriated through enthusiastic poetry or inspirational paintings alone – scholarly clout was required, and for that an established academia would have to shape the country’s ancient and modern historiography.
Zionist historiography turned professional after Zionism had become a significant social and political force in Palestine; its successor, Israeli historiography, was formulated during the early years of statehood. It was, after all, Ben-Gurion who approached Dinur, not the other way around. As with other national movements that have established nation-states, this professionalisation of history coincided with officialdom’s making the political archives accessible to scholarly researchers.
As expected, this generosity was reciprocated by scholarly work that corroborated, rather than challenged, the political élite.3 Similarly, social scientists in a variety of disciplines determined that developments in the Jewish community during the period of the British Mandate (1918–48) as well as the early years of statehood presented a classic case study in successful modernisation. According to the findings of the academic community, all the preconditions stipulated by the theory of modernisation for a successful transition from tradition to modernity existed in the Zionisation of Palestine. In other words, if you were a Zionist you could confidently participate in the best modernisation project in existence; and if you were a student of modernisation, Zionism was your best case study.
Providing scientific proof for a set of ideological claims was a tricky business. From the outset, most participants in the Zionist movement and later in the State of Israel who did academic work on Zionist and Jewish history have been involved in it, and they were able to do so only by embracing the seemingly impossible combination of a positivist wish to reconstruct reality and an ideological commitment to prove the justness of their cause. The facts, found exclusively in political archives, were treated as the raw material for proving the validity of the Zionist narrative.
Some of these scholarly works were written at a time when theorists globally had begun to challenge the validity of narratives fashioned in the name of nationalism, especially in situations of conflict, and to offer methodologies for exposing the hidden hand of nationalism in such narratives. Nevertheless, the positivist Zionist scholars of the 1970s and the 1980s who were engaged in researching the country’s past ignored all methodological and theoretical innovations that might have undercut their confidence in the scientific truth of Zionism. One of the most effective ways to ensure their independence from innovation was their heavy reliance on the deeds of the élite. By taking this biased version of events as an objective, accurate description of fact, ideology and fact were fused and manipul
ated to produce the same story.
History was recruited to make the ideological and political project look good. Historians who declared themselves Zionists went in search of the roots of Jewish nationalism in the distant past and were satisfied only when they could establish that a national ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hebrew’ group existed in Palestine long before the foundation of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. Some were content to seek these early roots in the seventeenth century; others went as far back as biblical times.
The early historians did not see a contradiction between professionalism and ideology. Ben-Zion Dinur explained this abnormality by observing that Zionist historians, by definition, were researchers who fused scientific mastery of the material with a clear and correct understanding of Zionism.4 The conviction that professionalism demanded strong ideological loyalty became accepted by successive generations of Zionist historians. As the veteran Israeli historian Shmuel Almog remarked, such loyalty was essential for the success of the Jewish national movement: ‘Zionism needed history in order to prove to Jews wherever they were that they all constitute one entity and that there is historical continuity from Israel and Judea in ancient times until modern Judaism.’5
Almog’s colleague Israel Kolatt turned the argument around, claiming that only Zionist historians could provide a quality history of Zionism.6 These professional historians perceived themselves as taking part in a nation-building project of unique dimensions and proportions under exceptional, indeed extraordinary, circumstances. Even if in every other historical instance ideology and objectivity could not be reconciled, here, they maintained, it could be done.
