The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  Michel Warschawski, known as Mikado, was born in central Europe, as were so many of the other challengers mentioned so far (I discuss in a separate chapter the Arab Jews who challenged Zionism later in the state’s history). He was born in Strasbourg to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was the chief rabbi of Strasbourg and a partisan in the Second World War. In 1961 Warschawski’s family sent him to a yeshiva in Jerusalem that was also attended by future leaders of Gush Emunim, the settlers’ movement in the occupied territories. Warschawski went in the opposite ideological direction, pushed there by his own formative event – the expulsion of the residents of three Palestinian villages near the monastery at Latrun (between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) in 1967. The Israeli army had tried in vain to occupy these villages in 1948, losing many soldiers in the attempt, but the Arab Legion bravely defended them. Finally the Israeli army succeeded in capturing the villages in June 1967, expelling the residents with vengeance.

  Mikado was an eyewitness to this expulsion. When he began to study at the Hebrew University in the late 1960s, he joined with like-minded students to organise a solidarity movement with the Palestinian struggle on both sides of the Green Line. For a while he also dreamed of importing the 1968 Prague Spring. In 1984 he put his energies into something far more permanent, the Alternative Information Center, which has continued ever since to track the abuses of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the oppression of Palestinians inside Israel. Deep analyses, wide reportage and strategic discussion made its publications an important source for activists inside and outside Israel before the Internet revolution provided even more accessible and immediate tools for apprehending and reacting to the reality on the ground. Again, like so many other activists, Warschawski paid a high price for his views and activity: sitting in jail for months while he was a young father of two.26

  Two other trailblazers were willing to do even more than pay the high price of being jailed or being condemned as traitors by their own society. These two – Ilan Halevi and Uri Davis – actually went over to the ‘other’ side.

  Halevi was born in Vichy France to an extraordinary family. His father had been born in Jerusalem and, after travelling the world, joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; his mother was a Resistance fighter in Paris. As a teenager, he was sent to the United States after the separation of his parents, and there joined the Black Panthers. He also came to know Malcolm X quite well. Years later, he would say that his darker complexion made him feel like, and be accepted as, an African American. Like his father, Halevi chose a cause and finally landed in the newly liberated Algeria as a guest of the FLN. In 1965 he arrived in Israel and joined a kibbutz, Gan Shmuel, near Hadera, but was eventually thrown out of the kibbutz because of his radical views.27

  Halevi’s political career took a turn in 1976 when he left Israel for France and from there began frequent visits to Beirut and the PLO headquarters until he received an official appointment to the organisation in 1982. He represented the PLO in the Socialist International and in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. His highest position in the PLO was as deputy to the PLO’s foreign minister, Nabil Shaath. He was more of an activist and politician than a writer. But the interviews he left behind give us a glimpse of his worldview: he uncompromisingly rejected Zionism and declared himself to be ’100 per cent Jew and 100 per cent Arab’.

  Uri Davis followed suit and joined the PLO in 1984. He was born in 1943 in Jerusalem and grew in Kfar Shmaryahu, a well-to-do suburb of Tel Aviv. He was already thinking out of the Zionist box when he succeeded in avoiding military service by substituting civil service for it instead (a very rare move for a young Jewish man in the early 1960s). After completing his national service, he was drawn into the Palestinians’ struggle in northern Israel against the expropriation of their land. His focus was on the land taken from several villages for the construction of the new, Jewish-only town of Karmiel on the road between Acre and Safed. In 1964 he began demonstrating there, sometimes all by himself; at the height of his struggle, he undertook a hunger strike and moved to one of the villages as a resident. The expropriated areas were declared closed military zones, but he violated these orders and was arrested for doing so; all told, he was incarcerated for half a year, during which he again began a hunger strike. After several forays into local and municipal politics, he adopted a different mode of action and joined Fatah, of which he remains a member of the Revolutionary Council.28

  Davis was one of the first to fuse his professional qualifications – a doctorate in anthropology – with his political commitments. As an anthropologist, he exposed the apartheid nature of the State of Israel.29 In many ways he set an example for the following generation of how to confront Zionism within Israeli academia and within one’s own discipline – the inevitable price for which was the loss of his job.30 It was possible in Israel to teach the sciences and hold anti-Zionist views, but it was not permissible for a dissident social scientist or humanities professor to teach Zionism in an Israeli university. Until Davis’s daring scholarly work, critiques of Zionism were dismissed as purely political and ideological tracts.

  But even lone fighters need a home, and most of these activists – most of the time, in one way and another – were connected to Matzpen, the longest-standing anti-Zionist Jewish movement in Israel (apart from the Communist Party), or to one of its many offshoots.

  The Anti-Zionist Movements: Matzpen and Its Offshoots

  In 1962 Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr, Oded Pilavsky and Yirmiyahu Kaplan were expelled from the Israeli Communist Party. They were among the younger cadres of the party, and their sin was their continued critique of party policies, specifically its blind obedience to the Soviet Union. On various occasions, they argued that the party had, since 1948, failed to advance the conditions and realities of its natural constituencies: the Palestinian minority of Israel and the socio-economically deprived classes of the Jewish state.31

  Feeling that what was needed was a clearer discourse about a socialist revolution in Israel and the Middle East as a whole, they decided to found a new political organisation that would better reflect their views. They also proposed that the workers in Israel create councils that would make major decisions on the policies to be pursued and actions to be taken, rather than follow the practice of the Communist Party, in which the Politburo made all the decisions. Their early publications declare clearly their rejection of Zionism (for the Communist Party, this was never a clear issue) and fully endorse the demands of the Palestinian national movement (in 1962 these were not yet clear, since the Palestinian National Charter, which defined these demands, was not produced until 1964).

  These ideas came out in the public manifesto of the new group, which called itself Matzpen (Compass). At their first meeting in 1962, the participants defined themselves as a voluntary organisation of Israelis committed to a social revolution within the territory of Israel and Palestine. In the next few years the group succeeded in recruiting dozens of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. Consisting mostly of students, it had more Jewish members than Arabs; most of the Jews came from the kibbutz movement, while the Palestinians came from the cities. In 1965, Matzpen joined Uri Avnery in the founding of a parliamentary party that would compete in national elections, although none of the Matzpen members were willing to be in the actual list – they only lent their support.

  Having started with twelve members, the movement grew significantly after the June 1967 war. On June 8 it burst into the international arena when it published a joint ad in the Times of London, together with the Palestinian guerilla organisation the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, calling for the abolition of the Zionist character of Israel and the creation of an ‘a-national’ federal-socialist state. The ad further stated that in the desired new state, everyone would enjoy equal cultural and civil rights and that the state would be committed to the economic and political union of the Middle East. Soon after, leading members of Matzpen, such as
Akiva Orr and Moshe Machover, joined exiled Palestinians in Europe to create a pro-Palestinian solidarity movement. Inside Israel, it became the most vociferous lobby against the occupation – an approach that frequently led to the arrest and detention of its members.

  In the 1970s Matzpen underwent an ideological crisis, when some members found it to be too passive and departed to create a number of splinter groups. The first was the Workers’ Union (called also Avangard). This group criticised Matzpen for being insufficiently active within workers communities in Israel and for preferring the international stage. From this group sprang another one, the Revolutionary Communist Alliance – the RCA, whose publication was named Ma’avak, ‘Struggle’ – which proposed that the political strategy had to focus on the creation of a binational state over the entirety of historical Palestine. Some RCA members were still active in the 1990s, in a new organisation called Derech Ha-nizoz (Through a Spark) and were arrested for their connections to left-wing organisations within the PLO.32 Nowadays some of them are part of the parliamentary list, the Da’am Workers Party, which focuses on the rights of workers and has thus far not succeeded in entering the Knesset.

  From those two basic groups emerged a third, the Red Front, which chose, among other things, to be associated directly with the armed Palestinian struggle. The best-known, outside of Israel, of their members was Udi Adiv, a young member of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel (Ilan Halevi’s kibbutz) who, after serving as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, joined others in creating an underground web of connections with the PLO. The members of the Red Front were arrested in December 1972 and charged with the creation of an Arab–Jewish sabotage and espionage network in Israel. It seems they had never gotten, nor did they intend to go, that far. In any case, they were sentenced and jailed for long periods but were released in 1985, when three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon were traded by the Palestinian organisation Ahmad Jibril for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including the arrested members of the Red Front.33 Finally, I should mention a fourth group, the Revolutionary Communist League (also called Matzpen Marxist). All of these groups, as well as their own splinters, shared a stronger affiliation with Maoist or Trotskyite variants of communism and were willing to participate in actual military struggle against the state.

  For the Israeli public, these dissident Jews should have symbolised everything Zionism was proud of. Many were young, handsome members of kibbutzim who had served in the élite units of the army. Although there were only a handful of them, the society as a whole was bewildered that such members could subscribe to such revolutionary and counter-Zionist ideas.

  Aside from the specifics of these splinter groups, it is Matzpen that is most important within the context of the history of ideas that I wish to chart here. Matzpen’s positions were very much the same as those put forward by the challengers of the future. I myself can attest that while I had not read any Matzpen publications prior to writing my books challenging the Israeli version of the 1948 war and depicting Zionism as a colonialist movement, I was amazed to discover – when, in 1997, Akiva Orr handed me the book Peace, Peace and There Is No Peace, along with several issues of Matzpen’s official publication – the degree to which we shared the same analysis and prognosis.

  This holds true for other works that appeared in the 1990s as well. They, too, would reflect Matzpen’s views of Zionism as colonialism and of 1948 as a catastrophe, and would share the movement’s critique of Israeli policies towards Arab Jews, the Palestinian minority, and the occupied territories. The later critics had neither access to the archives nor an interest in scholarly academic work, and yet the end result would be the same. More than anything else, the courage displayed by the members of Matzpen was inspiring. These young men and women could be seen in small groups, carrying provocative banners and not being deterred by the prospect of verbal or even physical assault by bystanders or the police. Through that commitment and determination, they showed the way for the few who, still today, do not give up regardless of the opposition.

  Few members of the academy belonged to this group. But in the 1970s there emerged academics who found themselves developing similar doubts about Zionism. They differed from the earlier activists in that their trigger for questioning the idea of Israel was not some specific formative event or a personal epiphany. Their beliefs began to be shaken when their professional research exposed the false assumptions and historical fabrications on which the idea of Israel was based.

  The Pioneering Academics

  In the wake of the groundbreaking work by these pioneering activists, there appeared the first voices from within the Israeli academy expressing profound doubts about the nature of the state, its ideology and policies. Until the war of October 1973 – sometimes called the Yom Kippur War – academia was obedient, highly patriotic and overwhelmingly Zionist. Dissenting teachers paid less of a price than did activists in terms of imprisonment or public condemnation, but being a lonely voice in the wilderness made such academics feel quite marginalised and out of place in the Israeli universities.

  One such voice was Uriel Tal. A professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, Tal wrote extensively on Jewish secularisation in modern times but also voiced consternation about the way Israeli academia was being pressed into the service of the nation and of Zionism.34 In a series of lectures delivered to colleagues in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University in the 1980s, Tal posed some poignant questions about the newly formed discipline in Israeli academia known as Jewish studies. Since the 1970s every university had a department of Jewish history; some had gone further and opened Eretz Israel history or studies departments, which taught and researched according to a specific disciplinary logic and methodology. Tal objected to any insistence that the study of Zionism, Judaism, and the history of the Land of Israel required both ideological loyalty and particular methodological tools. He sought instead a universal approach towards all these topics. To his mind, there was no such discipline as ‘Jewish history’ – there was only history – and whatever history’s methodologies, theories and tools were, they should apply equally to the study of an African, European or Jewish past and present.

  Tal failed in this quixotic quest. Universities continued the zealous cultivation of the ‘disciplines’ of Jewish and Eretz Israel studies. The politicised academic structure, displaying continued indifference to what was going on in the rest of the world, remained impenetrable to any genuine interdisciplinary influence, let alone any comparative studies. Zionism and the Zionist version of Judaism continued to be taught and researched as unique case studies that lay outside the framework of general historiography.

  Nevertheless, what Tal had noticed in mid-1980s Israel soon became obvious. Formerly acclaimed Israeli scholars working on Israel and Zionism started to lose their prestige abroad and became regarded as propagandists for the national narrative. A short while later, international criticism began to have an impact within Israeli academia itself. Tal’s critique had been shaped by his interaction with the academic world outside Israel, but most of the early academic challengers were less engaged than he was in philosophical or theoretical criticisms of Israeli academia. Their problem with the national academy was that it was indifferent to the predicaments of the society around it; predicaments that began to surface forcefully after the 1973 war.

  That war is a turning-point in its own right. The Syrian–Egyptian surprise attack that month on the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, which had been under Israeli control since 1967, shook the earth beneath the feet of many Israelis. The aftershocks reached the academy before they affected Israeli culture as a whole. The war ended a period of euphoria and consensus in Israeli society and exposed cracks in Israel’s moral smugness. In many ways, it served to prod academics and others to embark on an introspective search for answers to a number of troubling questions about the moral validity of the state, including both past and present policies, and eventually to revisit the essen
ce and implications of the idea of Israel itself.

  Until the third day of the war, the sense among generals, politicians and indeed the general public was that Israel was lost. There was even serious discussion of the possibility of using nuclear weapons as a last resort in case the United States would not come to Israel’s aid. By this time, Syrian forces were deep inside the Golan Heights, while Egyptian forces had advanced into the Sinai Peninsula; dozens of Israeli soldiers had been captured, and the famously invincible Israeli Air Force found it difficult to operate against the enemy’s antiaircraft system. An American airlift and a successful strategy in the north tipped the balance later on, but these did not lessen the sense of insecurity and suspicion about the leadership’s ability to sustain the Jewish state. In the early days of the debacle, the Labour government, headed by Golda Meir, was handed the blame. Although a committee of inquiry absolved politicians such as Meir and her minister of defence, Moshe Dayan, from responsibility for the failure and cast the blame on the army and the intelligence chiefs, the electorate thought differently. In order to save the Labour Party from defeat in the elections of 1974, the 1967 war hero Yitzhak Rabin was brought back from Washington, where he had been serving as ambassador, and he indeed won the election for Labour. But in 1977 Labour ran his rival, Shimon Peres, who was easily defeated by Menachem Begin and his Likud Party.

  But this was more than just a changing of the guard. The war traumatised the society, and many Israelis lost, albeit for a short moment, their sense of perpetual invincibility – not only because of the army’s poor performance on the battlefield, but also because of the raising of doubts about Israeli policy among traditional supporters of the state in the world at large. By itself, the 1973 war was not enough to cause loyal adherents of the idea of Israel to doubt the whole plot. Earlier developments had already planted these doubts in a few corners of the public mind even before the war. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, the state’s highest officials and ministers had become entangled in highly publicised cases of personal corruption. Most of those suspected and later indicted were members of the ruling Labour Party. As a result, the founding movement of the State began to lose its prestige and its hegemony – politically, socially and culturally – for the Jews of Israel.