The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  Taken together, these points showed that the success of the Jewish side was explained by the overall parity of forces on the ground, the understanding with the Transjordanians, and international support and pressure. Clearly, victory had not been delivered by some kind of miraculous good fortune, as the official historiography would have it.

  In my book I also took some issue with Benny Morris’s analysis of the making of the refugee problem. It was a scholarly debate that turned bitter in the next century. For purposes of the future marketing of the idea of Israel, the myth of the Palestinians’ voluntary flight was the most important myth challenged by the ‘new historians’. This is why many of the documents on the expulsions and atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers have been reclosed to the public.

  Morris, as was pointed out, debunked this myth in his book. Nevertheless, he did not accept the Palestinian historiographical claim, first made by Walid Khalidi in 1961, that the expulsion was part of a master plan.33 This difference of opinion showed that there was still a gap between the Palestinian national narrative and the ‘new history’. It did not seem crucial at the time, but this distinction would later become perilous and would reveal Morris to be more loyal to the Zionist narrative than he had seemed to be at first. The casting of blame and responsibility on Israel was not simply an argument about historical accuracy; it was also a debate about the solution to the refugee problem.34

  For example, the intentional expulsion, which I have elsewhere called ‘ethnic cleansing’, located the Israeli actions in 1948 within the history of war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, with wider implications for a future solution of the problem.35 Later, Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem would become an important issue in the diplomatic war with the Arab world. World opinion – however elusive that term may be – while supporting Israel’s right to exist, nonetheless sympathised with the plight of the refugees. Moreover, even pro-Zionists could not ignore Israel’s responsibility for the problem, a problem that has been persistently shunned by Israeli governments to this day.

  Lastly, my second book tackled the final myth that Flapan refuted: Israel’s relentless and unreciprocated search for peace. This chapter in the ‘new history’ was missing from the Palestinian narrative. I claimed that there was a genuine willingness on the part of most of the Arab governments, along with what was left of the Palestinian leadership, to negotiate a settlement over Palestine after the war. This agreement was based on the Arab acceptance of the 1947 partition recommendation and the repatriation of the refugees. Avi Shlaim, in another, later book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000), further undermined Israel’s self-image as the relentless peace seeker and claimed that it had failed to exhaust opportunities for peace with its Arab neighbours from 1948 until our own time.36 Both of us showed that Israel did not extend its hand in peace, and in fact rejected such gestures on the part of a considerable number of Arab leaders. It was the intransigence of Ben-Gurion (his foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, had been more forthcoming) that had blocked the chances for peace in that era.

  Two additional books should be mentioned. The first was Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis, which exposed documents that strengthened the major points made by the above-mentioned ‘new historians’ in our work. Segev was born in 1945 in Jerusalem to German Jewish parents who arrived in Palestine in 1935; his father died in the 1948 war. After graduating from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he completed his academic studies at Boston University with a PhD on the commanders of the Nazi death camps. Since 1979 he has written for Haaretz; periodically he publishes books on the modern history of Israel. In his book 1949, Segev collated documents that exposed the attitudes of the Jewish political and cultural élite to whoever was different from them, beginning with the way Palestinians in the occupied villages and towns were treated from the first moment of their surrender or occupation.37

  The second book was published in 2002 but belongs to this slightly earlier group of works: Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948.38 This work helped complete the historiographical picture of the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. Having been born in Jerusalem in 1934, Benvenisti was half a generation older than Morris, Shlaim, and I were. After a short initial academic career, he became involved in local politics in Jerusalem and served, from 1971 to 1978, as the deputy to the city’s legendary mayor, Teddy Kollek. He became internationally renowned for a project he conducted on Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, concluding that the settlements had become such a fait accompli that it would be impossible ever to dismantle them. As a result, he called for a binational state as the only feasible solution.39

  In between writing, as he still does today on that particular issue, he wrote one book on the 1948 events. In it he explored the enthusiasm with which Israel erased the Palestinians’ abandoned villages and transformed them into cultivated land or new Jewish settlements. Archaeologists and architects also took part in the festivities by demonstrating that Arab villages were located on ancient biblical places and suggesting that the Jewish settlements built over them might carry a Hebrew name that sounded like the Arab name of the village, thereby creating a narrative that claims that a given site was first a Jewish place, in biblical times, before becoming Arabised for a time, and was now being properly redeemed. Thus, Lubya became Lavi, Saffuriya became Tzipori, and Maan remained Maan.

  All the works discussed above have reaffirmed through archival documents what Flapan found between the lines of the published material available to him at the time. But their significance also lies in the ways they challenged mainstream interpretation of the idea of Israel. The situation was changing. There was now an atmosphere in which it was easier to write a historical version that was as alive to the Palestinian narrative as to the Zionist one. The peace activity on both sides allowed for a more open dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian scholars, and finally one could begin to hear on Israeli university campuses academic versions of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. In some cases, the recognition of the other side of the story, even to the point of adopting it as the rightful interpretation, was the result of a newfound ideological stance; in others, it was the consequence of adopting a more relativist and multi-narrative approach to history; in still others, it was both.

  The Significance of the 1948 Historiography

  The ‘new history’ signified a new chapter in the production of knowledge in Israel because it was the work of professional Israeli historians whose specialised area of inquiry was the Arab–Israeli conflict. But their impact was limited, because of the scores of Israeli historians who entered the Public Record Office in Kew Gardens and the Israeli State Archives in the basement of the prime minister’s offices in Jerusalem (nowadays it moved to a new place in the south of the city), only a few emerged as ‘new historians’ – that is to say, historians convinced that the evidence they had seen challenged a formative chapter in the consolidation of the idea of Israel. Indeed, documents are not the only bricks with which a historiographical picture is built. The prism through which one interprets the evidence differs from one historian to another, and that prism is suffused with his or her ideological background and political outlook. The documents we have been discussing became an explosive and even sensational discovery only when scrutinised though a highly critical prism on Zionism in general and Israeli contemporary policies in particular.

  The ‘new history’ of the 1948 war had a twofold effect on Israeli historiography: it legitimatised the historical narrative of the Palestinians, and it offered a potential for normalising the national collective memory. It did not adopt – and this is worth reiterating – the Palestinian narrative in its entirety. In the case of the 1948 war there are specific chapters in the new Israeli narrative, such as the claim that the British were neutral, that are still rejected by Palestinian historiographers. Nor does the reference to an Arab willingness to compromise with
Israel after the 1948 war – even though it portrays Israel as the intransigent party – appeal to what may be called either the collective Palestinian memory of the period or the pan-Arabist memory, inasmuch as it shows a lack of serious Arab commitment to the cause of Palestine. But those caveats do not undermine the overall contribution. With regard to the history of knowledge production on Palestine, and the challenge to the Zionist marketing of the idea of Israel, the ‘new history’ of the 1948 war is the most profound legitimisation given by Israeli scholarship to any chapter in the Palestinian narrative.

  The ‘new historians’ thus presented, in a purely positivist way, what they believed was the true nature of Israeli behaviour – or rather, misbehaviour – towards the Arab world and the Palestinians in 1948. They drew a picture of which most Israelis were unaware, and it provoked angry reactions from public figures and press commentators. As mentioned, Shabtai Teveth, the respected biographer of David Ben-Gurion and a senior journalist for Haaretz, branded the ‘new historians’ as traitors. Others followed suit, although more soberly, and were willing to engage in some degree of public debate about the findings but a far greater degree of debate about our motives. Name-calling characterised the initial response to the publication of the work of the ‘new historians’. I recall a conference at the University of Haifa, an early conference devoted to the ‘new history’, at which the head of the history department suggested that the research being pursued by the new group was tantamount to treason during a time of war. Later, in an article in Haaretz, he called me Israel’s Lord Haw-Haw.40

  Nevertheless, when Morris and Shlaim began to study the aftermath of 1948 and on into the 1950s, the early years of statehood, they took the same critical approach to the Zionist narrative. Before 1967, Israeli policy had never been depicted as aggressive, to say nothing of occasionally brutal and inhuman and quite often morally unjustifiable. While there was little in the work of the ‘new historians’ that dealt with historiography, and specifically Zionist historiography, their/our works did serve to highlight mainstream academia’s repression of the truth and its participation in the fabrication of the national narrative about 1948.

  Revisiting the First Decade of Statehood

  The research on 1948 that was carried out during the 1980s paved the way for a more fundamental criticism of Zionism and its role in Israeli academia. In addition, the media coverage of this issue encouraged scholars to go beyond the topic of 1948, both in thematics and in chronology. The same socio-economic and political background that produced what I have called the academic pioneers and the new history also contributed to the shaping of a new research agenda about the first decade of statehood. This period, 1948–58, seemed to attract not only professional academics but also novelists, film-makers, playwrights, musicians, poets, artists, and journalists, who represented their version of events in a way that did not tally with the collective memory nurtured and maintained by the state through all its agencies and apparatuses.

  What differentiated this new energy, apart from the choice of topics and methodology, from anything that preceded it was its almost matter-of-fact acceptance of Zionism as an ideology and not as an ideal reality. As such, scholars could not be neutral about it; they must be either for or against it. This aspect of the debate was absent from the ‘new history’. Our new history of 1948 was based on a new ideological approach, even though Morris and Shlaim denied that this was the case and thus upheld the claim to academic objectivity with the same vigour and conviction as had their predecessors. As for myself, I was inclined to engage with the impact of power on knowledge as an overall part of our work. The present book is in many ways the result of this engagement.

  The next wave of new historiography in Israel, however, was motivated by just such an impulse. This new approach emerged among a group of young Israeli social scientists who added a historical perspective to their attempt to understand contemporary Israeli society. Their challenge was not based on new evidence; rather, they read the documents differently. More important, they searched for a different kind of evidence that could not necessarily be found in the political archives. As a result, they were as critical of the past as they were of the present social situation in Israel. In fact, they attributed the contemporary unease of, and cleavages within, the society to government policies in the early years of statehood and, in particular, to the inherent contradiction between Zionism and values such as democracy and liberalism.

  This new wave of challengers, to which I devote the following chapter, started a conversation at the heart of which lay several questions never before asked in Israel: How is academic knowledge produced? How does it serve or abuse the interests of the society, and how can it be made more equitable and democratic? The answers were drawn both from far away, from the United States, and from very close to home, from the social reality around them.

  SIX

  The Emergence of Post-Zionist Academia, 1990–2000

  In the autumn of 1994, a group of mainstream Israeli scholars met their young challengers for an open discussion at the secular mausoleum of Zionism, the burial place of David Ben-Gurion, on the desert plateau that the Israelis call the Negev and the Palestinians al-Naqab. Today the grave is still a ceremonial space for commemorating past glories and spelling out bold visions for the future.1

  It was a bit ironic that the defamers and violators of the shrine, myself included, were asked to come and share the sacred space. The introduction to the volume that came out of this meeting shows that there was a hope of converting us back to Zionism even while embracing the principle of free exchange of thought and ideas. Nevertheless, since a discussion at Sunday Mass on the existence of God is by itself a refreshing moment in the history of any religion, this discussion on the existence of Zionism was no exception. It was there that I heard the term ‘post-Zionism’ for the first time as a description of the renegades who dared question the truisms of Zionism.

  The year 1994 was a good one for apostates like us. It was the year after the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the PLO. There was a hopeful public atmosphere, and it made possible a meeting such as the one that took place at the very heart of the Zionist establishment. Nor was it a unique event. Anyone who visited Israeli academia in the 1990s would have sensed a changed place, one that had nothing in common with what preceded (or, as it turned out, succeeded) it. From every poster-crammed wall you would be invited to conferences and seminars to discuss topics that had hitherto been taboo in the Jewish state: Zionism as colonialism, the Nakba, discrimination against the Arab Jews, the manipulation of Holocaust memory. Even more daring were the articles you could have read during that period, both in academic journals and in the popular press, about these and similar topics that before (and after) the 1990s were deemed subversive and unprofessional.

  These winds of openness and adventure blew not only in the corridors of academia but also across the public domain. New conversations about the past, as well as the present, seeped into chat shows on radio and television. There was a sense that these discussions could perhaps serve as a new source of inspiration for textbooks and high school curricula. Soldiers and officers were invited to attend debates and discussions on ‘the new history of 1948’ or Israel’s policies in the 1950s.

  As a whole, the 1990s were a decade in which the entire idea of Israel was questioned. The evidence for this enterprise is readily available: dozens of books in English and Hebrew, hundreds of articles and conference papers, similar numbers of op-eds, numerous appearances on television and radio talk shows. All show academics pointing a guilty finger at their own milieu for providing the scholarly scaffolding for acts of repression, oppression and discrimination. This deconstructive effort affected virtually every discipline in the Israeli human sciences: arts, history, philosophy, political science, literary criticism, and many other fields in the social sciences and humanities. The local press labelled this new energy ‘post-Zionist’, but was ambivalent about whether it was a positiv
e development or a dangerous deterioration. The term ‘post-Zionism’ became generic for describing any academic critique on Zionism from within Jewish Israel. It was used equally by those who complimented themselves and gladly identified as post-Zionists because they challenged Zionism head-on, and by those who condemned the challengers as traitors to the idea of Israel. There is no easy Wikipedia definition for ‘post-Zionism’ and, like so many other such phenomena, it is preferable to describe it in full rather than attempt to define it.

  What Is Post-Zionism?

  Nearly twenty years after I first heard the term near the burial place of the state’s founder, I think ‘post-Zionism’ warrants some elaboration. In the course of those twenty years, no one has been able to come up with a definition shorter than four pages, dotted with endless recurrences of ‘but’ and ‘nonetheless’, in an attempt to clarify this elusive phenomenon. Clearly there is no simple definition for this working term, whose claim to fame is that it enabled interested parties to lump together a disparate group of a few hundred academics and cultural challengers to Zionism in the 1990s. However, it is worth trying to provide at least a moderately focused and detailed reflection of the motivations of these academics, their areas of inquiry, and their impact on media and society.