The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  But first allow me to chart some common characteristics of these challengers, in so far as that is possible. The easiest way forward is to detect their internal debates so that the scope of their critique may be appreciated. The most important debate among them concerned ideology. This group included anti-Zionists as well as Zionists. The former despised the adjective ‘post-Zionist’ when it was applied to them and insisted that it better suited those who, despite their critique, remained Zionists, whereas the latter gladly adopted an adjective that they hoped would not brand them as traitors to their own society.2

  Another discussion concerned the importance ascribed to the debate about Zionism in the 1990s. Among the challengers one could find those who regarded it as a local conversation about the production of knowledge in Israel and academia’s role in it in particular. Others, by contrast, took it far more seriously and believed they were deliberating the very essence and soul of Zionism, in hopes of impacting the identity and nature of the state in years to come.

  The different ambitions were also manifested in the personal projects undertaken by these challengers of Zionism. Some were truffle hunters, if I may use the favourable term employed by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and adopted by the British historian Lawrence Stone when describing microhistorians, who knew everything at the level of historical anecdote about the life of Zionism and Israel but did not contextualise their particular research in a more general challenge to Zionism. Others were parachutists, to use Stone’s image of macrohistorians, who offered a comprehensive overview of Zionist and Israeli past and present realities but without providing concrete evidence for their challenge.3 The best works were, of course, those that were able to integrate both approaches to history.

  Another debate was between positivist and relativist historians. The former regarded the Zionist narrative as a fabrication of historical fact and saw their work as offering the truthful version of Israel’s history. The latter sought only to legitimatise additional narratives and versions of the past and the present, with the goal of undermining the hegemonic role of the Zionist narrative.

  Finally, there was uncertainty whether this endeavour was a Western or an anti-Western project. Because the challenge that inspired them was directed at Western civilisation, some of those who exposed the injustices and wrongdoing in Israeli society analysed them as the inevitable illusions and fallacies created by ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘modernity’, and ‘Westernisation’. Others critically reviewed Zionism and Israel as a failed case study of those very same processes, which they viewed as highly positive.

  So can Zionists and anti-Zionists – whether light-hearted or serious, modest or ambitious, relativist or positivist, academic or artistic – be regarded as part of the same phenomenon? As I cannot offer a sound-bite definition of post-Zionism, let me instead propose a generational identity card.

  We were a Jewish group, ably representing Israel’s Jewish ethnic mix. While most members were secular, it was possible to find religious Jews among us as well. As has already been mentioned, the group included academics, film-makers, playwrights, journalists, artists, educators, writers and poets; the academics came from a variety of disciplines but were mainly historians and sociologists. All of us, in one way or another, in our professional work, challenged basic truisms of Zionism. The more sacred the cow we slaughtered, the more anti-Zionist we were deemed, by ourselves or by the public.

  But this raises a legitimate question I have often been asked: why not call the individuals anti-Zionist, and the entire phenomenon anti-Zionism? Indeed, a reasonable case can be made for the adjective ‘anti-Zionist’. After all, the hundreds of academics described here as post-Zionist were the successors of the anti-Zionist critics who had emerged when Zionism itself arose. In more than one respect, this challenge from within is a link in a longer chain that goes back to the late nineteenth century. Like those I have named the trailblazers, these early disputants, too, left behind them the comfort zone of consensual Zionism because its actions and ambitions clashed with the universal values they believed in as Jews and as human beings.

  So why not call them anti-Zionists? First and foremost, most of them refused to be identified as such and marketed themselves as post-Zionists, a choice that should be respected. According to an explanation frequently offered by some of them, they chose this term because it fitted the ‘post-’ era in which they lived, with its postcolonialism, post-nationalism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. All these ‘posts’ were ways of asserting a certain degree of break from a thesis – the -ism – but not a total negation of it. Whether this can be done or not is another question, and in fact, quite a few self-defined post-Zionists would later call themselves anti-Zionists.

  Watching this phenomenon both from the inside, as I was one of these people, and from the outside, as a historian of the movement, I think the prefix ‘post-’ signalled a measure of caution and a sense of insecurity about the project the dissenters had undertaken. Their doubts were articulated in a far more guarded way than that chosen by the trailblazers of Chapter 3 above, and their commitment to scholarly discourse tamed and even at times watered down their criticism. They felt themselves to be part of Zionism and wished to retain some of its ambitions and aspirations while negating especially the negative mainstream ideological perceptions of the Other, whether a Palestinian, a Mizrachi Jew or a Holocaust survivor. As Hannan Hever, a scholar of Hebrew literature who recently joined the faculty of Yale University, commented, by calling himself a post-Zionist he felt he took responsibility for the evils as well as the achievements, of Zionism.4

  On questions of definition, it is always helpful to listen to those who have watched a phenomenon from the outside and are less preoccupied with the issue of an accurate definition, but nonetheless have a grasp of what they see. Sometime in the early 1990s, sociologists of knowledge in Israel and abroad noticed that the critique voiced in the past by individuals was now being articulated in a systematic, scholarly way and acknowledged by a relatively large number of academics, who offered reflexive and intuitive descriptions, two of which I have found particularly helpful.

  Edward Said in 1998 and Perry Anderson in 2001 described post-Zionism as a welcome movement of self-critique on what was wrong and dangerous about Zionism and Israel in the past and the present, although both lamented that it did not go far enough; in addition, both visited Israel during the hyperactive phase of post-Zionism and were thus able to convey the tenor of the post-Zionist atmosphere to their readers.

  After a 1998 meeting in Paris, organised by Le Monde Diplomatique, between Palestinian historians and a handful of Israel’s new historians, Said said he was impressed that ‘home truths can be heard which are blasphemy in the diaspora’,5 but he was also disappointed that the Israelis he met still wished to determine the research agenda and were blind to the Palestinian side of the story:

  Only Ilan Pappe, an avowed socialist and anti-Zionist historian at Haifa University, was open in his espousal of the Palestinian point of view, and, in my opinion, provided the most iconoclastic and brilliant of the Israeli interventions. For the others in varying degree, Zionism was seen as a necessity for Jews. I was surprised, for instance, when Sternhell during the final session admitted that a grave injustice was committed against the Palestinians, and that the essence of Zionism was that it was a movement for conquest, then went on to say that it was a ‘necessary’ conquest.6

  He was equally disappointed with Benny Morris:

  One of the most remarkable things about the Israelis, again except for Pappe, is the profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia, that informs their work. Benny Morris, for example, ten years ago wrote the most important Israeli work on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem … Morris’ meticulous work showed that in district after district commanders had been ordered to drive out Palestinians, burn villages, systematically take over their homes and property. Yet strangely enough, by the end of the book Morris seems reluct
ant to draw the inevitable conclusions from his own evidence. Instead of saying outright that the Palestinians were, in fact, driven out he says that they were partially driven out by Zionist forces, and partially ‘left’ as a result of war. It is as if he was still enough of a Zionist to believe the ideological version – that Palestinians left on their own without Israeli eviction – rather than completely to accept his own evidence, which is that Zionist policy dictated Palestinian exodus.7

  And this is what Perry Anderson had to say: ‘The emergence of a “post-Zionist” scholarship and – as yet small – sector of opinion is one of the most welcome developments in recent years. The context in which it has appeared, however, is a warning against any exaggerated optimism.’8

  Said and Anderson made two valid points. The first is that post-Zionism is a convenient term for measuring the distance that these scholars travelled out of the Zionist camp. And it seems that many of them did not go far enough, as Said and Anderson lamented. (As a result, one might add, under the pressure of events and public wrath after 2000 they were still close enough to the tribal space to return to its warm embrace.) The second is that, more than anything else, post-Zionism was a mood, and that when it changed, as moods do, it could easily be declared dead, which is what one Israeli journalist declared in Haaretz in September 2001. Alas, at least from the perspective of this writer, it was. This book is in many ways post-Zionism’s post-mortem.

  Why 1994?

  I have artificially located the emergence of post-Zionism in 1994 and have connected it to the Oslo process. Of course, developments such as a new discourse or a new academic orientation are not born in a specific moment, and yet that year symbolised the coming-together of the processes I already described as the background for the ‘new history of the 1948 war’ a decade earlier. In many ways, post-Zionism was a delayed reaction to the same socio-political and socio-economic processes that had produced the earlier critique at the University of Haifa and among the activists of Matzpen and similar groups in the 1970s.

  It took a few years for perceptive academics to digest the wider implications of the First Intifada and the peace treaty with the PLO. Ironically, the short-lived emergence of a post-Zionist point of view seems to have been the only positive result of these two monumental events, which otherwise failed to change even modestly the daily reality of the Palestinian people, whether they were under direct occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, second-class citizens within Israel, or refugees. It would be, as we shall see, another monumental event – the Second Intifada – that would bury this positive reaction for the time being.

  Ironically, when the ‘new historians’ published their first works, around 1988, the full impact and meaning of the first uprising in the occupied territories had not yet been fully taken on board. This unarmed Palestinian protest movement, the First Intifada, dramatically tilted world opinion in the West against Israel. This shift impressed Israel’s cultural élite, although it was totally ignored by the political sector. The academics, journalists and artists of Israel were and are an organic part of the Western cultural and academic scene. Hence, a shift in their global milieu was bound to impact the way these Israelis were viewing the present and, by extension, also the past. Moreover, the corpus already published by the ‘new historians’ made it easier for others to follow suit, each in his or her field.

  The ‘new historians’ began as three or four people; the earlier anti-Zionist scholars numbered only a handful as well. Nevertheless, the 1990s saw the endorsement of their views by scores of academics, inspired by twin developments. The first was the transformation of Israeli society from being relatively homogenous to being multicultural. In this new environment, two groups in particular attracted the attention of academics: the Mizrachi Jews and the Palestinians inside Israel and under occupation. To a lesser extent, this was also the time when feminism made inroads into Israeli politics and universities.

  The academics’ decision about what to revisit was influenced mainly by the agenda of social activists who had been engaged in protest movements since the early 1970s. Academics quite often lag behind social activists when it comes to challenging realities that are taken for granted. But when they do, they themselves become social activists (a role many of them do not like, which may be another factor in the demise of the movement). The decision about how to revisit these uncomfortable chapters of the past was imported from the West, in particular from the United States.

  The focus of the new research was history, of which one particular period attracted these challengers: the first decade of statehood, the 1950s. It appeared in their work as a formative period in which most of the ills of Israeli society emerged for the first time, formulated either as policies from above or as attitudes from below. Established academics viewed the first decade of statehood, or rather the first nineteen years of statehood, up to 1967, as exactly the opposite. To them it was the golden age – if mistakes were made, they could be forgiven and absolved because this was a pioneering era. To some extent, that benevolent view had to do with admiration for the great men of the past, who inevitably erred from time to time, but mostly it came from the attitude that the problems faced by the society were not the outcome of bad policies or immoral ideology, and that the policies pursued were the only options at the time. As Israel was still a poor country during the early years of statehood, the only way it could receive immigrants from the Arab world was by pushing them into poor ‘development towns’ and allowing them only unskilled work and technical careers.

  Similarly, the Arab–Israeli conflict justified the imposition of military rule over the Palestinian minority in Israel, as well as brutal retaliation against Palestinian infiltration from the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria. In this vein, mainstream historians justified Israel’s decision to join Britain and France in the attempt to topple Gamal Abdul Nasser in the autumn of 1956. They also saw no harm in the way individuals and children were mistreated or abused under the collective education of the kibbutz or the way women were ordered back into the kitchen for this Zionist experiment in socialism. Finally, they applauded the diplomats of the young country for securing Israel’s international legitimacy by persuading the world to accept the Jewish state as the only moral and just response to the horrors of the Holocaust.

  The critical post-Zionist scholars of the 1990s, however, rejected these explanations. Marginalisation and oppression were seen as the outcome of an ideological bias, both economical and financial, against Mizrachim and Arabs alike, yielding a cheap labour force made of Mizrachim, women and Palestinians. What for classical Zionist scholars was an inspiring ideal of nation-building was for the dissenters an oppressive ideology that was ruthlessly used to crush any opposition to the dominant, domineering Eastern European culture.

  Initially, the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel was a topic of research dominated mainly by Palestinian scholars, although several post-Zionist Jewish scholars soon joined them to expose the nature of the oppression imposed on the Palestinians during the years of military rule, 1948–67. The mainstream justified these policies as responding to the ‘objective’ problems of security and scarcity of resources in the young state. The challengers attributed them to a racist and segregationist ideology. For example, Oren Yiftachel, a geographer from Ben-Gurion University, wrote:

  The territorial restructuring of the land has centered around an all-encompassing and expansionist Judaisation (de-Arabisation) program adopted by the nascent Israeli state, following the 1947–49 flight and expulsion of close to 800,000 Palestinians. This created big ‘gaps’ in the geography of the land, which the authorities were quick to fill with Jewish settlements inhabited by migrants and refugees who entered the country en masse during the late 1940s and early 1950s.9

  There are many other examples. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, who was working at the leftist Zionist institute of Givat Haviva as a historian of the state of Israel, wrote that ‘the military regime imposed on the Ar
abs in Israel became a tool for political, economic and cultural control of the state in the lives of the Arab minority’.10 Dan Rabinowitz, an anthropologist from Tel Aviv University, wrote extensively on the need to adopt the term ‘the Palestinians in Israel’ as a replacement for the Israeli establishment’s term ‘Arabs in Israel’, which was meant to rob the minority of its Palestinian roots and identity. He also took a critical stance on the flourishing of workshops and NGOs in the 1980s and 1990s, which ‘at close examination, however, reveals the key aspects … were designed primarily for Israeli consumption. Palestinian participants and moderators thus tend to become objectified, mere illustrations in an all-Israeli debate which takes place, as it were, above the Palestinian’s head.’11 Hillel Cohen, a historian from the Hebrew University, was one of the first to write about the internal Palestinian refugees inside Israel – those who lost their homes and became refugees in their own country. Yoav Peled, a political scientist from Tel Aviv University, wrote on the need to recognise the just side of the Palestinian demands in the negotiations, including that of the right of return.12

  The study of gender and feminism was also part of this new post-Zionist energy. In many ways it was the most impressive import from America, a culture that more often than not had a negative impact on Israeli society. In the case of post-Zionism, however, it opened up constructive and crucial vistas of research and commitment for local scholars. As a result, during the late 1970s, under the strong influence of gender studies, feminist activism, and politics, a feminist movement emerged in Israel as well.

  The feminist movement grew in parallel to the American feminist movement and was greatly influenced by it. One of the main propellants was an American Jewish activist, Marcia Freedman. She was born in the United States in 1938, emigrated to Israel in 1967, and immediately became involved in left Zionist politics. A new party called Ratz, dedicated to peace and civil rights and founded by the female politician Shulamit Aloni, invited Freedman to become a candidate. Both women did well in the 1973 elections, and Freedman became a member of the Knesset. With other women, she founded the first refuge for battered women in Israel; she and other women members of the Knesset were also responsible for progressive legislation on gender equality and women’s issues. Freedman came out of the closet as a lesbian at around that time – one of the first women to do so in Israel. In recent years she has divided her time between Israel and the United States.13