by Ilan Pappe
In those years, a few newspapers even stood up to the military censor. Since the early 1990s on a number of occasions, for example, Haaretz chose not to cooperate with the censor. The now-defunct daily Hadashot took the lead in this respect, and as early as 1984 was closed for several days for disobeying a direct instruction not to publish a photograph of two captive Palestinian guerrillas who had hijacked an Israeli bus. The Shin Bet objected to the photograph because it was the only evidence showing that the guerrillas, who were battered to death by senior commanders in the organisation immediately after the photograph was taken, had been captured alive.
In general, the print media were more advanced in their presentation of diverse views than were the electronic media, particularly television. The very division of print-media information into news sections, editorials and commentary by in-house and guest contributors, and cultural and weekend supplements offered more scope for unconventional thinking. It was in the cultural supplements that the debates of the ‘new historians’ and later of post-Zionist scholarship first appeared. Around the mid-1990s, echoes of the debate were reflected in the editorials, thereby enlarging the number of readers exposed to post-Zionist views. The debate also moved to cultural programmes on television, which, despite their relatively low ratings, still reached a wider and more diverse audience than academic journals or conferences. The very fact that debates on post-Zionism came to be included in the print media and on both television channels (on educational programmes) was indicative of a significant change. This inclusiveness would have been inconceivable ten or fifteen years earlier. The term ‘Palestinians in Israel’ appeared not only in the editorial columns and commentaries, but even in the news sections of the press. The term ‘post-Zionist’ was now in common use, in both a positive and a negative sense.
Nevertheless, one should not exaggerate the extent of the transformation in the press or its impact in those days. The media was still Zionist, even if it allowed post-Zionist voices now and then to be presented in its midst. The cases cited above were exceptions that did not disprove the general conduct, even of Haaretz. No matter how frequently articles criticising the government’s policy towards its own Palestinian citizens and towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories appeared in the editorial pages, the representation of the Other in the news columns did not fundamentally change. The ‘factual’ news reports – radio, television, and print – continued to reflect an overall national agenda and employ a nationalistic discourse. TV and radio interviewers of Palestinians or Arab personalities continued to act as if they represented the government, or at least the consensual point of view.
The press’s approach to conflicting interpretations of the current reality was well illustrated in its coverage of the September 1996 clashes in the occupied territories. That month, the Netanyahu government had decided to open a tunnel under the Haram al-Sharif, angering and infuriating the Arab and Muslim worlds and triggering a mini-uprising in the West Bank. The press was almost unanimously critical of this decision. Nonetheless, with respect to the clashes that followed the decision, most of the journalists took it for granted that the Palestinian Authority had ordered its police to fire on Israeli soldiers. The possibility, as reported in the international media, that the Palestinian police might have been moved to enter the fray by the spectacle of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers shooting at unarmed Palestinian protesters was not deemed credible in any of the major Israeli papers or TV programmes.
The operating style of the Israeli media involved a combination of self-imposed national censorship on the one hand and an attempt to act as a liberal marketplace of ideas on the other. This produced a reality wherein the press served two masters that were sometimes, indeed often, at odds with one another, and this reality fed the self-image of the Israeli press as being a liberal organ but not unpatriotic. It was an intentional ambivalence, probably based on the reasonable assumption that the news sections were read more widely and were more influential than the columns and commentaries. Still, there was some improvement. Several years earlier, the Palestinian or Arab version of events was not mentioned at all; now it was mentioned at times, though with an obvious preference for ‘our’ version.
It should be noted that there were attempts to found newspapers that would present the news in an integrated fashion – that is, seeking a ‘post-Zionist’ or ‘non-Zionist’ approach to the way the news itself was covered and commented on. Most of these attempts did not last long. Uri Avnery tried with HaOlam HaZeh, but even his use of succulent gossip and unclad females did not help the paper survive, and it finally closed in the early 1980s as a financial failure. Hadashot tried fashioning itself as a tabloid with an ideological, non-Zionist edge; as a daily paper, it presented a different discourse, more neutral and at times even radical, but it, too, was forced to close after nine years because of financial problems. The local Jerusalem weekly, Kol Ha’ir, was the only paper in Israel which continued the fair-minded – which in Israeli eyes meant radical – reporting of daily events in the country and the region.
Despite the various failures, attempts at creating an alternative press continued. A Hebrew version of the weekly report prepared by the Alternative Information Center appeared in the 1990s, aptly called Mitsad Sheni (The Other Front). It provided a window not only into the official Palestinian position but also introduced Hebrew readers to the pluralistic nature of Palestinian politics and culture, so often misrepresented in a one-dimensional and reductionist way by mainstream media. Behind such a publication stood the still unfulfilled goal of establishing a common front between all those who have been victimised by Zionism in modern times. In those days, the potential partners included Hamas, the leftist Palestinian anti-Oslo organisations, Palestinians in Israel, Mizrachi Jews in the development towns, and feminist organisations. But it appeared that Mitsad Sheni was read only within the world of activists and did not reach the wider public – it was simply a weekly circulated among interested people.
One should wait and see if, in future, similar enterprises will be able to open the eyes of the conventional Israeli reader. Socialism Now tried presenting an anti-Zionist agenda for a short period. Mitan (the Hebrew word for both a bomb and a burden) is still in print. The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, Hadash, publishes a Hebrew weekly, Zo Haderech (This Is the Way) and 2005 saw the founding of an excellent monthly edited by Yitzhak Laor, Mita’am (not an easy term to translate, it means both on behalf of – either the authority or the counterforces – but is also associated with the Hebrew word for ‘taste’), which ceased publication after seven years of providing one of the few genuinely critical spaces for public debate.
In recent years, the media struggle around knowledge and information has moved to cyberspace. Several very active websites and blogs are there for any Israeli reader who wishes to know the truth about the occupation and the oppression inside Israel, or to be introduced to more profound analytical pieces about Zionism, globalism, US imperialism, or anything else that places local realities in a regional and international context. It is still difficult to tell at this point how influential these efforts have been. While Facebook networking enabled a toothless and depoliticised Israeli protest movement to emerge in the summer of 2011, neither Facebook nor similar electronic arenas have had an impact on the continued allegiance of knowledge producers and consumers to the classically Zionist idea of Israel or even, of late, its new, neo-Zionist interpretation. The most vibrant among these websites is Ha-Oketz (The Sting), a rare open forum for challenging views in a society rigid with censorship.
The Diet-Zionist Media
Finally, what of the journalists themselves? Except for the notable cases of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, and also perhaps Tom Segev, who has displayed similarly critical instincts, few other names from either the 1990s or the present day can be added to the list.
For the media, post-Zionism did not signify a legitimate position. It was not the left pole of the political field; it was
located outside it. ‘Left’ in Israel meant, and still means, a willingness in principle to give up territory for peace and to recognise the Palestinian right to self-determination. It is a definition which had very little to do with a socialist point of view or economic issues.
Consequently, the journalists on the left have presented an agenda very different from that of the academics and artists of the 1990s. They limited their criticism to post-1967 Israeli policy and conduct towards the Arab world and specifically the Palestinians. In this way they legitimatised what the State of Israel, and before 1948 the Zionist movement, had done to, and in, Palestine up to 1967. They adopted what might be called an Israeli-centric or Judaeocentric concern about the effect of the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories on Israel’s external image and on its internal and eternal ‘soul’; the plight of the Palestinians was of secondary importance, if indeed it figured at all. Their desire for peace with the Palestinians derived more from a wish to enclave (if I may coin a verb) the Palestinians in a way that would absolve Israel from any future responsibility for them, and less from a desire to redress historical injustice or to end immoral behaviour. Their approach also excluded from any future solution two Palestinian groups: the refugees and the Palestinian minority within Israel. The refugees, according to this point of view, could return to whatever would be defined as the future Palestinian state; any other suggestion, such as the return of the refugees to Palestine as a whole, was and still is regarded as an existential threat to the Jewish state. As for the sizeable Palestinian minority within pre-1967 Israel – a problem that cannot be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel – any inclusion of them in peace talks is interpreted in a similarly hysterical way. Indeed, left-leaning journalists have avoided including the Palestinians in Israel in any discussion on the question of Palestine. To do so could open a debate on the very nature of the state, bringing to the fore its more racist and non-democratic features – issues no one on the Zionist left has been willing to address. This point of view would also garner substantial support among mainstream academics who viewed themselves as left but fought the post-Zionist and anti-Zionist scholars of the 1990s harder than anyone else.
These journalists and academics had a political home – the liberal Zionist party Meretz (although some remained loyal to the Labour Party) and a daily paper, Haaretz. The academics of the left Zionist parties are the ones who populated the op-ed sections of the more liberal publications and were brought in as guest commentators on news bulletins and talk shows. In our present century, many of the leading journalists in Haaretz, as well as those who had ‘leftist’ radio shows, joined either Meretz or Labour as politicians. One of them, Shelly Yachimovich, led the Labour Party in the 2012 elections.
A typical example of the liberal Zionist discourse is a book by Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist who made frequent media appearances during the 1990s as the voice of reason and the left. His book Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel was one of a number of such books unleashed by liberal Zionist journalists in reaction to the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987.13 The book is a combination of personal soul-searching and academic analysis – one of the best in this genre. It is also the best example I have found to convey the esprit de corps of the liberal Zionist media, of which Haaretz is also a prime example and which lately has become well represented by additional forces and organisations, such as the J Street lobby in the United States and internationally renowned Israeli movies such as Waltz with Bashir and The Gatekeepers.14 Rubber Bullets is a well-balanced book that moves smoothly between the personal and the general, as well as between the immediate reaction to particular events in the Intifada and the more distant assessment of the process overall. In this sense, readers interested in the psychological and, above all, ideological world of a peace activist on the Israeli Zionist left could not wish for a more authentic presentation – one that reveals not only the strength but also, more important for the present discussion, the absurdity and ambiguity of this position.
This book is, in essence, a thorough examination of what might be called diet Zionism. That is, it revisits the acclaimed links between Zionism and liberalism, and all in all comes back worried and uncertain at the end of the journey. Juxtaposing liberal and modernist concepts of morality against the ideologies and practices of Zionism throughout its history, Ezrahi concluded that liberal humanism had a tough time penetrating or integrating into the political culture of Israel. However, he seemed to be ambiguous in his analysis of the causes for this poor state of affairs. Leaders of Zionism and Israel, when willing to admit the existence of such a problem, justified the dismal conditions of liberalism in Israel by pointing to the ‘objective environment’ that forced them to be economical on human and liberal rights. At times Ezrahi ridicules this excuse, but at times he wholeheartedly endorses it.
The reason for this ambiguity becomes clearer as one gets to the end of Rubber Bullets. It is a matter of periodisation. In pre-1967 Israel, according to the author, Zionist leaders were justified in their inability to make a clear choice between power and morality or between human rights and nationalism. Ezrahi, in fact, devotes only two pages in the book to a discussion – an indirect and elusive one at that – to the implication of the Palestinian Nakba on Israeli consciousness. Beyond those two pages, readers will not find in the book either the term ‘Nakba’ or other references to the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe. Ezrahi describes the immorality of the choice made after 1967 in an original manner, by highlighting the use of rubber bullets during the Intifada. Israelis considered this ammunition to be more humane than live ammunition. In the book, the phrase ‘rubber bullets’ becomes a concept, not just a kind of ammunition. The concept of rubber bullets appears here as yet another of many Israeli attempts to square the circle – it is immoral to use live ammunition against defenceless youths, but covering the bullets with rubber makes them kosher. However, Ezrahi applies this exercise in Israeli morality only to the post-1967 period, and particularly to the post-1977 period, during the rule of the Likud Party. This ambiguity is inherently imbued in the psyche and outlook of the Israeli Zionist left. This is why the words of praise attached by Shimon Peres to the book ring true: ‘This excellent book will serve as a means for the non-Israeli to understand the contemporary reality of Israeli society well beyond the fog of myth and conventional wisdom’.15
Indeed, the book is a manifestation of the Zionist left interpretation of the present reality in Israel, but the fog of myth still lingers – the myth of the small and harmless pre-1967, and especially the 1948, Israel. As the opening words of the book convey so clearly, the images of the Intifada were indigestible to Ezrahi. This gut reaction, analysed in a lucid manner in the book, led to the development of a moral and logical position supporting the rights of the Palestinians for their own state and was an important factor in pushing a sizeable proportion of Israeli Jewish society behind the Oslo Accords. However, people like Ezrahi perceive peace as constituting only a termination of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, an end that will cleanse the Hebrew language from absurd terms and free the army from immoral actions such as the use of rubber bullets.16
But the Palestinians expect more than that. They want compensation or rectification of past evils dating back to 1948. Thus, what is missing in this approach is a gut reaction, similar to the one prompted by what Ezrahi witnessed during the Intifada, to the ghastly images from the criminal Israeli uprootings and massacres that took place during the 1948 war and afterwards. Palestinians are not likely to get such a reaction from Ezrahi, who does not want, as he clearly shows in the book, to confront his father with the past follies of Zionism, although he does want to educate his own son on the basis of the horrific pictures from the Intifada.
The book reveals an only partial foray into the darker side of the Israeli collective soul. It comes from within the Ashkenazi ‘yuppie’ groups of Israelis, who are willing
to compromise with the Palestinians provided it will extract them from the Orient, the Middle East, the Arab world. They become less liberal and compromising when they encounter their ‘own’ Palestinian minority or those Arab Jews who succeeded in escaping the efficient machinery of de-Arabisation within the State of Israel.
Rubber Bullets is a genuine description of the paradoxes that currently tear Jewish society apart; it is also convincing proof that there is a metanarrative of Zionism, the implementation of which omits from a prospective solution of the Arab–Israeli conflict the Palestinians in the refugee camps, the diaspora, and those inside Israel itself. The book thus describes the transformation of the Zionist left within the boundaries of that metanarrative.
When, optimistically, I wrote in the 1990s about a post-Zionist media, I wrongly assumed that the liberalism of the left Zionist media would allow more confrontational views on Zionism to be aired freely and engaged with fully. But it was impossible for the Israeli press to display such tolerance for long. The film-makers had a far more interesting divide, between non-Zionist and liberal Zionist artists, and their post-Zionist legacy has lingered longer and might even have a more lasting effect on the idea of Israel in the future. The next chapter, which is this book’s last to describe this unusual decade in the history of knowledge production in Israel, is devoted to it.
TEN
On the Post-Zionist Stage and Screen
We kiss your ass, General Boom,
If it were not for you we would have kissed Kloom [‘nothing’ in Hebrew]
I remember how you lowered your shoulders when the soldiers fell, General Boom,
I have lost my two sons, but if it were not for you I had Kloom
I remember how your red eyes were flooded with blood, General Boom
