The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  This vision also had an economic dimension, which cut across national boundaries. Part of it involved the introduction of a capitalist, free-market economy that would connect Israel and the future ‘Palestine’. Under the Paris Protocol, which was the economic component of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1994, Israel and Palestine were to be a single economic unit. This can be seen in the connections between the customs bureaus and the imposition of a joint taxation policy. This unification was ensured by the decision to postpone any substantial negotiations over the introduction of a Palestinian currency. Furthermore, the protocol granted Israel the right of veto on any development scheme put forward by the Palestinian Authority. What all this meant was that the monetary and developmental policies of Israel and its currency exchanges were to play a dominant role in the Palestinian economy. Other aspects of the Palestinian economy, such as foreign trade and industry, would also be totally dominated by the Israelis.

  The introduction of the Israeli version of a capitalist society into the Palestinian areas soon proved disastrous. With a very low GNP and the absence of a democratic structure, such an introduction and integration as offered by the Oslo/Paris agreements turned the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority into the slums of Israel. An excellent example of such a development was evident already then in Erez, the buffer zone between Israel and the Gaza Strip. There the Israelis, with the blessing of the Americans and the European Union, opened an industrial park. Let the name not mislead the readers: it was a production line where all the workers were Palestinians and all the employers Israelis, who could enjoy the very low wages they paid their workers. Israel had similar visions for such parks on the border with Jordan and the West Bank – which was why industrialists in Israel saw themselves as belonging to the peace camp. Another aspect of the capitalisation of the peace process was the support given by a limited number of Palestinians who could benefit from such economic transactions.

  Perceptive observers understood that the double burden of economic misery and the lack of genuine progress on the national front could lead to a Palestinian attempt to revolt against the post-Oslo reality; similarly, there was obviously nothing in that reality that could have served as an incentive for the Israelis to alter the post-Oslo situation. For the majority of the Jewish population in Israel, the peace was based on an unbeatable logic, a logic often reiterated by the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. According to his vision, the Palestinians were locked in a dismal situation prior to Oslo; they were now offered an improvement – not a very impressive sort of improvement, but nevertheless better because it would mean that Gaza, Jericho, and Ramallah would fly the Palestinian flag and be guarded by Palestinian policemen. Most Palestinians saw it differently; what was on offer was a non-democratic authority that replaced Israeli occupation with Palestinian security services. But for most Israelis this was peace, provided there was no terror and no bombs; peace was equated with their daily security, and by around 2005, it was enhanced by the Oslo process.

  The two main political parties, then, shared this vision of the future. They also saw eye to eye on the method needed to implement it: dictating the solution to the Palestinians. This line of action became evident soon after the Oslo Accords were concluded. The notion of dictation enjoyed wide support among the Jewish population and still does so today, and that support was clearly manifested in the 1996 election results, when a vast majority of Jewish voters elected parties which vowed to impose the Oslo reality on the Palestinians in even harsher conditions, the ones suggested by Likud. The same public mood informed the Barak government, which succeeded the first Netanyahu government in 1999. The latter’s fall from power arose from his overall incompetence and a downturn in governability. The composition of the 1999 Barak government and its teams of principal negotiators (ex-generals such as Matan Wilnai, Dani Yatom, and Yossi Peled) produced a similar approach, even if the Likud chose not to join the new government.

  So by the time the Second Intifada broke out, there was already a political consensus, and when Sharon came to power in 2001 he upheld that consensus, with one caveat – he was not interested in keeping settlers in the Gaza Strip and preferred to focus instead on turning the West Bank into the future Israel. As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass commented, at that point the vast majority of Jews in Israel lost interest in the Palestine question. The next election campaign proved the point – the issue of Palestine was absent from the agenda of the various parties. For all intents and purposes, it had been solved.

  The Neo-Zionist Version of the Idea of Israel

  Even the Mizrachi ultra-Orthodox party Shas and the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael were willing to go along with this geopolitical vision. But this vision of the future was not just a matter of defining borders or containing Palestinian national aspirations and rights. It was also a matter of the identity and essence of the society. And here we encounter the neo-Zionist vision, shared by the settler community and by supporters of the National Religious Party, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and a new secular right that was closely associated, both financially and ideologically, with the New Right in the United States. Among its adherents was a new right-wing party of Russian immigrants that would be a powerful actor in the next few years: Yisrael Beiteinu – Israel Our Home, led by Avigdor Lieberman.

  Unlike the post-Zionists, following the 1999 elections the neo-Zionist alliance had representation in the Barak government – about six ministries, although compared with Netanyahu’s government, they had of course lost power. They were able to join the Barak government because their interest had shifted from territoral and political borders to socio-cultural questions. They regarded the mini-state offered by Barak to the Palestinians to be irrelevant, but they decided not to insist on their ultimate vision: a completely de-Ara-bised West Bank, along with the construction of the Third Temple instead of the Muslim mosques in the heart of Jerusalem.

  In elementary sociological terms, they thrived on the link between the decrease in external tension and the rise of internal tensions. Post-Oslo Israel was more than ever a multi-ethnic, multicultural society, deeply divided on issues of culture, law, morality and education. The Jewish population shared the same attitudes towards the Palestinians wherever they were, but basically differed on everything else. When there was no sense of external or existential threat, the various groups that constituted Israeli society tended to stress their separate identities at the expense of the state’s identity, a tendency manifested in the way that questions of taxes, of conforming to general civil duties, or of a commitment to shared causes were handled. It was also apparent in the 1996 elections that the particular interests of Ethiopian, Russian, North African, secular Tel Avivian, and Palestinian Israelis could be best served in sectarian voting. The 1996 elections were carried out after a revision in the election law: Israelis would now vote separately for a prime minister and a party. Now they could divide their loyalties by voting realistically for one of the usually two possible candidates for prime minister, but voting more emotionally for the party which represented their narrower interests. This dangerous fragmentation ended with the abolition of this provision in the electoral laws in 2001.

  During the 1999 elections, however, the trend towards fragmentation only strengthened. Neo-Zionism’s greatest attraction for the Jewish majority in Israel was its simplicity. It conveyed confidence, not confusion, about the future. Its main tactic was to present itself as having the key to the unification of a disintegrated and polarised Israeli society, that key being a crystal-clear version of Judaism as a national movement, which the spokespeople and intellectuals of Labour Zionism never succeeded in promulgating. The neo-Zionists could present themselves as a unifying force, bridging the wide spectrum of conflicting interpretations of Judaism, both as a religion and as a national movement. While the post-Zionist scholars suggested that the fractured reality be understood as an indication for the need to turn Israel into a state for all its citizens and not try t
o identify the state with one group at the expense of others, the neo-Zionists proposed that only a Jewish religious and nationalist cement would secure Israeli society from further fragmentation and disintegration.

  Four parallel processes forged this neo-Zionist option: the radicalisation of the national religious groups in Israel (whose strongholds were in the settlements and in a wide network of state-funded yeshivas); the Zionisation of the previously anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews; the ethnic insulation of segments of the Mizrachi Jewish community, caused by their being pushed to the geographical and social margins of society; and finally, the rapid integration of Israel into the stream of capitalist globalisation, which added to the alliance an intellectual neoconservative component, à la the American New Right (to which the Russian immigrants were mainly attracted).16 These four groups shared the vision of an ethnic Jewish state stretching across most of what had been historical Palestine.

  They were divided, however, on the issue of religion. The Russian immigrant community, almost one-sixth of the Jewish population by then, wanted the state to be a secular nationalist entity. The other groups envisaged a theocracy as the best means of facing Israel’s external and domestic problems. The dominant group among them were religious leaders, be they rabbis, magicians, healers, politicians or educators. This new religious élite shared a highly derogatory view of secular Jews and non-Jews in Israel. According to one account, this alliance of fanatics saw secular Jews as the ‘Messiah’s donkey’: having done their job in carrying Jews back to the Holy Land, they were now obsolete and could be treated as non-Jews. In other words, non-Jews are like beasts; Jews are allowed to utilise and exploit them, and may at times fear them, but always hold the moral high ground above them. As Sefi Rachlevsky’s book Messiah’s Donkey and similar publications show, medieval Jewish thinking, constructed to provide balance and solace in the face of a profoundly hostile Gentile environment, is reused here as a basis for a racist modern ideology that constructs a clear axis of exclusion/inclusion for the future. Its goal is an Israel without secular Jews and non-Jews.17

  This concept was formulated and upheld by the national religious thinkers, primarily rabbis. It was presented as Zionism, not Judaism, and was connected to the Zionist precept of fulfilment, Hagshama, which, according to its old interpretation, meant only one thing: settling the Land. At first, neo-Zionists regarded settlement of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights as the ultimate act of patriotism and felt connected to all the previous colonisation projects of the Land that had been initiated since the late nineteenth century. But earlier settlement targets there had been almost met in full. Fulfilment now meant geographically reorientating settlement energy into the heart of mixed Palestinian–Jewish towns in Israel, such as Ramla, Lod, Jaffa and Acre – a move that had already sparked many violent clashes and heightened tensions in places where Palestinians and Jews had coexisted quite peacefully in the past. Such actions are upheld by rabbis who issue injunctions prohibiting the letting or selling of flats to Arabs, befriending Arabs, and most definitely marrying an Arab.

  Neo-Zionist energy was also directed towards the attempt to impose stricter religious rule over public space, over the judiciary and on legislation. Its main target was the Supreme Court, because of its attempt to safeguard the public sphere from religious interference. So far, the secular Jews in certain areas, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa, have quite successfully rejected these initiatives, whereas those in Jerusalem decided to leave and rebuild their lives in suburbia.

  The neo-Zionist view on the past is even more nationalist and romantic than the consensual Zionist view of it. Israel of the Second Temple era was the glorious past which must be reconstructed. The resemblance between the neo-Zionists and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party adherents is quite striking. Both here and there, these groups wished to demolish a past of several hundred years in the name of a more distant past of several thousand years. As a result, neo-Zionists took seriously the idea of rebuilding a Third Temple to replace Haram al-Sharif and preparing cadres of priests to serve there when the time would come – although they differ on how to achieve this goal, whether by exploding the two mosques on the Temple Mount, or waiting for divine intervention to pave the way for their scheme.18

  The Next Generation: Education in Twenty-First-Century Israel

  Apart from having a principal role in every Israeli government since 1996, the neo-Zionists’ greatest success was having prolonged control over the educational system in Israel. In the late 1990s, they still shared the office with Meretz, a left Zionist party that was soon pushed out of mainstream politics. This impossible double control over the educational system, of a leftist minister of education and a neo-Zionist deputy, reflected the post-Zionist period of knowledge production in Israel. Throughout the 1990s, the balance of power in academia tilted towards the post-Zionist view, whereas the balance of power in the political field was still in the hands of classical Zionism; given the strong neo-Zionist opposition, the field of education had an unclear balance of power. But by the time the decade had come to an end, the academic as well as the educational system had shed all post-Zionist inclinations and resumed knowledge production in a classical Zionist way, with a growing tendency to paint history in neo-Zionist colours. For most of the first half of the twenty-first century the Ministry of Education was under the firm control of the Likud and oversaw the ousting of all textbooks that were suspected of being even slightly influenced by post-Zionist scholarship. The Knesset’s education committee assisted enthusiastically in this process, so all in all there was no need to have a neo-Zionist minister from the extreme right to execute the new strategy.

  Under the Likud ministers of education, in cooperation with a cohort of academics, many of whom hailed from the national religious Bar-Ilan University and its satellite, Ariel University, in the occupied West Bank, the neo-Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel constituted the ideological infrastructure for the official educational system. The neo-Zionists produced several educational kits (textbooks, curricula, and so on) which would have the power to impact the next generation of Jews in Israel. These kits could produce only one type of graduate: racist, insular, and extremely ethnocentric. The message that came through clearly, as found in research conducted by Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University and, more recently, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan of the Hebrew University, is to fear the Other inside and around you – the Other being the Arab world around Israel, the Palestinian neighbourhoods, the Palestinian citizens inside Israel, and non-Jewish immigrants. A good example of that sort of thing is the school textbook titled Those Were the Years – Israel’s Jubilee, which covers the state’s chronicles since its foundation in 1948.19 The Palestinians barely figure in the book – they are not mentioned with regard to the 1948 war, or as citizens of Israel under a military regime up to 1966, or as an occupied population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967. The presence of Palestinian refugees is something the readers will not know about. They will only become aware of the existence of Palestinian terrorism, which emerged sometime in the 1960s for unknown reasons.

  Another crucial element was the militarisation of the educational system. In 1998 the Ministry of Education announced a new master plan devoted to linking students more closely with the army. The basic idea was to follow children from kindergarten through high school graduation so as to ensure that they would be well prepared for ‘military environment and values’ and that they would ‘be able to cope with situations of pressure and developing leadership skills on a battlefield’.20 The level of physical fitness required by the army would be a precondition for matriculation and graduation, and an obligatory, integral part of the future educational system would be participation in army manoeuvres and military indoctrination. This was to be complemented by enriched lessons on Zionism and Eretz Israel studies. In the final three years of high school, the scheme aimed at ‘increasing the motivation and preparedness for the IDF’. During the initial year there would b
e a focus on ‘the individual’s commitment to his or her homeland’, and in the following two years, on ‘actual participation in military life’.21 In a way, this had always been done at schools, but always as a marginal part of school life; moreover, its features were formulated by more mainstream Zionists. Now the individual pupil would learn the history of the land according to the neo-Zionist interpretation – an education bound to shape his or her vision of the future. At the time, the universities seemed to offer some sort of counterbalance, but already, even before the demise of post-Zionist scholarship, it was doubtful how much a post-Zionist lecturer could do, even if he or she were lucky enough to have the opportunity to voice different opinions.

  While the neo-Zionist education plans began to be implemented, the final products of the post-Zionist era didn’t arrive at the Ministry of Education until the Ehud Barak government was in office (1999–2001). After all, it took several years for the books that had been commissioned back in 1993 to be produced. Consequently, the finished post-Zionist products were handed to a minister from the left Zionist party Meretz, who, as mentioned, had a neo-Zionist deputy in keeping with the impossible coalition that Barak tried to sustain. So, while the schools were slowly being introduced to the new version of neo-Zionism, they were also being given post-Zionist textbooks. This contradiction created a bit of mayhem that even reached the front page of the New York Times.22 The fact was, these were only mildly post-Zionist textbooks that probably would not have attracted any special attention in the early 1990s, but that later, when they actually entered the classroom, represented sacrilegious and heretical views. In any case, they were soon cleansed from the system.