The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  17 Flapan, The Birth of Israel, p. 19.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., pp. 119–52.

  20 Ibid., pp. 152–87.

  21 Ibid., pp. 187–212.

  22 Benny Morris, ‘The New Historiography’, Tikkun, 3, (November/December 1989), pp. 19–35, reprinted in Benny Morris, 1948 and After, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 1–34.

  23 The English version of Shabtai Teveth’s critique appeared in an article ‘Charging Israel with Original Sin’, Commentary, (September 1989). A good summary of that stage in the debate can be found in Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate About 1948’ in Ilan Pappe, ed., The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 1999 (2006), pp. 287–304.

  24 See the lecture by Aharon Shay and David Tal on the new history given in a Van-Leer Conference, ‘The New History in Israel’, March 1996.

  25 Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. iii–vi.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Pappe, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1948–51.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Pappe, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, pp. 26–7.

  30 Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1992.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, pp. 16–46.

  33 And remade in 1988, see Walid Khalidi, ‘Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 18:69 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–20.

  34 Ilan Pappe, ‘Were They Expelled?: The History, Historiography and Relevance of the Refugee Problem’, in Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cortan, ed., The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1988, London: Ithaca Press, 1999, pp. 37–62.

  35 Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London: Oneworld, 2006, pp. 1–10.

  36 Shlaim, The Iron Wall.

  37 Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, New York: Owl Books, 1998.

  38 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

  39 Meron Benvenisti, Sons of Cypresses: Memories, Reflections and Regrets From a Political Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

  40 See Ilan Pappe, Out of the Frame.

  6 The Emergence of Post-Zionist Academia, 1990–2000

  1 A short reference to the conference can be found in Pinchas Ginosar and Avi Bareli, eds, Zionism: A Contemporary Controversy, Sdeh Boker, Israel: The Ben Gurion Heritage Centre, 1996, p. 8 (Hebrew).

  2 Again it would be good to refer here to Honig-Parnass, False Prophets, and Ephraim Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Fundamentalist Politics in Israel, London: Zed Books, 2003.

  3 Lawrence Stone, The Past and Present Revisited, London: Longman, 1989, p. 8.

  4 Hanan Hever, ‘The Post-Zionist Situation’, in Gil Eyal, ed., Four Lectures on Critical Theory, Jerusalem: Van Leer, 2012, pp. 73–94 (Hebrew).

  5 Edward Said, ‘New History, Old Ideas’, Al-Ahram Weekly, (21–7 May 1998).

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, New Left Review, 10, (July/August 2001), p. 11.

  9 Oren Yiftachel, ‘Ethnocracy and Geography: Territory and Politics in Israel/Palestine’, Middle East Report, geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/paper3.html

  10 Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, ‘The Military Rule as a Mechanism of Control of the Arab Citizens’, Hamizrah Hahadash, 42, (2002), pp. 57–69 (Hebrew).

  11 Dan Rabinowitz, ‘Natives with Jackets and Degrees: Othering, Objectification and the Role of the Palestinians in the Co-existence Field in Israel’, Social Anthropology, 9: 1, (2000), p. 76.

  12 Hillel Cohen, The Present Absentees: The Palestinian Refugees in Israel Since 1948, Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2000 (Hebrew); Yoav Peled and Nadim Rouhana, ‘Transitional Justice and the Right of Return of the Palestinian Refugees’, Theoretical Inquires in Law, 5:2, (2004), pp. 317–32.

  13 Sharon Groves, ‘Interview with Marcia Freedman’, Feminist Studies, (22 September 2002).

  14 Yuval Yonay, ‘A Queer Look at the Palestinian–Jewish Conflict’, Theory and Criticism, 19, (Autumn 2001), pp. 269–75 (Hebrew).

  15 Eyal Gross, ‘Theo Meintz is Gone’, from his blog Eyalgross.com/blog, (14 June 2013) (Hebrew).

  16 Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; and Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, London: Pluto, 2002.

  17 Baruch Kimmerling, ‘State Building, State Autonomy and the Identity of the Society – the Case of Israel’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 6:4, (December 1993), pp. 369–429.

  18 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995.

  19 Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1995.

  20 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, New York: Verso, 2009; Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism.

  21 Amnon Raz-Karkozkin, ‘Exile Within Sovereignty: Towards a Critique of the “Negation of Exile” in Israeli Culture’, parts 1–2, Theory and Criticism, 4/5, (1993/94), pp. 23–56 and pp. 113–32 respectively (Hebrew). See an extensive discussion on these articles by Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, pp. 127–30.

  22 Gur Elroi, Immigrants: Jewish Immigration to Eretz Israel, Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2004 (Hebrew).

  23 Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

  24 Lev Greenberg, ‘The Arab–Jewish Drivers’ Union Strike, 1931: A Contribution to the Critique on the National Conflict Sociology’, in Ilan Pappe, ed., Jewish–Arab Relations in Mandatory Palestine: A New Approach to the Historical Research, Givat Haviva: The Institute of Peace Research, 1995 (Hebrew); David De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy: The Roots of Red Haifa, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1999 (Hebrew); Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries.

  25 Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, ‘The Emergence of Militaristic Nationalism in Israel’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 3: 1, (1989), pp. 5–49.

  26 Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

  27 Yagil Levy, Israel’s Materialist Militarism, New York: Lexington Books, 2007.

  28 Hagit Gur-Ziv, Statements on Silence: The Silence of Israeli Society in the Face of the Intifada, Tel Aviv: The Centre for Peace, 1989 (Hebrew); Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012; Diana Dolev, ‘Academia and Spatial Control: The Case of the Hebrew University Campus on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem’, in Haim Yacobi, Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, London: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 227–45. An important figure in this trend was Rela Mazali, and one of her recent contributions is ‘A Call for Liveable Futures’, Huffington Post, (25 June 2010).

  29 Uri Ram, Israeli Society.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

  32 For Zvi Efrat’s work in English, see the book he co-authored with Meron Benvenisti, Nadav Harel, Gideon Levy et al., A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, London: Verso, 2003.

  33 Alexander Kedar, ‘The Legal Transformations of Ethnic Geography: Israeli Law and the Palestinian Landholder, 1948–1967’, Journal of International Law and Politics, 33: 4, (2001), pp. 923–1,000.

  34 Haim Bereshit, ‘Givat Aliya as a Metaphor: Three Aspects’, Theory and Criticism, 16, (2000), pp. 233–8 (Hebrew).

  35 Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, ‘The Thirty-First Floo
r: The University Tower and the Phallocentrism of Zionism’, Theory and Criticism, 16, (2000), pp. 239–43 (Hebrew).

  36 Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002; and for more on Hever, see Honig-Parnass, False Prophets, p. 197.

  37 Sharon Rotbard, White Cities, Black Cities, Tel Aviv: Babel, 2005 (Hebrew).

  38 John Arthur and Amy Shapiro, ed., Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.

  39 See Tamara Traubman, ‘The Ratio of Mizrachim in the Academia’, Haaretz, (18 October 2007). Ever lower quotas are discussed by Yifat Biton in an interview with the weekly Makor Rishon, (20 May 2011).

  40 Mira Ariel and Rachel Giora, ‘An Analysis of Impositive Speech Acts: Gender Biases in the New Israeli Cinema Discourse’, in Nurith Gertz, Orly Lubin and Judd Ne’eman, eds, Fictive Looks: On Israeli Cinema, Tel Aviv: Open University Press, pp. 179–204 (Hebrew).

  41 From a paper she gave at an AAUP Conference on the academic boycott, February 2006, and which can be accessed at aaup.org

  42 Anat Matar, ‘Israeli Academics Must Pay Price to End Occupation’, Haaretz, (27 August 2009).

  7 Touching the Raw Nerves of Society: Holocaust Memory in Israel

  1 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Cambridge, MA: Southend, 1999, p. 99.

  2 Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 252.

  3 Israel Shahak, letter to the editor, Kol Ha’ir, (19 May 1989).

  4 Ibid.

  5 Shahak, Jewish History, p. 71.

  6 Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinzky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, London: Pluto, 2004, p. 105 and in Jewish History, p. x.

  7 Shahak, Jewish History, p. 135, n. 25.

  8 He repeated these ideas in English in Boaz Evron, ‘The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 10: 3, (1981), pp. 16–26. The original quote is from Boaz Evron, ‘The Holocaust – A Danger to the People’, Iton 77, 21, (May/June 1980) (Hebrew).

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Yehuda Elkana, ‘In Favour of Amnesia’, Haaretz, (2 March 1988).

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Reproduced in English in Amos Elon, ‘The Politics of Memory’, New York Review of Books, (7 October 1993).

  15 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston: Mariner Books, 1999; Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London: Verso, 2003; and Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Westport: Lawrence Hill and Co, 1983.

  16 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 10.

  17 Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, p. 47.

  18 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York: Picador, 2000, appeared first in Hebrew and was the only direct reference in Hebrew to these connections. An even more explicit condemnation can be found in Moshe Zimmermann, ‘The Zionist Dilemma’, Haaretz, (28 October 2004).

  19 Ahimeir’s references are quoted in Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, p. 125; Ben-Avi’s appeared in sequence in Doar Ha-Yom, August and November 1932.

  20 See Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 33.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, ‘Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered’, Modern Judaism, 19: 1, (February 1999), pp. 25–6.

  23 Ibid.

  24 He published his books in Germany and then they were translated into Hebrew. The most recent in which these views are articulated clearly is Germans Against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013 (Hebrew).

  25 One local newspaper, Yerusahlaim (part of Yeidoh Ahronoth) claimed Zimmermann compared the settler youth to the Hitler-Jugend movement (22 September 1995). Zimmermann sued the paper for misrepresentation, but lost the case on 3 February 2005.

  26 Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators.

  27 Ibid, p. 93.

  28 Joseph Massad, ‘The Last of Semites’, Al Jazeera English, (21 May 2013).

  29 Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, p. 93 and Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 31.

  30 Ibid.

  31 David Ben-Gurion’s Speech, Labour Party Archives, Beit Berl, Mapai Secretariat, (7 December 1938).

  32 Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 83.

  33 The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, directed by Benny Brunner, 1995.

  34 Marek Edelman, Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, London: Ocean, 2004; Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  35 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Canto Books, 1983.

  36 Edelman, Resisting the Holocaust.

  37 Quoted in Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 35.

  38 Ibid., pp. 54–6.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 57.

  41 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, New York: Abacus, 1988, pp. 78–85.

  42 Quoted in Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 27.

  43 Ibid., p. 28.

  44 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking, 1968.

  45 See Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide, New York: Transactions Publishers, 2001.

  46 Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, ‘The Morality of Acknowledging/Not-acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide’, Journal of Moral Education, 27:2, (1998), p. 161.

  47 Adi Ofir, ‘On “Hidush Ha-Shem”: The Holocaust as an Anti-Theological Tract’, Politika, 8, (1986), pp. 4–5 (Hebrew). Hilul Ha-Shem means sacrilegious. Ha-Shem is one of God’s names, and Hidush means Renewal.

  48 See Eyal Sivan, Yizkor.

  49 Nurith Gertz, ‘The Early Israeli Cinema as Silencer of Memory’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 24:1, (Fall 2005).

  50 Ibid.

  51 This is the excellent summary of Milton Viorst, ‘After the Fact: A Review of The Seventh Million’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 24:2, (Winter 1995), p. 94; see also Segev, The Seventh Million, pp. 123–40.

  52 Hanna Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials’, Israel Studies, 8:3, (Fall 2003).

  53 Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

  54 Yosef Grodzinsky, Good Human Material: Jews Against Zionists, 1945–1951, Tel Aviv: Maariv, 1998 (Hebrew).

  55 See the episode described in Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, p. 31.

  56 Grodzinsky, Good Human Material.

  57 Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, Albany, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

  58 M. M. Silver, Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanisation of Israel’s Founding Story, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010.

  59 See Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, pp. 24–5.

  60 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 229.

  61 Quoted and discussed in Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi, Miami, FL: University of South California Press, 1995, p. 122.

  62 See Yablonka, ‘The Development of a Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’ and Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, pp. 69–71.

  63 Ibid., pp. 196–8.

  64 Quoted in an interview he gave to Yeidoth Ahronoth on 18 June 1982.

  65 Amos Oz, ‘Hitler Is Already Dead, Mr Prime Minister’, Yeidoth Ahronoth, (21 June 1982).

  66 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 158.


  67 Gur-Ze’ev, ‘The Morality of Acknowledging/Not-acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide’.

  68 Moshe Zuckermann, Shoah in the Sealed Room: The ‘Holocaust’ in the Israeli Press During the Gulf War, Tel Aviv: self-publication 1993 (Hebrew).

  69 Also this year this alternative ceremony took place in the school.

  8 The Idea of Israel and the Arab Jews

  1 Yehouda Shenhav, ‘The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology, and the Property of the Palestinian Refugees of 1948: An Anomaly of National Accounting’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31:4 (November 1999), pp. 605–30.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid., p. 605.

  5 This text is now available in English, see Ella Shohat, ‘Remembering Baghdad Elsewhere: An Emotional Cartography’, Jadaliyya, jadaliyya.com, (1 April 2013).

  6 Ariella Azoulay, ‘Mother Tongue, Father Tongue’, Yigal Nizri, ed., Eastern Appearances: Mother Tongue, Tel Aviv: Babel, 2004, p. 160 (Hebrew).

  7 Quoted in Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, p. 88. See also the apologetic article by Meyrav Wumser, ‘Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question’, Middle East Quarterly, 12:2, Fall 2005, pp. 21–30.

  8 Quoted in Sammy Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978.

  9 Quoted in Sami Shalom Chetrit, The Mizrachi Struggle in Israel, Between Oppression and Liberation, Identity and Alternative, 1948–2003, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004, p. 65 (Hebrew).

  10 Quoted in Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, p. 88.

  11 Aryeh Gelblum, Haaretz, (22 April 1949).

  12 Ilan Pappe, ‘Edward Said’s Impact on Post-Zionist Critique in Israel’, Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, ed., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010, pp. 321–2.

  13 Eli Avraham, The Media in Israel: Centre and Periphery – The Coverage of the Development Towns, Tel Aviv: Breirot, 1993, p. 32 (Hebrew).

  14 Edward Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’, The Edward Said Reader, Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, ed., New York: Vintage, 2000, pp. 68–114; Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims’, Social Text, 19/20, (Autumn 1988), pp. 1–35.