The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  But the war did stand at the gateway to two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, that exposed some basic Zionist truisms as doubtful at best and as fallacies at worst. In the relative calm after 1973, these tensions brought to the fore certain demons that had been safely hidden away, the most important of which was the claim that the state was a successful melting pot in which a new Jewish identity had been forged. What became apparent was that the society was ridden with tensions between various cultural and ethnic groups, and was only precariously cemented together by the lack of peace and the continual sense of crisis.

  It was at this time that social and cultural undercurrents of dissatisfaction and antagonism in Israeli society began to erupt. These were transformed into social protests against the evils inflicted by the state on deprived Jewish communities, mostly North African in origin. Young and vociferous activists tried to emulate the dissent voiced by African Americans and so, in the early 1970s, established their own Black Panther movement, led by a group of extraordinary young men.

  Reuven Abargel, who was born in Morocco, arrived in Israel in 1950 at the age of three. His family settled in Musrara, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem from which the residents had been evicted in 1948; in those days, it served as a buffer zone between Jordanian East Jerusalem and Israeli West Jerusalem. It was a slum, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. Occasionally the respective armies exchanged fire.

  Abargel spent some time outside the neighbourhood and was educated in a kibbutz in the Negev. When he came back, he, like so many other youngsters, lived on the margins of the law and normative society. Seeing his family’s poverty and lack of hope, in 1971 he decided jointly with friends from the neighbourhood to found a protest movement that would demand government investment in the educational, transportation, and housing infrastructure in the poor neighbourhoods.35 Abargel’s friend Charlie Biton, who also arrived in Israel in 1950, came from Casablanca at the age of two; his family, too, had been thrown into the slum of Musrara. Other friends from the neighbourhood included Saadia Marciano and Kochavi Shemesh. Together with another ten friends, and with the help of social workers who operated a community centre in the neighbourhood, they founded the Israeli Black Panthers.

  The movement demanded a new and fairer distribution of the economic resources of the state and a share in the definition of its cultural identity. The protesters failed to move the Israeli left but attracted the attention of the right, which skilfully manipulated their protest into a mass movement that brought Menachem Begin to power in 1977. In this shifting landscape, the Israeli left lost the working classes, the natural constituency for such movements in the West. In addition, some of its adherents in academia began to drift away from Socialist Zionism and began to view critically their former political home. In particular, they saw the Labour Party’s defeat at the polls in May 1977 as an indication of the potential failure of the Zionist project as a whole.

  Meanwhile, protests and discontent continued against the ongoing discrimination against Israeli Jews of North African origin, whose second generation expressed grievances against the Ashkenazi-dominated national memory. They pointed to the exclusion of the North African experience from the collective story of early statehood. The protests exposed the deep-rooted racism played out in practice within the ideal of Israel as a ‘melting pot’ society. They highlighted the continual institutional discrimination against the Mizrachi Jews.36 When academics joined this protest movement in the footsteps of activists on the ground, they not only investigated the discrimination in their own time but also sought its roots in the early years of statehood.

  The first group of academics to respond to Mizrachi grievances operated at the University of Haifa. The university itself had been established in 1963 as a branch of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem but gained its independence in 1972. This was an ideal place for novel thinking, located along a ridge of Mount Carmel – where it became a familiar feature of the northern scenery, with its eerie thirty-floor tower designed by the communist Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer during the tenure of the legendary megalomaniac mayor Abba Hushi. The university boasted a fresh and innovative department of sociology, and until they were tamed, these sociologists challenged the orthodox methodology and Zionist commitment of the leading Israeli sociologists of the day.

  One of their main targets, and the best known among their former Hebrew University professors, was Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt. A Polish Jew who emigrated to Palestine at an early age, he was groomed to be the doyen of Israeli sociology under Martin Buber. He introduced the theory of modernisation as both an academic pastime and a guidebook for future Israeli government policies towards anyone who was neither Western nor modern. The theory was that anyone who encounters a Western society is, at the end of the day, bound to be Westernised, which is to say to be modernised and introduced to the world of economic progress, social stability and liberal democracy. Nevertheless, such an integration cannot be expected to happen voluntarily or autonomously – the new recruits must be coached into becoming modern.37

  When that theory became policy in the 1950s, it signified that the state had the power first to define who was and who was not modern, and then to choose the means by which to modernise them. These means included de-Arabising Mizrachi Jews, secularising Orthodox Jews, and breaking traditional practices of rural or immigrant societies while at the same time compensating or rewarding these people by locating them at the social and geographical margins of the society until the process of modernisation was successfully completed.

  In the era of nationalism, the idealisation of one group often requires the demonisation of another. The idea that Israel epitomised modernity meant that Palestine signified the precise opposite: primitiveness. Similarly, if modern Judaism epitomised enlightenment, then Arab nationalism was the heart of darkness, and as Ashkenazi Jews were progressive, Mizrachi Jews were regressive. These antitheses wounded and scarred society in such a way that only a constant state of emergency and near-war could suppress the pain and anger. On the other hand, as this view was the fruit of theoretical research, the Zionist narrative and highly positive self-image was accepted as scientifically valid.

  In response, the University of Haifa challengers approached their research on Israeli history and society with critical distance, paving the way for post-Zionist scholarship. Common to their multifaceted works and interests was the underlying assumption that collective memory was constructed officially through the educational system, the media, and the academy. Directly and indirectly, they accused Israel’s mainstream sociologists of employing methodologies that suited Zionist claims on the land and the Jewish people, and that excluded marginalised groups and narratives that did not fit the self-image of Israel as a Western, Jewish society.

  With the help of historical and sociological research, this group of social scientists hoped to represent as valid and worthy the agendas of deprived groups in Israeli society. They unearthed the hidden voices of the past in Israel – those of North African Jews, Palestinian citizens, women, all those who had been submerged by the Zionist narrative. These scholars made their way into history from departure points suggested by the political organisations that represented these groups.

  Universalism was the key factor that separated these researchers from the traditional historiography and linked them with the critical voices of the future. Politically, they also broke traditional barriers by grouping Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews into a single subject, as was especially evident in the work of Sammy Smooha and Shlomo Swirski. They used a typology that ran contrary to everything that Zionism and Zionist academia had stood for.

  Swirski, an Argentinian Jew, would become the main non-academic expert on social and economic problems in Israel, consulted and listened to by the media as well as politicians. During his early days in Haifa, he was involved in the establishment of a high school based on Mizrachi values and perceptions; later he opened the Adva Centre, which is today the only reliable inform
ation source about poverty and inequality in Israel. Smooha came from Iraq with his family in 1941 and experienced personally the discrimination against Mizrachi Jews. Although an excellent pupil in his elementary school, he was refused entry into a prestigious high school in Tel Aviv and had to work hard as a boy to finance his studies.

  Swirski and Smooha, each in his own way, became severe critics of established sociology in Israel. Swirksi focused on, among other things, the major works of the mainstream sociologists in Israel (S. N. Eisenstadt, Dan Giladi, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak) and the way they depicted the history of Zionism in Palestine. He described how the major actions taken by Zionist settlers were always ascribed to an ideology, but without any discussion of what that ideology entailed or how it acted as a motivation (he sought, for instance, to engage with Karl Marx’s hypothesis that reality informs cognition and not vice versa). He and others suggested that economic interests might be the reason behind the colonisation of Palestine, the oppression of the Mizrachi Jews, and other policies invoked under the rubric of ideology. But more than anything else, Swirski opened the door for the next generation of critical sociologists not to look at ideology, and in particular Zionist ideology, as an object of inquiry which exists outside the reality on the ground. It was part of the reality, he insisted – sometimes a manipulation of that reality and at other times a justification in hindsight for actions taken by individuals and collectives.

  It was a question of responsibility and accountability. Mainstream sociology explained settlement as an ideology and everything that happened afterwards as normalisation – namely, a process in which ideology no longer played, nor did it have to play, an important role. According to later, critical sociologists, Zionism as a colonialist project developed an ideology that justified the continued and thus far never-ending dispossession of the indigenous population. Swirski was more interested in the failure of these works to explain why the settlers’ utopian socialist ideas had in fact created a capitalist society:

  The main problem of these works is that due to their approaches and assumptions, they do not engage in a serious discussion about Zionism as a social project. Whereas in history, the Zionist movement – and in particular the socialist Zionist part of it – was infested with internal debates and hesitations, it is depicted by these authors as a process of selection that produced the best alternative possible. While today still a lot of people ask what should be the future orientation of Zionism, the impression these works leave is that there is no debate anymore, since the natural development that ensued after the right selection has turned Israeli society into a mature and healthy one.38

  Sammy Smooha tackled the works of the mainstream sociologists from a different angle. He painted a picture of social scientists in Israel in the early 1980s as a White Ashkenazi establishment that displayed patronising, and at times racist, attitudes towards Arab culture.39 Smooha called this school of thought in Israeli academia ‘the cultural approach’, and he highlighted sociologists who assumed that an ‘inferior’ culture could absorb a ‘superior’ one as happened in 1977. He explained that mainstream Israeli sociologists depicted this political change as the end of the era of universalist, liberal democracy in Israel and the beginning of an ‘ethnocentric, fanatic, pre-modern and irrational’ era in the state’s history. He took issue with this depiction on two grounds: first, the cultural hegemony of the Ashkenazi Jews did not end with Likud’s rise to power and said it was incorrect ‘to characterise the political Mizrachi culture as nationalist, extreme and anti-Arab’.40 Instead, he contended, the vast majority of the Mizrachi Jews supported the peace with Egypt in 1977 because it was brought about by the Likud and not by the hated Labour Party.

  The Haifa sociologists published their findings in the Hebrew journal Notes on Critique and Theory, still a valuable source for an alternative view of the history and sociology of the idea of Israel. Not long afterwards appeared the work of two Israeli sociologists who were similarly engaged but, like Uriel Tal before them, were lonely voices within established departments of sociology. Baruch Kimmerling worked in the department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Yonathan Shapira in the department at Tel Aviv University. Their input was invaluable for the future deconstruction of the mainstream Zionist historiographical enterprise. They employed conventional sociological theories to explain the domination of the Labour movement in Zionist life and how marginal groups were both co-opted and coerced into full collaboration with a small élite that had held all the power and resources since 1882.41

  These two scholars were the first to suspect that the forefathers of Zionism and modern Israel were not altruistic, committed politicians but rather were motivated by more cynical reasons, such as the wish to remain in power at all costs. This determination rested less on the basis of new evidence and more on their theoretical choice to appraise Zionism as a normal rather than an abnormal chapter in history. They were also the first to explain the malaise of 1970s Israeli society by way of historical research on the Mandatory period. In their new retelling, the Jewish Mandatory political system was far less democratic and egalitarian than it appeared to be in work done by their peers from the Eretz Israel departments.

  Kimmerling and Shapira painted a picture of a far more dictatorial, and at times even sinister, political and social system whose practices and conduct afflicted the politics of Israel for years to come. The most notable of these was its nurturing of mediocre successors who would not endanger the leadership. The researchers showed how party affiliation and ethnic origin, namely, Labour membership and Ashkenazi origin, were the main criteria for being admitted to the better jobs and positions in society and government. Yonathan Shapira characterised Israeli democracy during its first thirty years as a system that gave no room to any kind of opposition, whether ethnic or ideological:

  Israel was not a liberal democracy; it did not nourish individual and minority rights against the power of the majority rule, and therefore did not have an effective opposition party, which is the basic guarantee for a liberal democracy … the public was exposed to a limitless and uncurbed indoctrination and intervention of the hegemonic ideology in its life. This condition of dominance by the ruler, manifested both in institutional and cultural dominance … was what characterised the rule of Mapai in the Israeli political system.42

  These two researchers were also the first to describe the Israeli policy of land purchase as a regime orientated entirely for the sake of creating more space for the Jews at the expense of the Arab minority in Israel. As Kimmerling put it,

  The state made sure that the Palestinians in Israel would be confined geographically, socially and politically through the apparatus of the military rule [imposed on the Palestinians in Israel until 1966] and the general trade unions, the Histadrut, discriminated against the Palestinian citizens, favouring the Jewish workers in terms of salaries and place in the labour market.43

  Yonathan Shapira was born before the creation of the State of Israel and finished his graduate studies at Columbia in 1964, before returning to help found the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tel Aviv. Although part of the university management and leadership, he engaged with Zionism and Israel in a way that was liberated from the reverence and awe his predecessors had showed to the state’s founding fathers. Shapira re-examined the historical origins of the leading Zionist Labour party, Mapai, and found there a propensity for domineering and brutal politics and little trace of pure socialist ideology or a Zionist vision devoid of narrow-mindedness and egotism. He then attributed some of the contemporary problems of Israeli society to the tyrannical nature of the ruling groups within Mapai, which had prevented the emergence of a competent élite during the early years of statehood.44 Shapira was a charismatic lecturer and in many ways ensured that what Mapai’s founding fathers had done – allowing only mediocre successors to grow beside them, so as to leave their authority intact – would not happen in the university. He left behind him a cohort of impressiv
e scholars who continued his work in the same vein of boldness.

  Baruch Kimmerling had a powerful impact of a different kind. Born in 1939 in Romania, he was afflicted with cerebral palsy that would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. His family arrived in Israel in 1952 after narrowly escaping death in the Holocaust. Kimmerling’s physical disability did not prevent him from pursuing a successful academic career at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught until his death. He spent most of his adult life in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Qalunya, which had been destroyed in 1948 and its inhabitants expelled. Kimmerling would digest this fact only in the late 1990s, but when he did so, it further radicalised his critical position towards Israel and Zionism. An obituary in the London Times described him as ‘the first academic to use scholarship to reexamine the founding tenets of Zionism and the Israeli State’. He may not have been the first, but he was indeed among the first.

  This fragile, crippled man wrote and spoke, with the help of others, in a loud, clear voice until disease defeated him. There was an intriguing disjunction between his definitive criticism of Zionism as an ideology, as well as his pioneering analyses of Zionist intentions in the 1948 war, and his low public profile and lack of political involvement. Nevertheless, his writings have had an enduring effect on Israel’s understanding of itself.45