by Ilan Pappe
Preceding the establishment in the 1980s of the first women’s studies programme in an Israeli university, Israeli NGOs were intensely active, united in the wish to push forward a progressive feminist agenda but divided on the strategy for doing so. The resulting feminist research addressed a variety of topics and included the rewriting of women’s history in the Zionist movement and in Israel, highlighting the misogynist attitude of the society and state in the 1950s, and the discovery of unknown stories of feminists in the pre-state period and the early years of the state.
Another import from America was queer theory. Scholarship on gay and lesbian politics now began to develop in Israeli academia and to become fused into the post-Zionist agenda. The academics who were involved in introducing these issues to the scholarly community, such as the sociologist Yuval Yonay from the University of Haifa, also wrote extensively on the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. But in many cases the focus on gay and lesbian rights inside Israel was not associated with the oppression of other groups within the state. Nevertheless, the raising of gay issues was a revolutionary development, given the hostile attitude of Judaism to homosexuality.14 The first public activist on this issue was a German Jew named Theo Meinz, who came out openly as a gay man in 1956.15 For many years, gays had to be content with being active within the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, founded in 1972, as any other reference was forbidden in Israel. But the 1980s saw a flourishing of NGOs and university study modules that investigated gay issues, thus adding to the sense of pluralism in the local academy and society.
Unfortunately this new openness was later used by mainstream academia to deflect any attempt to criticise it for complicity in the occupation or the oppression of the Palestinians. The Israeli academic establishment attempted to fend off calls for an academic boycott of Israel earlier in the 2000s by turning to gay and lesbian lobbying groups around the world – a move that was later dubbed ‘pinkwashing’. Broadcasting Tel Aviv as the most gay-friendly city in the West (a title it wins frequently) was one of the main campaigns supported by the government in order to undercut the boycott. Quite a few groups, including some powerful ones in the United States, refused to partake in the ‘Brand Israel’ campaign and were fully aware that while life may go on happily for gays in Tel Aviv, a few kilometres away millions of people are incarcerated in the huge megaprison of the West Bank and the ghetto of Gaza.
More familiar areas of inquiry developed impressively in the 1990s, such as political economy. Scholars such as Michael Shalev and Shimshon Bichler, joined the critical sociologists in pointing to the economic interests and materialist realities that lay behind the ideological project – not only in the 1948 war, but also thereafter. They were followed by others, such as Dalit Baum, who described the economic realities and benefits behind the continued occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.16
As the group of challengers grew, the chronological and thematic scope of the research expanded enormously. Earlier, even ancient, periods were now revisited, as bold, new, and previously taboo themes were tackled. The ancient past was revisited under the influence of critical theories on nationalism as an invented, engineered story that told us more about the nature of modern Zionism than about what really happened in those distant years. Baruch Kimmerling opened the way through his exposure of the invented tale of two thousand years of exile, and how it was used to justify the colonisation of Palestine.17
Yael Zerubavel, an Israeli historian who taught in the United States, added to this the intriguing insight that the ancient stories of heroism, such as Masada, that were the fulcrum of the Zionist metanarrative, were actually tales of defeat and total failure, as were many later acts of heroism.18 Similar but probably even more outrageous from a Zionist point of view was the anger voiced by the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda about Zionism’s chosen and revered ancestors: the Jewish rebels against Rome.19 As Zerubavel rightly commented, their rebellion ended in total failure. Ben-Yehuda went further: he called them a bunch of thieves and murderers, and cast a blaming finger at the Zionist archaeologists for providing what he saw as false scholarly scaffolding for that narrative. Shlomo Sand and Gabriel Piterberg, each in his own way, would later shed more light on how the past, even the biblical one, served to create a society suffused with romantic nationalism in the eyes of Sand and a settler colonialist society in the eyes of Piterberg.20
The more recent past, such as the centuries preceding the emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, has not been extensively revisited, but in this respect the work of Amnon Raz-Karkozkin should be mentioned. (In fact, Raz-Karkozkin, who regarded himself as an anti-Zionist, was quite unhappy about the term ‘post-Zionism’ but nonetheless took part in many of the workshops, conferences and publications that pushed the academic critique of Zionism.) In a two-part article published in the main venue for post-Zionist critique during the 1990s, Theory and Criticism (founded in 1991 at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), he explored what he called ‘the Zionist denial of Exile’.21 The first part shows how the depiction of Jewish life in Europe as exilic since the end of Roman times was used in order to deny the Palestinians’ right to their homeland; the second part examines the distortions created by this depiction, as Jewish life in Europe did not centre on or relate to Palestine. Raz-Karkozkin also examines in this article how this idea of Jewish life in history as a life of exile determined the negative attitude of Zionism towards the Arab Jews, who, from the Zionist-narrated perspective, unnecessarily extended the exile longer than anyone else. Some years later, a professor from the University of Haifa, Gur Elroi, would demonstrate the mundanity of the motives of most of the settlers who came to Palestine – their emigration had nothing to do with the establishment’s narration of their journey as a wish to return home from their exilic life in Europe.22
The Mandatory period was a topic frequently revisited. Historians and sociologists, such as Zeev Sternhell, belittled the role of socialism in the Zionist project in Palestine and depicted it as romantic nationalism.23 A more positive approach was taken by historians who showed that the natural instinct of Palestinians and settlers was to coexist and collaborate on the basis of class association in industrial struggles – an instinct crushed by the Zionist trade unions. Lev Greenberg examined the joint industrial action of drivers; David De Vries examined the industrial action of junior clerks; Deborah S. Bernstein described in detail the policies of the Zionist trade unions.24 In addition to all of this, militarism – never before deemed relevant in Israeli academia – emerged as a new field of study. It began with a close look, provided by a couple who began their work in the Haifa group mentioned earlier. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld worked as a team to expose the mammoth growth of the military industry in Israel, claiming that it had arrested overall economic growth over the years.25 They were followed by a young sociologist, Uri Ben-Eliezer, then a member of the department of sociology in Tel Aviv, who depicted the militarisation of Israel not only as an inevitable product of the state’s precarious existence in the midst of a hostile world but also as a means of obtaining the wholehearted commitment of every citizen to the state, which is why women are still recruited and men are called for reserve duty until the age of fifty-five.26
The work on militarism later focused on two aspects. The first was the state and pre-state history, which showed how from very early on, the use of military force was more than tactical – that it was part of the ideology. The formative years were the 1950s, when ‘special forces’ units were created to punish and challenge Palestinian refugees who were trying to return clandestinely to their homeland, and who later organised themselves into guerrilla units, leading to the official founding of Fatah in the mid-1960s). The aura of these special forces – the most important of which was Unit 101, whose commander was Ariel Sharon – transformed them into the main core group from which Israel’s most famous leaders, such as Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, were recruited. Their world view would turn Israel
into an extremely active and aggressive agent on the regional scene, espousing the belief that the language of military power was the best means of ensuring the state’s existence and success.
Yagil Levy, a sociologist now at the Open University of Israel, associated militarism with the treatment of new Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.27 His work showed that the decisions of where to settle new arrivals and how to integrate them into Israeli society were made not only by politicians but also by generals. Locating them on the borders of the Arab world served more than one purpose: confronting them with Arab hostility would help to de-Arabise them; they would serve as a human presence on the long borders that Israel shared with its ‘enemies’, and recruiting them into the army was regarded as the best means of ‘Israelising’ them.
Indeed, identifying the nexus between education and the militarisation of the society was part of the new post-Zionist agenda. Hagit Gur-Ziv, Rela Mazali, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Diana Dolev and many others examined the impact of militarism on the educational system and reached some dismal conclusions about the possibility for change from within Israeli society in regard to issues of peace, democracy and equality.28 Their works exposed the highly militarised space that Israeli Jews inhabited from cradle to grave.
Not only was the army examined at close range – academia, too, became a new object of inquiry. The analysis of its role was provided mainly by Israeli graduates of the New School, a university in New York’s Greenwich Village that became the alma mater of progressive social scientists around the world. One such graduate, Uri Ram, was particularly influential in the new post-Zionist approach to methodology. He was one of the first to introduce post-structuralism and postmodernism to the local academic scene. For more than a decade, he has taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.29
Ram showed how, in their analysis of Israeli society, Zionist sociologists elaborated theories to fit notions such as the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ and the ‘melting pot’. They described a modernised society in which the white, Western component – the Jewish immigrants from Europe – coached the rest, be they Jews from Arab countries or Palestinians who remained in Israel, on how to emulate them and become better citizens in a Jewish democracy. The modernisation theories embraced by the Israeli sociological establishment disregarded the heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and multicultural society that had developed since 1948.30 To these sociologists, Israel was a paragon of successful modernisation process and progress. Ram not only challenged the validity of this claim but argued that the sociologists provided academic justifications for the discriminatory and oppressive policies that resulted from such an interpretation of the idea of Israel.
The scholars who worked on the history of the State of Israel were in tune not only with the realities around them but also to the contemporary global debates about power and knowledge. An important component of the new research, in addition to aspects of history and society, was a lively inquiry into theoretical questions. As a result, there arose a vibrant local conversation about knowledge and power that yielded important texts relevant not only for local consumption but for more general use elsewhere.
Because of this interest in theory, tremendous effort was directed towards the translation into Hebrew of major works, foremost among them those of Michel Foucault, as well as the revisiting of archaic translations of Marx and Marxist literature. These books were published by a Tel Aviv publisher, Resling, and the articles in Theory and Criticism. This effort also required expertise and familiarity with new methodologies, so that academics, within their professional remit, would be able to expose the production of hegemonic knowledge and, even more important, offer ways to intervene in the process.
Post-Zionist Methodology
Post-Zionist scholars continued to accumulate new evidence about the past and new data about the present, within the restrictions imposed by the thirty-year delay in declassification of materials in the Israeli archives. The new archival evidence exposed previously unknown domestic and foreign policies, some of them quite horrific. One example was the forced kidnapping of Yemeni Jewish babies in the 1950s from their mothers, on the grounds that they were unfit parents, so that the babies could be given over for adoption by Ashkenazi parents. The babies were taken while the mothers were still in hospital; they were told that the babies were dead. These revelations caused a Yemeni Jewish rabbi, Uzi Meshulam, to barricade himself and family members in a house in the centre of Israel in 1994, demanding truth and justice.31 Also found in the archives were nasty and unpleasant statements about anyone who was not an Ashkenazi Jew – quotes from top ministers and journalists in all the major newspapers. The archives shed new light as well on the activities of the Israeli intelligence services in Arab countries, including both active interference in Arab politics and ways of triggering the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel.
But the vast majority of academics were not focused simply on the collection of new evidence. They were more interested in the deconstruction of existing evidence and knowledge for the purpose of exposing the realities that lay behind the accepted vision of Israel. So they reread newspaper articles, speeches, and novels; they looked again at art and movies. This second look enabled them to pose a more fundamental challenge to the idea of Israel.
Thus, Zvi Efrat revisited the iconic photography of the 1950s, which in fact recorded the destruction of Palestine even though the photographs were commissioned to commemorate the forestation of the country; the Jewish National Fund had planted European pine trees all over the villages destroyed and depopulated by the IDF during the 1948 war.32 Galia Zlamansov Levi examined how the Bible was taught in Israeli schools as a text that justified military occupation and dispossession, minus any exploration of moral issues or questions of justice. Alexander Kedar looked at the Israeli land law regime and presented it as a colonialist structure in its intent, praxis and objectives.33 Haim Bereshit deconstructed the history of urban planning in Jaffa as a microcosm of the Zionist policy of de-Arabisation of the country.34 Ilan Gur-Ze’ev discussed the physical structure of the University of Haifa, built on Mount Carmel, as a project aimed at ‘erasing the existence of the other cultures on the mountain … its phallic towers eradicating the memory of the destroyed Palestinian villages as well as the natural flora of the area’.35
Every medium through which the historical narrative of Zionism and the essence of the idea of Israel were conveyed was examined, deconstructed and exposed as a text that hid, distorted, rejected and oppressed the Other, whoever that might be. Like their colleagues in the West who ventured in a similarly critical way to question their own national ethos and idealism, the post-Zionists sought to salvage hidden or repressed voices of Israeli society.
Critical theories on nationalism, relativist historiosophies, postmodernist hermeneutical techniques, and deconstructive methodologies were all employed in the service of understanding how the Zionist interpretation of reality affected the life of everyone who lived, or used to live, in Israel and Palestine. Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, for instance, developed a subfield of postcolonial Jewish studies that, among its other issues, examines how Zionism transformed Judaism and turned the Jewish victim into a victimiser, while Hannan Hever reread the literary Israeli canon through the lens of the most up-to-date postcolonial theoretical analyses.36 One of the most intriguing samples of such work was a reaction to the UNESCO declaration that an area of old Tel Aviv that was built in the 1930s–50s be labelled a World Heritage site. Sharon Rotbard, an Israeli architect, used a postcolonial prism to show how the so-called White City could not exist without the Black City, the depopulated and now gentrified town of Jaffa.37
As I am rereading these sources, it seems that whether these and other scholars were using the term ‘postcolonial’ or ‘colonial’ as the preferred adjective in their studies, for ordinary Israeli readers the overall message was the same. Even when a scholar applied updated theoretical prisms to the case study of Zionism, the project could not but be describ
ed as a nineteenth-century colonialist enterprise that continues to this day to focus on erasing the Palestinians from the land in any way possible. The only drawback was that the theories, especially when translated into Hebrew, brought with them a highly specialised language which was not accessible to a wider public.
Two tools attracted this new scholarship in particular: deconstruction, as offered by literary criticism and hermeneutics, and positionality as defined by cultural anthropology. In simple terms, and as it was understood in Israel, positionality is the right of scholars to position themselves vis-à-vis their research in accordance with whatever identity they choose. As a result, whatever your identity, or your politics of identity, it plays a crucial role in why, what, and how you research a given topic. The more representative academia becomes of the full range of positions, the better its work will be – and if significant positions are not represented, then the research will be biased against the very groups whose representatives are absent. The best way to fully appreciate the nature of positionality is to juxtapose it with the older idea that it does not matter who the researcher is, since all research is scientific, even that done by humans on humanity, and is therefore accurate and truthful.
Deconstruction enabled scholars in Israel to treat the Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel as a text that could destroy, or elevate, real people’s lives and fortunes. The gist of the approach was that the power of Zionism, either as a national movement in the eyes of some or as a settler colonialist movement in the eyes of others, is the omnipotent narrator; and that in many ways is lived according to, or in defiance of, this narrator’s script or plot. Consequently, every human cognition, action and emotion can be examined as a literary text in which one can identify the plot, the heroes, the villains, and the genre.