The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  In fact, the Mizrachi Jews had not only lost their Arabic or French; they also lost their ability to speak Hebrew in an accent that could capture the similarities among the Semitic languages, especially the closeness of Arabic to Hebrew. This loss is beautifully expressed in a poem by Sami Shalom Chetrit:

  On the way to ’Ayn Harod [a veteran Zionist settlement]

  l lost my trilled resh [the letter ‘r’ in Hebrew].

  Afterwards I didn’t feel the loss of my guttural ’ayn

  And the breathy het [the letter ‘h’ in Hebrew)

  I inherited from my father

  Who himself picked it up

  On his way to the Land.4

  Post-Zionist Music

  If there was a clear point of dialogue between the Mizrachi constituency that emerged in the 1990s and the post-Zionist challengers, it was a longing for the music they had left behind but could still listen to on the radio and television and more recently via the Internet. There has been a concerted attempt to market Israel as a Western, modern state in the midst of a sea of Arab primitivism and barbarism. But music is part of the local culture and, like Arabic food, it may have the potential to play a more significant role some day in integrating a new kind of Israel into the Arab world. At present, however, it serves no such purpose.

  This was the motivation behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab–Israeli philharmonic orchestra founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. If the fortunes of Arabic music in Israel are any indicator, one cannot be too sanguine about the prospects. The popularity of Arabic music demonstrates a process of appropriation by local Mizrachi musicians of Arabic music as exclusively Mizrachi music. Yet the music had no political or substantial cultural implications for the identity or behaviour of the society or state, and indeed, on occasion, right-wing parties have played it at the very rallies at which they have vented anti-Arab rhetoric. Even the West Bank settlers’ Gush Emunim radio station, Arutz 7 (Channel 7), energetically broadcasts a somewhat Hebraicised version of Arabic music. Despite all these caveats, in the 1990s, music was one of the many means by which Ashkenazi cultural hegemony was challenged.

  Mizrachi music, minus any Arabic language, became a salient feature of the post-Zionist musical revolution that took place in the 1990s. It became a genre by itself – Hebrew lyrics set to Arabic-style music. Today, Israel’s national airline, El Al, offers an audio channel designated ‘Mizrachi music’, a category that also appears in music shops and on radio and TV channels. Back in the 1990s, even Arabic music itself – that is, the music emanating from the Arab world – became popular, whether classics such as Umm Kulthum or the new genre of North African Ra’i.

  The optimistic mood of the 1990s meant that Mizrachi scholars regarded the growing popularity of such music as an indication that Israel was slowly integrating into the Arab world around it. They saw the musicians – especially the early ones who, since they did not have the money or connections to employ established studios, had to produce music on illegal audio cassettes – not only as subversive activists against the law or challengers to hegemonic Western music, but also as harbingers of a new age in Israel. Their cassettes were even compared with those used by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, since cassettes were the medium through which his revolutionary words were spread (other political Islamic movements, too, have relied on cassette tapes).

  Post-Zionist music tended to be more Arabic in style and dotted with lyrics that conveyed some sort of challenge to basic Zionist truths. But in the domain of mainstream music, few of Israel’s pop singers who imitated Western models were willing to risk their relationship with the wider public by being ‘political’. One interesting exception was the pop star Aviv Geffen, at least until 2000, when he, like many others, winced under the ideological pressue. His lyrics included sharp, though simplistic, criticisms of Israeli militarism, and he himself refused to serve in the army. It was, however, his Michael Jacksonesque performance and histrionics, rather than his message, that made him popular. Nevertheless, his continuing appeal did signify an increased local tolerance for nonconformist lyrics that could perhaps have heralded a wider acceptance of less nationalistic ideas among the youth. Alas, it failed to do so.5

  A New Written Word?

  While music appealed to all walks of life, in the 1990s the more educated élite were exposed as never before to the possibility of narrating the idea of Israel through literature and poetry in ways that could be confrontational and, occasionally, even subversive.

  It is somewhat difficult to ascertain whether there really was a post-Zionist literature. Reading was an important pastime in Israeli society, which was always endowed with excellent writers in the Hebrew language. When it came to post-Zionist ideas, there were clear differences between fiction and poetry in Israel. Very few prose writers crossed the consensual lines or were willing even to acknowledge that they worked within the constraints of an ideological orientation imposed by Zionism. Poets, on the other hand, found it easier to experiment with alternative viewpoints. The First Lebanon War of 1982 led some highly regarded poets to write pacifist or at least anti-war poetry, and the tendency to decry the evils of the Israeli occupation through the medium of poetry continued throughout the First Intifada. These poems were never collected in an accessible form; in any case, poetry was and is not widely read in Israel. One trend worth noting, however, was the growing body of Hebrew translations of Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian poetry, a trend that had been building since the 1970s. The literary monthly Iton 77 began to publish such poems regularly in the 1980s, and even though one is free to doubt the broader impact of a journal read by a limited audience, the translations had the potential to disperse the one-dimensional and negative perception of ‘Arab culture’ and to some extent weaken the desire that Israel be a European cultural bastion. Unfortunately, the demise of the post-Zionist era killed these various possiblities at the budding stage.

  On the other hand, in the realm of literature, mainstream publishing houses showed a growing interest in translations of famous writers from the Arab world, especially Palestinian and Egyptian novelists. Palestinian stories that carried a political message were generally not bought or distributed widely. On the other hand, the Hebrew translation of a novel by the Palestinian Israeli novelist Emile Habibi that reconstructed the evil days of the military regime imposed on the Palestinians in Israel until 1966 introduced the Jewish public to a period and to crimes by the state of which they would otherwise have known nothing. His early works were translated by fairly esoteric publishing houses, but he later became a household name, included on the lists of leading publishers, and in 1992 he was awarded the Israel Prize.

  When mainstream interest in Habibi and in novelists throughout the Arab world petered out in the late 1990s, there was a noble but ultimately failed attempt to continue this important work. Usually the publishers that took on the task were one-man – or, in the case of the most prolific among them, Andalus, one-woman – enterprises. In the opening decade of the present century, Andalus specialised in translations from Arabic to Hebrew. The works were sensitively chosen by the owner, Yael Lerer, who was willing Israeli readers to a variety of Palestinian and Arab works, including works focused on how the West and Israel are perceived by the Arab world and the Palestinians. She thus enabled Israeli readers to become more deeply acquainted with the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (who had earlier been translated by a mainstream publishing house) and to be introduced to more avant-garde writers such as the Sudanese Tayeb Salih. One important landmark in this respect was the Hebrew translation of the epic Bab al-Shams by Elias Khoury, the powerful saga of the Nakba and its consequences.

  As for works originally written in Hebrew, so far only a handful have provided anything approaching a new view of Palestinian or Israeli society. Such writers were located on the margins and certainly were not part of the national canon. Shimon Ballas, for example, was quite well known in Iraq, where he had grown up as a
communist, but was either neglected by mainstream critics in Israel or denigrated as having produced a primitive form of literature. Needless to say, publishing houses followed suit; Ballas’s works, which criticised Zionist or Western Orientalism as well as the willingness of Arabs in general to internalise Orientalism, were rejected as unprofitable or as having inadequate cultural value. In his book Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Fiction, published in the 1990s, Yerach Gover commented that Ballas, by presenting himself as an Arab Jew, offered a counter-narrative, a self-declared identity as an Arab Jew who was bound to be perceived by genuine or cynical upholders of Zionism in Israel as someone who betrayed his nation.

  Albert Swissa, who was born in Casablanca in the late 1950s, emigrated late to Israel – 1963.6 His most famous novel, Bound (Aqud in Hebrew), tells the story of the trials and tribulations of Ayush, a Moroccan boy in 1970s Israel. The tale, and the many articles Swissa wrote, presented a softer Arab Jewish counter-narrative, which is probably why he won a prestigious literary prize in 1991. But he never published another book and left off writing to manage a cafe in Jerusalem.

  The most influential writer within this trend was Sami Michael, who was widely read and was better known in Israel than Ballas or Swissa. His main contribution lay in his ability to reveal to Hebrew readers the Palestinian perception of Israeli reality. He, too, eventually left the counter-hegemonic route for a less contrary, and highly productive, existence.

  A different kind of counter-narrative was provided by the poet Yitzhak Laor in The People, Food Fit for a King, a novel that uses every possible literary device, from the names of the heroes to the twists of the plot, to question basic truisms about Israeli society.7 The story of an army unit about to enter the 1967 war, the novel has several endings and butchers more than one sacred Israeli cow. Laor ridicules the sanctity of the army and its heroism on the battlefied and rejects common Israeli notions about genuine friendships forged in war. Here is how the Nakba makes its appearance in another book of his, which tells the story of a tank column that finds itself mistakenly in Tel Aviv on the Day of Independence:

  The procession reached the new commercial centre. The cries echoed all over the country: ‘Who Are We? – Israel! Who Are We All? – Israel!’ One incident, however, spoiled the overall joy, one that really knew no boundaries (the procession hit circles of dancers that blocked its way, and the dancers were asked to halt for a while so that the procession could continue). The incident involved ‘crazy Zamira’, who was the youngest granddaughter of the Iraqi communists in the neighbourhood; she was one of those kids whose parents were never summoned to school when she misbehaved and was punished. They did not trust them more than they trusted her. Suddenly Zamira yelled, ‘You have not heard about Dir Yassin? You criminals! You murderers! You did not hear?’ And she ripped off the military uniform she had donned for the festive day. Everybody laughed at Zamira and the history teacher said, ‘This is not an excuse.’8

  Finally, David Grossman’s work on the Israeli occupation and the status of the Palestinians in Israel presented sights and sounds generally inaccessible to Jews in Israel. Unlike the novelists mentioned above, Grossman ranked high on the best-seller lists for some years. He may have been more mainstream and at times less critical, but his wide readership made him an important part of the challenge.9 His cautious inputs did at least familiarise a wider audience with the Palestinian point of view, even if this greater familiarity did not lead to a recognition of its legitimacy or even validity.

  A Post-Zionist Media?

  The readiness of the Israeli media to open its doors to the new academic viewpoints, albeit for a very short while in the 1990s, can be understood as part of the ambiguous role played by the media in Israeli society. Traditionally, it acted in many ways like a state press in a non-democratic environment, imposing restrictions on itself to an extent unparalleled in democratic countries. Legally, the press operated according to the emergency laws enacted by the British Mandatory authorities in 1945, which were subsequently adopted by the young State of Israel. Although these regulations were used almost exclusively against the Palestinians in Israel, they were also used on rare occasions against the press, notably in the temporary closures of the Hebrew communist daily Kol Ha’am in 1953 and the daily Hadashot in 1984.10 In addition, the press revised its own code of conduct, subordinating the ‘right to know’ to ‘security considerations’ in times of national emergency. There is no Israeli law guaranteeing the press freedom to operate; it is an assumed practice in a self-declared democracy but one which is not protected by law.

  Until 1977, the press accepted the state’s guidance in all matters concerning foreign policy and defence. Thus, ‘sacred cow’ topics such as Israel’s ‘retaliatory’ policy against the Arab states in the 1950s, its atomic policy in the late 1960s, or its arms trades during the 1970s were avoided. This consensual approach to ‘security’ meant that there was no need for the state to impose sanctions on any of the main newspapers. The same situation applied to broadcast media. With the arrival of Internet media, which were far more pluralistic and beyond the reach of government, a new reality unfolded. Nevertheless, self-censorship still held sway.

  Until 1965, Radio Israel was part of the prime minister’s office. That year, it began to be operated (soon to be joined by television, which appeared in Israel in 1968) by a public company, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, whose advisory board comprised representatives from several political parties. One of the main reasons for the smooth cooperation between the government and the press during Israel’s first decades was that most journalists were affiliated with the Labour movement, which held power from the creation of the state until 1977.

  The ascension of the Likud to power created a schism between the more left-leaning press and the right-wing government. The press, for instance, did not accept Likud’s aggressive settlement policy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and was not enthusiastic about the Lebanon War of 1982. Vigorous criticism of government policy, however, did not lead to any change in the basic approach to the ‘sacred cows’ that make the idea of Israel what it is today.

  The press was (and is) guided by a self-appointed committee of editors-in-chief who met regularly with the military censor, accepting his advice on matters concerning state security. The Editors Committee, established in 1948, reviewed every piece of information the press wanted to publish concerning the army or the security services. It should be noted that this self-censorship had wide public support throughout the 1980s: opinion polls showed that the majority of Jewish Israelis favoured limiting the media’s freedom to report on ‘national security’ issues. Overall, then, the press did not deviate from the Zionist consensus, either in the tone of its reports or the orientation of its lead articles.

  Nor did the press, in its by-and-large dismissive presentation of Arabs, especially the Palestinians, deviate from the public imagery of Israeli Palestinians as a ‘fifth column’ of aliens from within. The term ‘Israeli Arabs’ or even Bnei Miutim (members of minority groups) were in common use, the latter term having been coined in the early years of the state. When dealing with Jewish and Palestinian fatalities, whether caused by accidents or acts of terrorism, the press employed different font sizes and placed the items in more or less prominent sections of the newspaper, giving extended and careful detail where Jews were concerned and only brief and general references where Palestinian casualties were reported.11 Even tragedy or loss operated on different scales. Indeed, the very presence on newspaper staffs of ‘our special reporter on Arab affairs’ to cover Arab politics within Israel – even infrequently and in a limited fashion – underscored the segregation (there was no Arab correspondent who was an expert on Jewish affairs).

  In the 1990s, changes began to occur in the Israeli press, as they did in academia, caused in part by new ideological insights but also facilitated by the partial privatisation of the print and electronic media at that time. The three leading dailies, Ha
aretz, Maariv, and Yedioth Ahronoth, were owned by three families, and Israel’s second TV channel, which appeared in the 1990s (as well as channel 10, which arrived with the advent of cable TV), was run by private companies that shared time on the screen.12 This turned the media into a kind of liberal watchdog, a function it had not previously fulfilled. Now granted a greater degree of free speech and opinion, the press took stands against human rights abuses in Israel, which concerned Palestinians. Privatisation also led to the first bold articles exposing corruption and financial embezzlement in the army and the security forces.

  Another factor that contributed to the relative openness and pluralism of the media was the debate concerning the First Lebanon War and the First Intifada. Although the intifada was launched at the end of 1987, it was not until 1989 that Israeli journalists, especially print journalists, began to report what the national television and radio had avoided presenting: the daily brutalities inflicted on the population in the occupied territories. There were several reasons for this delay. As long as the national unity government was still in power (the Labour–Likud coalition was in office 1984–90), the press, with its pro-Labour orientation, hesitated to criticise the IDF’s actions in the territories. The right-wing coalition under Yitzhak Shamir that took over in 1990 was an easier target.

  Among the Israeli reporters who already stood out for coverage of this debate was Gideon Levy of Haaretz, who brought to the attention of Israeli readers the human tragedies arising from the continuing closures of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their moral implications. Also in Haaretz, columnist Amira Hass, who lived for three years in Gaza, made Israelis aware of life under occupation and later in the 1990s graphically conveyed the illusions and disappointments generated there by the Oslo Accords.