by Ilan Pappe
But they were worth looking at, again as an exercise to gauge where the post-Zionist challenge could have, but has not, taken Israel. How hopeful and naïve in a way were those who prepared the books one can gather from a statement by a member of a committee preparing such books, Avner Ben-Amos of Tel Aviv University, who explained to Haaretz in 1996 the raison d’être of the project:
In the past the teaching of history [in Israel] was dominated by a version which claimed that we [the Israelis] had an unquestionable right to the land to which we returned after 2,000 years of exile, and we reached an empty land. Nowadays we cannot divorce the teaching of history from the debate inside academia and the professional literature. We have to insert the Palestinian version into the story of Israel’s history, so that the pupils would know that there is another group that was affected by Zionism and the Independence [1948] war.23
From the vantage point of 2013, when this book is being written, the saddest and in many ways most disappointing aspect of my survey of the post-Zionist decade is its almost complete lack of influence on the educational system in Israel. Despite, or perhaps because of, the impossible wedding of post-Zionist and neo-Zionist control over the educational system during the days of the Barak government, only one side left a legacy that endured into the next century – the neo-Zionist’s. When the new Netanyahu government came into office in 2009 (and again in 2012), both the mandatory and optional kits available for teachers in the State of Israel conveyed the neo-Zionist point of view.
But far worse was the absolute absence of any post-Zionist influence on legislation in Israel, especially legislation in the area of human and civil rights in ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’.
Legalising Apartheid: The Neo-Zionist Version
An especially intensive and energetic wave of legislation against the Palestinians in Israel began in the twenty-first century. The Second Intifada was only a pretext for this; the true trigger was a demographic anxiety, prevalent in the very centre of the establishment, that natural birth and immigration could not tip the population balance in such a way as to ensure Jewish exclusivity and supremacy.
These phobias were articulated most clearly in the annual meeting devoted to the ‘national agenda’, which took place at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (now a private university) on the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv. Ever since the late 1980s this venue had served as a kind of old people’s home for famous Israeli academics, most of whom identified with the Labour Party. Every year they published a report on the state of the nation, based on speeches delivered to them by the country’s top politicians, generals and strategists. Their report, commissioned by successive Israeli governments, set the national agenda for the next few years.24 From the 1990s onwards the report included implicit recommendations for the transfer of Palestinians from Israel if and when they doubled their share of the population (from 20 per cent to 40 per cent) and for the reintroduction of nationalist indoctrination into the school system, a recommendation enthusiastically endorsed by all the governments, as we have seen.
It took a few years for the first recommendation to be implemented; apparently, implementation required the shock of the October 2000 events inside Israel to be activated. That month, the Palestinians in Israel joined in massive demonstrations in support of the Second Intifada, and the brutal police reaction left thirteen Palestinian citizens dead. The vast majority of media regarded these protests as acts of treason, and the politicians followed suit by blaming the Palestinians and their leaders for the bloody outcome of the protest movement.
And yet until 2009, no initiative for apartheid-like legislation succeeded in passing the final stages required for such initiatives to become law. This self-imposed inhibition disappeared with the re-election of Netanyahu, however, although it must be acknowledged that the prior governments – those of the political midgets who succeeded Sharon, such as Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni – were already giving vent to policies from which Israel had refrained during the 1990s, instigating two brutal and massive assaults, one on Lebanon in 2006 and one on the Gaza Strip in late 2008.
Domestically, it was Netanyahu’s government that channelled this aggression towards the Palestinians inside Israel as well as dissenting Jewish voices in the society. The Knesset became a venue for legalising neo-Zionist attitudes towards these two groups. The former were far more important and in much greater danger of being affected by such new legislation. Numbering a million and a half, they were already living under a regime of oppression that unfortunately was unknown and unnoticed outside Israel. It did not help that even the consensual NGO in the state, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, reaffirmed the deterioration in the conditions and rights of this minority since 2000. Its 2012 report summarised the reality for this group of Israeli citizens as follows:
Aside from the violation of Arab citizens’ right to equality, their lack of access to services, and the discomfort inflicted on them, the exclusion of Arabic from the public space infringes on the dignity of a fifth of Israel’s population and generates a feeling of discrimination and alienation, testifying to their inferior status and damaging their feeling of belonging in Israeli society. On the symbolic level, the absence of Arabic delegitimises the presence of Arabs in the public space.25
Below are listed just a few of the laws that make the Israel of 2014 what it is. This is the Israel that must be marketed inside and outside as the fulfilment of Yosef Gorny’s and Ari Shavit’s claims of its being the most successful modernisation and enlightenment project in modern history.
The Nakba Law of 2009 is probably the most outrageous. It stipulated that whoever would commemorate Israel’s day of independence as a day of mourning would be arrested. Under international pressure it was slightly revised: arrest was replaced by the denial of any public funding to any entity that would commemorate the Nakba. There is not one Palestinian school, cultural centre, NGO, or home in Israel that does not remember and commemorate the Nakba.
The 2011 amendment to the Citizenship Law of 1952, called the Law to Revoke Citizenship for Acts Defined as Espionage and Terrorism, along with similar laws from that year, allows the state to revoke the citizenship of anyone accused of terror and spying. Needless to say, support for the Palestinian struggle against the occupation is declared a terrorist act by Israeli law.
Another law from 2011, the Admissions Committees Law, legalised a known practice in Israel that can ban Palestinian citizens from living in areas that Jewish citizens wish to keep free of Arabs. The law allows existing and new Jewish-majority communities, wherever they are and however they live, to reject requests by Palestinian citizens of Israel to live among them, on the basis of their ‘social suitability’, in other words their ethnicity or nationalism.
And finally, more than once a bill has been introduced in the Knesset that would give preference to Jews (defined in the law as those who served in the Israeli army) in public service, jobs, salaries, and houses, which would compound the effect of a law to mandate every non-Jewish new citizen to swear allegiance to the ‘Jewish and democratic’ State of Israel.26
And that is just a short list of the worst. Ever since 2000, discriminatory practices and informal policies have been legalised by the Knesset, and this is still taking place. The construction of the legal infrastucture for an apartheid state is important for Israel, because its recent governments, including the one elected in 2012, believe in a unilateral annexation of Area C, 40 per cent of the West Bank, as a final act of geographical expansion, even though it adds Palestinians to the overall demographic balance. In that area, Israeli law would be imposed, hence the need to prepare a racist infrastructure for the future, expanded, and possibly final State of Israel.
Post-Zionists were also targeted. The most important law in this respect is the 2011 Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel Through Boycott, which defined as a criminal act, bearing the risk of lengthy imprisonment, any support for a boycott of Israel or for an action abr
oad considered to constitute delegitimisation. To this was added more recently a proposal for a law that would limit foreign funding for human and civil rights organisations in the state. As yet it has not passed.
Finally the legal reality in Israel reflects the ideological stance of the powers that be. Past ambiguities, remorse, and debates about the idea of Israel – all are gone, replaced by the joy felt on Independence Day by Shavit and most other senior journalists.
With the legal, political, and educational systems almost completely taken over by this new, energised version of the idea of Israel, one might have looked to the media and the universities to provide counterbalance and response. The media, however, became so united in its reactions after 2000 that it does not warrant further discussion. As for academia, I return at the end of this book to that domain and illustrate, for the sake of comparison, the earlier scholarly engagement with the history and historiography of Israel’s foundational year of 1948 (after all, it was the work of a handful of serious historians concerning that particular year that triggered the unique 1990s in the Jewish state), on the one hand, and new research on the other, in which one can see how that hesitant journey into the past, fuelled by hopes of creating a different future, ended as if it had never existed at all.
TWELVE
The Neo-Zionist New Historians
Honest readers [of the work of the New Historians] cannot deny most of the facts presented by these historians about Zionism’s policies in the past … and yet it seems that the conclusions that these historians were looking for are aimed at undermining the very legitimacy of the fathers of the nation, who are not alive anymore … We cannot underrate the perils of such an attack … No nation would be able to keep its vitality if its historical narrative were to be presented in public as morally defunct. [Moreover,] the novelty of what the New Historians did was in the perspective not the facts … these are not facts, but deep moral assessments.
– Daniel Pilser, Techelet, 20001
The time that elapsed between the challenge posed by the ‘new historians’ addressing 1948 and their disappearance from the scene was short – less than two decades. The reason for this brevity is doubtless to be found in the fact that the 1948 war is not only a story closely linked to current politics but also a foundational myth. According to Louis Althusser, foundational myths are those most easily absorbed by society and according to which the social order is structured and maintained.2 They provide the narrative that justifies the existence of the state, and as long as they remain relevant to the existing social order, they retain their force. In the case of Israel, of course, and despite the appeal and prominence enjoyed by the post-Zionist discourse for a time, the social order had not changed, which could explain why the society so quickly reverted to its long-held beliefs. And because the history of the 1948 war is also linked to matters of war and peace, to relations with the Palestinians, and therefore to the entire future orientation of the country, any scholarly or academic conclusions about it were and are extremely relevant to an understanding of the political scene. This was recognised by the scholars themselves, as well as by the politicians involved in the peace process.
In this final chapter I would like to show how the pendulum switch from a post-Zionist to a neo-Zionist version of the idea of Israel has impacted the Israeli scholarly community, most particularly its professional historiography. Deciphering what lies behind the decision to produce a certain narrative is still an enigma – we are much better at exposing a narrative than we are at exposing the motives for constructing or revising it. Therefore, I have limited my attempt to pointing to the ways in which changes in the political atmosphere are reflected in the narrative of the works produced by practising historians who focused on the 1948 war. According to the ethos of academia, the work of these historians should in principle not be affected by changes in public mood or general political orientation. However, the case of the current Israeli historiography of 1948 indicates that, in this conflict especially, the writing of history absorbs and represents ideological disputes and political developments to a degree comparable to any other cultural medium. The difference is that other media or discourses do not pretend to be objective or neutral.
As described in the previous chapter, almost immediately after the outbreak of the Second Intifada a reinvigorated Zionist consensus, which had somewhat eroded at the height of the Oslo days, reasserted itself with force. Public discourse in Israel was reshaped along strictly consensual lines. Thus, just as the atmosphere and politics of the early 1990s had been conducive for local historians to open a window onto the Palestinian narrative and even to contemplate acceptance of some of its major claims, so the changed conditions after 2000 provided fertile soil for a new generation of historians to entrench and barricade the narrative behind a wall of negation and fortify the collective identity in the face of renewed struggle.3
It is important to emphasise that while the new Zionist consensus was immediately restored and re-embraced, the new historiographical narrative, which had already begun to assert itself prior to 2000, did not exactly reproduce the classical Zionist narrative. It is not only history, but also historiography, that does not repeat itself. What emerged instead was a new/old narrative, updated to fit the shifting political realities on the one hand and to take into account and absorb the new information coming out of the Israeli archives on the other.
The new historiography was Zionist in its ideological orientation, its mode, and its colouration, but it avoided the omissions, distortions, and denials of fact that had characterised the classical Zionist version. The post-Zionists and ‘new historians’, whose work had been based on Israeli archival sources to the extent that these were accessible at the time, had brought to light new facts concerning expulsions, massacres, and other war crimes committed in 1948 that the neo-Zionist generation could not ignore. Most important for their emergence was the release in 1998 of major new documentation from the archives of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Hagana, enabling professional historians in Israel to see with their own eyes, in government documents, the magnitude of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. Even ‘nationalist’ and Orientalist historians, who had scorned Arab or Palestinian sources and relied exclusively on Israeli sources, could no longer deny the massive, intentional expulsions.4
Thus, from a purely factual standpoint, the neo-Zionist version of 1948 did not differ significantly from that of the post-Zionists or the new historians. The difference lay in the response or interpretation of the facts. What the new historians saw as human and civil rights abuses or even as atrocities and war crimes are treated in the new research as normal and sometimes even commendable actions by the Israeli military. What the post-Zionists interpreted as shameful chapters in Israeli history are, in the new research, justified.5
From the neo-Zionist perspective, acceptance of the factual claims of the new historians was accompanied by the categorical rejection (shared by the Israeli public at large) of the contemporary moral implications that these critical new historians drew from their findings concerning Israel’s crimes in 1948, first and foremost being the dispossession of the Palestinians. The neo-Zionists did not merely reject the interpretation of the post-Zionists but also attacked them on moral grounds for dangerously undermining the legitimacy of the state. This approach is succinctly articulated in the quote that opens the present chapter.
That quote sums up the essence of the neo-Zionist response to the new historians: acceptance of the basic facts that they unearthed, combined with a castigation of them on moral grounds. This ambivalence produced something of a division of labour between the neo-Zionist scholarly attempt to reassert hegemony in Israel’s production of knowledge, specifically in the presentation of the ‘academic’ narrative of 1948. One group undertook to challenge the moral underpinnings of the critical historiography, while the other group focused on a re-examination of the factual evidence, so that a new/old Zionist narrative of the 1948 war could be (re)constructed i
n a way that would reflect the post-2000 mood in the state and an updated interpretation of the idea of Israel.
The Critique of the New Historians and the Moral Debate
Paradoxically, even as the post-Zionist approach – and with it, the critical spirit within Israeli society – was totally silenced and marginalised with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the attack on the new historians (except for Benny Morris) showed no signs of abating. Even in its greatly diminished condition, the critique of Zionism from within Jewish society continued to be depicted as a grave danger to the Jewish character of the state. From 2000 onward, questioning the national narrative in general and that of 1948 in particular was perceived as an ideological threat that needed to be countered by academia at home and abroad. It culminated quite recently with several new laws passed in the Israeli Knesset, as mentioned in the previous chapter, stipulating that, among other measures, public funding to any scholarly or educational entity that commemorates the Nakba be curbed, and academics who support the Palestinian academic boycott campaign be severely punished. It was followed by the exclusion of critical material from the educational system and the appearance of a new NGO, Im Tirtzu (If You Will It), whose main role is to monitor anti- or post-Zionist writing and teaching in academia. Im Tirtzu produced its own booklet on the Nakba, denying the new history of it in such a vulgar and insidious way that mainstream academia found it at best irrelevant and at worst embarrassing. This NGO is supported by another one, Israel Academia Monitor, whose board includes Israel’s leading political scientists and historians and who employ their own team in every university to eradicate all residues of post-Zionism. It took a while before their intimidation began to bear fruit, as admitted by Haaretz’s education correspondent Or Kashti: