Israeli identity, like all other national identities, is anything
but primordial, natural or integral. Rather, it is contested and
negotiated, incessantly constructed and manufactured by those who
promulgate it so as to fit approximations of what they deem to be
the national project.
The presence and proximity of Arabs, as individuals, as a culture,
as a polity-in short as an essentialized category-is central to
Israeli identity formation. This makes physical and symbolic points
of contact with and separation from Arabs, in particular the
Palestinians, sites in which Israeli identity and solidarity are
acted out and reified.
This paper uses this theoretical context to look at some of the
socio-psychological and political significance of borders for
Israel and Israelis. The first part of the article looks at the
recent fascination, on the part of the Israeli mainstream, with the
notion of "unilateral separation" from the Palestinians. Present in
Israeli politics in various forms and guises for decades, this
obsession resurfaced to become particularly potent in the summer of
2001. It preached the withdrawal of Israel from its current
positions in the West Bank and Gaza even if it means doing it
without the prior agreement or approval of the Palestinians.
However, this vision is far from promising in terms of progress
toward a viable solution. Its popularity is better analyzed not in
terms of solution, but as a part of the internal debate within
Jewish Israeli society regarding Israeli identity and
destiny.
To set such an analysis in motion, the second part of the article
looks at the ironic ways in which realities since 1967 consistently
obscured and obfuscated the demarcation lines between Israelis and
Palestinians. This ambiguity was exacerbated with the violent
events of 2001, when Palestinian suicide bombers crossed into
Israel almost with the same ease in which Israeli armor penetrated
Palestinian soil. This diffusion of the border further confused the
Israeli mainstream, breeding a craving for a "real"--and preferably
impenetrable--physical border between Israel and Palestine.
The third part of the article put this into a more general
theoretical perspective through the use of Arjun Appadurai's
concept of culturalism (Appadurai 1996). Zionist discourse, like
other national narratives, promotes a particular bundle of cultural
traits as an exclusive representation of the national project. A
central tenet of Israeli culturalism is the binary opposition
between Jew and Arab, which stands for a series of "Us versus Them"
dichotomies: modern versus primitive, European versus Other,
progressive versus stagnant. In such a context, the quest for the
border, the need for psychological differentiation and the desire
for a coherent Israeli identity emerge as different aspects of one,
ostensibly uniform and coherent national project.
"Unilateral Separation" and the Border in Contemporary Israeli
Discourse
Recent surveys indicate that more than 60% of the Israeli public
now support "unilateral separation." This concept made an
impressive entry into Israeli public discourse in the summer of
2001. It is heralded by ex-generals, security experts, some
academics, a considerable number of Labor politicians and some
influential members of the press. Unilateral separation is premised
on the logic of territorial division that has guided political
initiatives in Israel/Palestine ever since the partition proposals
of the British Peel Commission in 1936 (see Shlaim 1990,
54-106).
However, unlike earlier attempts to divide Mandatory Palestine,
which were premised on a formal agreement between Israel and a
future Palestine, current Israeli thought on unilateral separation
assumes that an agreement with the Palestinians is unattainable.
This is of course a clear reflection of the view of Ehud Barak, who
as prime minister of Israel convinced his public that the failure
of the Camp David II negotiations in July 2000 resulted from
irrational and dishonest Palestinian obstinacy vis-á-vis a
reasonable and lavish Israeli peace proposal. According to this
linear logic, Israel has no choice but to act alone: withdraw its
armed forces and possibly some outlying settlements from the West
Bank and the Gaza strip, re-group along lines of its own choosing,
and hope for the best. Barak, incidentally, was forcefully in favor
of separation even before he came to office in June 1999.
While Ehud Barak was the first to give it prominence, many of those
advocating unilateral separation in 2001 are politicians identified
with the dovish wing in Labor, such as Shlomo Ben-Ami and Haim
Ramon. This must not be taken as an indication that the new border
they envisage will run along the old green line and terminate
Israeli occupation. The protagonists have never indicated
willingness to dismantle all Israeli settlements in the occupied
territories and to relinquish all territories taken by Israel in
1967. While they are, in principle, in favor of a nominal
Palestinian state, the outcome of their proposal is likely to be a
partial Israeli redeployment. The Palestinians will surely perceive
this as a transgression of their sovereignty, and armed conflict
will persist and chances for a comprehensive settlement will be
badly damaged.
When supporters of the concept of unilateral separation rationalize
it, they focus on two aspects, ostensibly congruent with
fundamental Israeli interests. One is that separation, once
consolidated by a real barrier in the form of a well-surveyed,
controllable frontier zone, will curb Palestinian suicide attacks
and bring security to Israel. The second is that separation is
necessary for Israel to protect itself from the demographic threat
posed by the rapid population growth of Palestinians in the
occupied territories.
Both claims are very difficult to defend. No credible security
expert is willing to maintain that a wall or a fence can
effectively stop terrorists willing to die in action. The chance
that such a barrier might work in the hilly terrain of Israel and
Palestine, where potential Palestinian vigilantes view Israeli
territory as the homeland stolen from their parents, are as slim as
they are on the United States-Mexican border (Kearney 1991; Rouse
1991), on Europe's eastern and southern frontiers (Driesen 1998),
and along other interfaces dividing a strong economy such as Israel
from a considerably poorer repository of cheap labor such as
Palestine (cf. Borneman 1998). In fact, the economic
interdependence between Israeli employers and Palestinian laborers
is likely to ensure that the border, however well-buttressed, will
in the long run be as porous as it has been since 1967.
The demographic argument is equally indefensible. The Palestinians
who are under Israel's system of control, without citizenship and
other basic human rights, will remain in more or less the same
predicament until they can establish a viable state of their own.
Separating them from Israel without catering for such a state is no
more than incarceration-an intensified state of occupation in a
different form and with tighter control. It reflects a
well-disguised xenophobic impulse on the part of Israel to
consolidate an apartheid-like system of segregation while
maintaining internal cohesion and external support, and has little
or no effect on demographics.
Some say the unilateral separation option is a device by frustrated
Labor politicians to rekindle hope for a settlement that would be
antithetical to prime minister Sharon's hard line and pave their
way back to power. They know, the argument goes, that the ploy will
never work, but preach it anyway, assuming failure could always be
attributed to incomplete execution, external interventions, and
unforeseen developments. In short, they cynically wave it as a
trump card in a game they know full well is going nowhere.
While this may be so, it nevertheless begs the following question:
how come an alert and generally well-informed Israeli public
supports this seemingly improbable solution with such enthusiastic
persistence? To understand this, I shall present a two-tiered
analysis of Israeli identity, concentrating first, on the confusion
associated with territorial blurring and second, on the role of
separation from the Arabs.
The Geography of Occupation
The summer of 2001 witnessed renewed preoccupation on the part of
Israelis with the notion of the border. The backdrop was a chaotic
phase of the conflict in which a well-prepared Israeli army is
capable of inflicting mortal damage on Palestinians in the occupied
territories at will, and has been doing so incessantly, with or
without immediate provocation. It seemed to operate, however,
without a clear objective other than defending the settlers and its
own troops, and occasionally making punitive retaliatory hits on
Palestinian leaders, activists and facilities. More than two and a
half million Palestinians in the occupied territories became
subject to unprecedented disruptions of their daily lives: road
blocks and closures sealed off villages and towns for days and
weeks, condemning many to thirst and hunger. Commerce was stifled,
poverty and economic hardship became the order of the day. Health
and education seemed to be the only aspects of Palestinian public
life that somehow continued to function.
By that time, the lives of Israeli settlers in the occupied
territories had also been transformed, as attacks by armed
Palestinians on vehicles traveling to and from the settlements took
toll on life and limb. Palestinian suicide bombers proved
practically unstoppable, sowing death, damage and fear in Israeli
town centers. No real long-term political solution to the century
long crisis was in sight.
This crisis threw the territorial incoherence of the conflict into
sharp relief. The war of 1967 signaled the imposition of Israeli
military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but did little to
clarify the borders of the Israeli State. On the contrary, Israel
established a policy of open bridges between the West Bank and
Jordan to the east. It opened up the green line so as to enable
hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers to commute and seek
employment in the lower scales of the Israeli labor market. The
occupation became a canopy for wide-scale expropriation of
Palestinian land for Israeli settlements, triggering an
ever-growing wave of Palestinian guerilla attacks against Israel
and Israelis.
Over the years, Israeli governments of all political persuasions
consistently attempted through settlement to undo the green line.
The result further complicated by practices that followed the Oslo
agreement of 1993, is a geography of occupation on the West Bank
that looks like a jigsaw of protrusions and incursions. Israeli
settlements are isolated by large expanses of pre-existing
Palestinian towns and villages. Israeli-built bypass roads traverse
Palestinian spaces. Army posts and holy sites venerated by both
sides add to the territorial incoherence. A map prepared by Israel
for the Camp David talks in July 2000 reflecting a partition
possibly acceptable to Israel indicates the immense difficulty
associated with translating the logic of territorial separation
into an operational plan.
The occupation transformed the ultimate demarcation line between
"Us" and "Them" that had been such a major component of Israeli and
Arab realities until 1967. The role of such a dividing line in the
daily lives of millions was largely suspended. For a while before
the Oslo process of the 1990s, it looked as though the territorial
mass of Israel and Palestine was turning into one large border
zone, in which a fateful historic competition over control,
identity and destiny was being waged (cf. Kearney 1991).
This geographical reality and the complexity of history and
politics since 1967 go some way to explicate the desperate yearning
of so many Israelis for separation. Clearly, they see the border as
a replacement for an agreed settlement, a panacea for a torn and
restless world.
The explanation is incomplete, however, without a concluding look
at the symbolic role of the border for Israeli identity.
Culture, Zionist Identity and the Border
Israelis have an inherent tendency, buttressed by the ideological
concept that Zionism brings modernization and progress, to
associate themselves and their collective project with a "cultured"
Europe. This tendency is often played out through disassociation
from the "primitive" and threatening Arab East-a trajectory the
roots of which go back to early Zionist thought.
Tom Segev gives evidence of the deep-seated fear and alienation
which Zionist leaders felt and perpetuated vis-á-vis the Arab
East. For example, Theodore Herzl, who founded political Zionism in
1897, asserted that Zionism should provide the vanguard of
(European) culture against (Eastern) barbarism. Max Nordau told the
first Zionist congress that Zionism must attempt to do to Western
Asia what the British did to India, "coming to the land of Israel
as envoys of culture, with the aim of widening the moral boundaries
of Europe as far the Euphrates" (quoted in Segev 1999, 125). The
Jewish writer Mordechay Hacohen, who describes Arabs and Bedouins
as savages "yet to be reached by world culture," was adamant that
Zionists must neither imitate the Arabs nor become integrated with
them. Aharon Kabak thought that Yemenite Jews, like other natives
of the east, have a tendency to daydreaming, sloppiness, slowness,
physical fatigue and nerve weakness (Segev 1999, 126). Zeev
Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of Revisionist Zionism, the
forerunners of the present Likud party, was particularly outspoken
about the need to distance Jews and Zionists from Arab culture. In
his words:
We Jews have nothing in common with what is called "The East", and
so much for the better. To the extent that our uneducated masses
have ancient spiritual traditions and laws reminiscent of "The
East" we must wean them--as indeed we do in every decent school and
as, in fact, is happening successfully in daily life itself. We go
to the land of Israel first and foremost for our national
convenience, and secondly […] to finally sweep from the Land
of Israel […] all traces of the "Eastern soul." As for the
Arabs who are in the Land of Israel -- that is their concern. But
if there is one favor we can extend to them, it is to help them
liberate themselves from "The East." (Quoted in Bielsky Ben-Hur
1988, 173 and in Segev 1999, 126; my translation.)
Admittedly, there was a tendency among some early Zionist
practitioners and writers to stress the similarities between Jews
and Arabs. For example, founding members of the early Zionist
defense organization "Hashomer," established in 1909 and seen by
many as the institutional origins of the Hagana, formed in 1920.
They modeled their attire, riding skills and field craft after a
romanticized version of Arabness, many of them acquiring
considerable language skill in Arabic (cf. Hurwitz 1970; Talmi
1955; Rogel 1979). This was echoed in the 1940s by language and
other practices adopted by members of the Palmakh, as well as by
hikers and geographers "discovering" the landscape in the 1950s,
who preferred citing geographical names in the Arabic origins
rather than their recent Hebrew innovations. In many ways, however,
this superficial mimicking of native Palestinians, which was never
accompanied by any tendency to lower barriers-let alone promote
assimilation between Jews and Arabs-served to reaffirm symbolic
borders. In fact, by highlighting a similarity between contemporary
Palestinians and the biblical Hebrews, which many Jews did quite
explicitly, expressed by Jewish writers like Moshe Smilansky and
Yehouda Burla). The Hashomer version of Orientalism signaled that
Arabness, in spite of its obvious claims to be an authentic
representation of locality, is merely a secondary incarnation of
ancient Judaism (See also Ben-Ezer 1999, Shaked 1989 and Morang
1986).
Between Us and Them
The mainstay of Zionist ideology was thus confined to a consistent
--and on the whole successful-- attempt to sustain a new identity
against a negated ultimate Arab Other. The representations of the
East so rife in formative Zionist musings on this subject are thus
politically and historically significant: they isolate rural
Palestine, incarcerating it in a time capsule with rudimentary
technology and marginal economy, and make it into a prototype of
Arabness at large. By doing so, such representation repeatedly
obscures contemporary Arab and Palestinian urban culture, Arab
contributions to Western thought and learning, and many other
aspects of Arab culture and society, which signify modernity and
progress. The old dichotomy between "Us" and "Them" is
reified.
These convictions thus became the substrate against which Zionist
identity was shaped. Of course, this placed a formidable load on
geographical border and other demarcation lines purporting to
reflect and signify it (cf. Barth 1969). When the time came in 1949
to draw an international border between the newly-born Israeli
state and the Arab states around it, it was construed not only as a
line that separates physical communities, but as an interface of
cultures and civilizations. The 1950s saw the border being socially
constructed as a fetishized entity (Kemp 2000), a space where the
nation defines itself against the ultimate Arab Other, perceived as
a malicious, faceless mass conspiring across the sealed
frontier.
This notion, blurred beyond recognition following the 1967
occupation, began resurfacing after the 1979 peace agreement
between Israel and Egypt, and once again, as I have indicated
earlier, in the mid- 1990s. It made a powerful re-entry, albeit in
a different version, in the immediate aftermath of the terror
attacks on New York's World Trade Centre on September 11 2001, as
Israel was scrambling to identify itself with the USA's "coalition
against terror".
Appadurai's thesis defines culturalism (1996) as an active and
conscious attempt by states to establish composite notions of
"culture" and present them as defining features of the national
projects. Israeli culturalism, to follow this logic, is
characterized by an ongoing attempt on the part of the state to
fabricate a new, essentially secular identity for immigrants from a
variety of territories, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.
While much was (and still is) actively done to imbue it with a
positive inventory, Israeli identity remains premised to a
considerable degree on a dual negation: that of the Jewish Diaspora
(cf. Raz-Krakotzkin 1993; Boyarin and Boyarin 1994) and that of
anything and everything remotely associated with the Arab East.
Defining a border thus becomes, to use Mary Douglas's term, a tool
to think with at least as much as it is a tool with which to
actually attain political, demographic or cultural goals.
Border and Identity
There are elements in the current desire of Israelis to have a
border, which were absent in earlier periods, which further amplify
the role of the border as an identity marker. The first Intifada
(1988 to 1993) illustrated the Palestinian capacity to attain
self-definition and activate democratic processes under occupation.
It did, however, lack involvement of two important segments of the
Palestinian nation: the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the
Palestinian diaspora. The 2000-2001 al-Aqsa Intifada, which came
about partly because of Israel's refusal to discuss the Palestinian
right of return, admittedly takes place predominantly in the
occupied territories. However, and unlike the earlier Intifada, it
was echoed in October 2000 by mass demonstrations inside Israel,
leading to violent clashes with Israeli police that left 13
Palestinian demonstrators dead and hundreds wounded. Abroad, the
al-Aqsa Intifada became immensely relevant for diasporic
Palestinians, for whom the right of return carries concrete and
personal ramifications. This turned it into a unifying process,
integrating Palestinian communities in unprecedented fashion and
seriously impairing the symbolic role of the Green Line.
This created more confusion among Israeli liberals of moderate
leftist persuasions. The traditional Israeli Left needs the Green
Line so as to define whatever happens on the other side as
"temporary occupation" (Shenhav 2001). This allows them to treat
the territory within the line as a coherent, self-explanatory
component of the Israeli project. More importantly, it exempts them
from the awkward task of coming to terms with the catastrophic
implications of the war of 1948 for Palestinians, and with its
moral consequences.
The collapse of the Oslo process at Camp David in July 2000 left
this important segment of mainstream Israel suspended. The al-Aqsa
Intifada brought home the imminent dissolution of the green line.
The dependence of Israeli identity on the existence and viability
of an exclusive ethno-territorial project in the form of a
well-bounded Israel came under direct threat. Demands made by
Palestinian negotiators for a Palestinian return into Israel
proper, coupled with strong signals sent by Palestinians from
within of their feelings for Palestine rather than for Israel, are
interpreted by Israelis as challenging the very stability of the
Israeli project.
This is a serious threat. The notion of re-defining Israel as
anything other than an exclusive ethno-territorial project, for and
by the Jews alone, is unthinkable for the majority of Israelis.
Modifying Israel is thus not only a matter of national importance,
but one that carries real significance on an intimate and personal
level. Once, though uninvited, these notions entered Israeli public
discourse Israelis tended to scramble for a border-any border-to
save and reconstitute the national project, and through it their
identity.
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