(This is the second and concluding part of Laurence
Silberstein's article.
Critics of Postzionism
So long as the work of postzionist scholars was contained within
the walls of the academy, it provoked little response from the
non-academic community. However, when, beginning in 1994, their
writings attracted the attention of journalists and others outside
the academy and news of their highly controversial positions began
to appear in the press and reach the general public, what had
previously been a matter of contention among scholars became a
topic of heated public debate.
According to Israel Landers, a new wave of Israeli scholars,
believing that "the State of Israel was born in sin," depicted
Zionism as "a violent and oppressive movement." In his view, these
scholars, allowing their ideology to intrude on their academic
research, have excluded themselves from the ranks of those who can
be considered as Zionists. Instead, picking up on the term used by
Uri Ram, Landers refers to them as postzionists. However, whereas
Ram used the term in a positive sense to indicate an urgent need
for far-reaching changes in Israeli society, Landers used it as a
term of derision. To Landers and others who continue to identify
with Zionist discourse, postzionist is a term of approbation
applied to those who believe that "Israel should be a normal
democratic society without a specifically Jewish mission". Through
their writings, he insisted, they have placed themselves outside
the pale of legitimate Israeli public as well as scholarly
discourse (Landers 1994, 8). In his usage, the label postzionist
identified them as scholars who cast aspersions on the motives and
intentions of the Zionist settlers and the founders of the state. A
vision of Israel as a multicultural, pluralistic state in the
American sense, a democratic state for all its citizens, is seen as
conflicting with the Zionist vision of a Jewish state, in which the
national symbols, national institutions, and national values are
the product of and serve to reinforce Zionist discourse.
Postzionists, in the view of many of their Zionist critics, aid and
abet the enemies of Israel by contributing to the erosion of
national values and the destruction of Israel's distinctive
national identity.
Of course, postzionists reject the way in which their critics
characterize them. In their view, they are loyal and concerned
citizens of a state that they were no longer willing to define in
terms of the dominant Zionist discourse. Whether they perceived
Zionism as a form of colonialist-based nationalism, or whether they
viewed it as once legitimate but now obsolete, postzionists share a
common sense that to continue to frame Israel and the scholarship
about it through Zionist discourse is both inappropriate,
exclusionary and dangerous.
Questioning the Heart of Zionist Discourse
And so the lines of battle over the future of Israeli national
identity were drawn, with scholars and intellectuals lined up on
both sides. However, as Zionist critics were soon to learn, the
historical revisionists and critical sociologists were only the tip
of an iceberg. For as social scientist Baruch Kimmerling
recognized, the so-called "postzionist" critique did not stop at
challenging historical narratives and social representations. What
postzionist scholars are calling into question, Kimmerling (1995)
argued, is the very discourse employed by Israeli scholars to
produce the dominant representations of historical events and
social reality. Insofar as it employed such terms as "War of
Liberation," "national homeland," "national redemption," and
"ingathering of the exiles," conventional Israeli scholarship was
infused with Zionist discourse. And the historical accounts that
are produced through this scholarship only serve to confirm and
legitimize the Zionist perspectives on the past and the present.
One effect of this discourse has been a complete exclusion of the
Palestinian perspective, thereby producing an ideologically laden,
one-sided interpretation of the Israeli past. If what Kimmerling
and others considered to be a violation of scholarly ethics was to
be rectified, it was not sufficient simply to adopt new methods or
revise inadequate scholarship. The heart of the problem was not
simply issues of method or evidence, but the very discourse through
which scholars framed the issues, posed the problems and selected
the data.
Although Kimmerling and several of his social scientific colleagues
were sensitive to the role of discourse in the production of
scholarly knowledge, another group of Israeli scholars and
intellectuals cast their net wider, expanding the critique to
include the various and multiple ways in which Zionist discourse
produced what had come to be taken by most Jewish Israelis as
common sense. Often taking as their starting point the dominant
common-sensical representations of the conflict between the
Israelis and Palestinians, these academicians and intellectuals
undertook to formulate a new critical discourse and create new
discursive spaces that would make possible a reframing of the
representation of Israeli life and politics (Silberstein, ch.6).
Well-versed in such theoretical discourses as feminism,
poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism, they were
particularly sensitive to the ways in which, all around them,
well-meaning Jewish Israelis engaged in practices that empowered
the Jewish Israeli, while disempowering and oppressing
Palestinians, inside and outside the state. To redress this
situation, they believed, requires a critical discourse that is
capable of revealing and representing the power relations that
informed the capillaries of Israeli quotidian life. The task of
such a discourse is not only to render visible the diverse and
recurring practices that inscribed unjust power relations into the
fabric of Israeli society and culture, but to reveal the
positioning mechanisms that produced a situation in which most
Jewish Israelis viewed these practices as both normal and
just.
Postmodern Postzionist Knowledge
While agreeing with much new historicism and critical sociology,
this group of postzionist intellectuals are convinced that new
historical and sociological writings, though necessary, are
insufficient. To distinguish this group of Israeli intellectuals
from the "new historians" and "critical sociologists," I have
(notwithstanding the problems it entails) chosen to refer to them
as "postmodern postzionists." A distinctive component of this
postmodern form of postzionist critique is its focus on the
discourse and practices by means of which meaning is constituted
and knowledge produced and disseminated.
A major site for the production and dissemination of this
postmodern postzionist critique has been the Hebrew journal Theory
and Criticism. Repeatedly, contributors to this journal sought to
demonstrate the ways in which seemingly innocent cultural
practices, including art, museum exhibitions, and literary
production, infiltrated specific kinds of power relations. Their
critique extended to the disempowering effects of everyday
language, the nomenclature used to designate the Palestinian
population living within the borders of Israel ("Israeli Arabs")
and the spaces that they inhabited (the "Arab village").
Recognizing the inadequacy of approaching Zionism as an ideology,
they regarded it, in Foucault's terms, as a "regime of truth," a
set of codes, practices, institutionalized arrangements and
discursive processes that produce what comes to be taken for
granted as knowledge, while, at the same time, providing the
vehicles that render it true. Through its regime of truth, Zionism
attempted, and for the most part succeeded, in governing the ways
in which Israeli Jews talk about and reason about the realities of
Israeli life. This regime of truth, like all regimes of truth,
includes social and economic forms and processes, educational
practices and institutions, a military, the media, the legal
system, geographical sites, memorials, and an official state
calendar. These, in turn, contributed to a situation where Israeli
Jews (and Jews outside of Israel) regard Zionist discourse and
practices as "natural" or "commonsensical."
However, what Israeli Jews regard as positive and creative outcomes
of Zionist discourse, others, particularly Palestinian citizens of
the state, regard as repressive. As in any society, the dominant
ways in which national history, land, literature, society and
identity are represented and discussed have the effect of
marginalizing or excluding certain groups. In the case of Israel,
such groups, as postzionists have sought to demonstrate, include
Palestinians, religious Jews, Mizrahi Jews and Jews living outside
the homeland. While many, perhaps most Israelis, experience the
discourse, practices and identity norms as positive and empowering,
these "others" experience it as restrictive and/or
oppressive.
Dominant Discursive Concepts
An important dimension of the postmodern critique of zionism is to
demonstrate that concepts such as homeland, exile, redemption,
aliyah and ingathering of the exiles, which Zionists take as
accurate reflections of reality, are instead the products of
discursive processes. Far from simply describing or reflecting
"what is," these concepts and others that comprise the dominant
Israeli discourse, actually participate in the construction of
these "objective" conditions. While these and other such terms from
Zionist discourse apply to actual physical spaces, they provide the
grids and categories that produce the meanings attributed to such
spaces.
Nonetheless, there are many reasons to believe, as I do, that
having instantiated itself among a critical core of faculty at each
of the Israeli universities, postzionist discourse that, less than
10 years ago, was perceived as radical, is being increasingly
(albeit slowly) accepted as accurately representing changing
realities.
Thus, even though recalled by the Sharon government early on, new
secondary school texts were produced by the previous Israeli
government that incorporate what many would characterize as
postzionist ideas. And an expanding critical core of younger
scholars, particularly at Ben Gurion University in the Negev (BGU),
but also at Tel Aviv University and institutes in Jerusalem, are
producing work that takes for granted many of the historical claims
that only a decade ago were regarded as unspeakable. And even Anton
Shammas's call for a repeal of the Law of Return, which for years
resonated only with small marginal groups of Israeli Jews, is now
being advocated by a small but growing number of scholars who hold
positions within the Israeli university system, and is being echoed
and disseminated in respectable academic journals and books.
A new social scientific journal produced in English at BGU provides
yet another indication that the discourse is continuing to change,
however slowly. Bearing the controversial name Hagar, the journal
is described by its editor, geographer Oren Yiftachel, as aiming to
promote "critical scholarship with constant examination of systems,
regimes and rules, and with a persistent challenge to the
rationale, values and consequences of 'the order of things,'" (a
reference to the English title of one of Foucault's works). In his
view, the name Hagar, Abraham's concubine, Mother of Yishmael
(Ishmael), regarded as the matriarch of the Arab nation, reflects
some of the key critical perspectives of the journal: "marginality,
mobility and changing power relations."
In the words of the editor; "Hagar evokes boundary, the border
region, the movement and the peripherality which is often
overlooked in mainstream social science" (Yiftachel 2000, 3). The
story of Hagar also invokes; "the inevitably close - if often
uneasy - relations between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and
Israelis, Arabs and Hebrews. Hagar," he continues, "denotes the
deep historical roots of these communities in the ancient land, and
casts our minds to the variegated ways in which land and memory are
simultaneously contested and shared by these groups".
New Politics of Truth
Foucault sees the intellectual's responsibility to redress unjust
power relations in the practice of theorizing that engages in a
struggle against certain forms of power - a struggle, "aimed at
revealing and undermining power where it is most visible and
invidious" (Foucault 1996, 75-76). Using theory, the intellectual
ascertains the possibilities for constituting a new politics of
truth. However, the objective is not to change "people's
consciousness - or what's in their heads - but of altering the
political, economic, institutional regime for the production of
truth" (Foucault 1980, 133).
A major goal of intellectual critique is to render visible power
relations that are obscured, concealed or neglected; power
relations that have been rendered invisible by the dominant
discourses and regimes of truth. Without an alternative discourse,
however, any transformation would remain within the same discourse,
the same mode of thought, only adjusting the thought to the reality
of things and, "would only be a superficial transformation"
(Foucault 2000, 457). By helping to see power relations and their
enabling conditions, the intellectual makes it possible for people
to engage in what Foucault describes as "a struggle that concerns
their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and
whose methods only they can determine" (Foucault 1996, 81).
If we view postzionism as a form of what Foucault considers to be
intellectual critique, we may designate as postzionists those who
are engaged in a critique of the discourses, practices and
institutions that have produced Zionism and have been and are being
produced by it. On one level, the postzionist critique challenges
Zionism's position as the dominant discourse through which the
daily realities of Israeli life, society, and culture are to be
spoken of, defined and inscribed with meaning. In so doing,
postzionists reveal that the foundations upon which the prevailing
Zionist definitions of Israeli national identity, national
territory, national history, and national law rest are contingent
rather than natural, necessary or essential.
At the same time, their critique makes it clear that things can be
otherwise, that alternative ways of understanding Israel identity,
territory, history and law are available, and that what keeps the
dominant forms of knowledge in place are regimes of truth and
relations of power rather than national destiny or national
mission.
This also helps to clarify the ferocity and intensity of the
responses evoked by postzionist critics. In a sense, the critics
are right. The cumulative effect of the postzionist critique does
indeed threaten what Zionists have taken to be sacred truths,
sacred practices, sacred narratives and sacred memories. And the
struggle is over what Israel will become in the future. Children
educated by textbooks that present an alternative narrative, that
frame that narrative in a different way, may think differently
about the state and its history, although, as a teacher, I am
somewhat skeptical of just how much of an impact textbooks really
make.
In Foucault's terms, the key to the conflict surrounding
postzionism is the issue of knowledge and power. In criticizing
dominant forms of knowledge in Israel, postzionists are also
threatening power relations that make possible such forms of
knowledge, and institutional arrangements that have kept them in
place. If what the postzionists maintain is true, and if the way is
opened to alternative forms of knowledge, then what will eventually
have to change is not simply what is known, but practices as well.
And this knowledge and these practices include an ensemble that
supports and is supported by that knowledge - what Foucault calls
an "apparatus"- that can include such diverse things as "practices,
regulatory decisions, laws, architectural forms, administrative
measures, scholarly statements, moral and philanthropic
propositions" (1980, 196).
New Discursive Spaces
While this article has focused on intellectual critique within
Israel, and the intellectual function of such critiques in
uncovering previously obscured relations of power, the value of
such a critique to the eventual resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict depends upon whether or not a similar
critique emerges among Palestinians. Just as Israeli intellectual
critics have undertaken to critically assess the historical
narratives inherited from the past, to render visible power
relations within Israeli society, the same task must also be
undertaken by Palestinian scholars. Foucault's critique of power
relations and the intellectual tools he provides to bring their
mechanisms to light are by no means limited to Israel.
For Foucault, power and power relations characterize all societies:
all cultures produce knowledge that is interlaced with relations of
power. Accordingly, until a similar kind of critique is applied to
prevailing Palestinian discourses that demonize Israel and
prevailing forms of Palestinian knowledge that occlude the
complexity of the historical relations between the two peoples, the
possibility of dialogue that traverses ever shifting boundaries is
unlikely. Similarly, until the power relations within Palestinian
society that conceal the marginalization or exclusion of
alternative voices among the Palestinian people are rendered
visible, the potential of Israeli postzionist discourse will be
stifled.
On September 11, 1993, the headline in the English-language Israeli
daily The Jerusalem Post read: "Taboos shattered in peace process."
Only a short time before, the world had become aware that since
May, 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
had been conducting secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway. Uri Savir,
a seasoned Israeli diplomat and Abu Ala (Ahmad Qurei), a high
ranking PLO official, had led the two teams of negotiators whose
efforts resulted in a Declaration of Principles. The signing of
this document on September 13, 1993 at the White House brought a
cessation in the armed hostilities between Israel and the
Palestinian people. In the words of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin at the White House ceremony, a new era was dawning on the
Middle East.
A New Mapping of the Middle East
As Savir reports, the momentous event was made possible by the
willingness of the two sides to draw "a new road map" (Savir
1998,15). In other words, serious peace negotiations between Israel
and the Palestinians required a new mapping of the Middle East.
According to Savir, central to this new mapping was separating the
events of the past from the realities of the present and the hopes
and promise of the future. To move forward, both sides agreed,
references to the past had to be suspended,
In an early meeting, Savir and Abu Ala agreed that if their efforts
were to prove successful, it would be necessary to change the
prevailing discourse in the Middle East:
'"You know," I warned Abu Ala, "as far as most Israelis are
concerned, you're just a gang of terrorists."
"And [Abu Ala replied] as far as most Palestinians are concerned,
you are a nation of cruel oppressors, robbing us of our lands,"
(Savir 1998, 21).'
Though I doubt that either of these men ever read Foucault, they
instinctively sensed what Foucault had argued throughout his
career: for significant social and cultural transformation to
occur, a change in the discourse through which events are framed
and assigned meaning must first occur. As the events at Camp David
and Taba clearly showed, any negotiations are doomed to failure
when the Israeli perceptions of the Palestinians is framed within
Zionist discourse and the Palestinian attitudes toward the Israelis
are framed within the demonizing discourses inherited from the
past.
As intellectuals on both sides increasingly understand, the fate of
the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, are inexorably
intertwined. For the new discursive spaces to open up in Israel to
be truly effective, a parallel phenomenon must occur among the
Palestinians. Until Palestinian intellectuals recognize the need
for a form of critique that parallels postzionism, little actual
progress will be made in bringing about the change of discourse
that is a necessary condition to a genuine peace. The possibilities
of opening such critical spaces among Palestinian and other Arab
intellectuals seems extremely limited at present. Unless the
process of transforming discourses within Israel are paralleled by
a similar phenomenon among the Palestinians, the disputes and
conflicts will be mired in the very forms of discourse that makes
their resolution virtually impossible.
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