Notwithstanding the ongoing violence of the past year, and the
despair and disillusionment that has followed in its wake, and
despite the apparent erosion within Israel of elements opposed to
the current government's policies, one continues to find evidence
of a growing counter discourse, if only among an intellectual
minority. Moreover, it is clear to students of Israeli society that
things that were considered unsayable and even unthinkable just a
short time ago are today being said publicly and with increasing
frequency.
These internal debates are indicative of an ongoing conflict over
the discourse through which Israelis construct the meaning of
events that transpire in the life of the state, and the production
of the knowledge that serves as the basis for understanding by
Israelis of their national identity. At the heart of this cultural
conflict is a phenomenon known as postzionism. The rubric of
postzionism and the ensuing debates emerged on the public stage in
Israel around the mid-1990s and relates to issues that are basic to
the formation and future development of Israeli national identity.
Insofar as the way in which Israelis understand that identity is
intricately related to their relationship with the Palestinian
people, these debates are directly relevant to future peace
prospects.
Postzionism is understood differently by people depending on their
position and perspective. Moreover, there is not simply one form of
postzionism or postzionist discourse, but several. Like all terms
ending in "ism," postzionism is what philosophers call an
"essentially contested concept." The meaning of the term changes
according to who uses it and why. As I wrote in my book on
postzionist debates, postzionism is a term applied to a current set
of critical positions that problematize zionist discourse and the
historical narratives and social and cultural representations that
it produced. Like the term zionism, postzionism encompasses a
variety of positions. The growing use of the term postzionism is
indicative of an increasing sense among many Israelis that the maps
of meaning provided by zionism are simply no longer adequate.
(Silberstein 1999; 2)
The debates over what is called postzionism in Israel often
obfuscate and confuse more than they clarify. Those who regard
themselves as defenders of zionism use the term postzionism
somewhat flagrantly to accuse and to taint, while among those who
are commonly referred to as postzionists, there are many who eschew
the term, some who embrace it, and others, like Benny Morris, who
proclaim their zionist affiliation. Critics subsume under the
rubric of postzionism, writers of diverse views who operate within
different theoretical frameworks, and who hold differing opinions
about what corrective actions are desirable.
Cultural Critique and National Identity
One way of approaching the phenomenon of postzionism is to view it
as a form of social and cultural critique. Increasingly, I have
come to feel that Michel Foucault's concept of intellectual
critique provides a useful tool for elucidating the different forms
of postzionist critique and clarifying what is at stake in these
ongoing debates. In so doing, the task is not to arrive at a
universal definition of postzionism, an impossible task in its own
right, but rather to map the various forms of critical activities
in which different postzionists are engaged, their differing forms
of critique, and the kinds of responses that would adequately
address them.
The struggles over postzionism are struggles for the control of
cultural space, that is, the space within which the meanings of
Israeli collective identity are constructed, produced and
circulated. At the same time, the controversies surrounding
postzionism represent a conflict over national memory, and,
accordingly, national identity. Accordingly, these controversies
are less about the past, than about "how the past affects the
present" (Sturken 1997; 2). For Israelis, as for all national
groups, the narratives of their nation's past provide a framework
through which they interpret the events of the present. In calling
into question prevailing Israeli historical narratives, the new
historians, together with a group known as critical sociologists,
render problematic the very foundations on which Israeli group
identity has been based. In the words of one scholar closely
identified with the postzionist position, the scholarly debate
reflects not only an academic dispute, but also an identity crisis
of a society that stands on the threshold of a period of peace, in
which the national consensus, previously built upon threats to
survival and security problems, clears a space for a debate across
the society and its culture (Pappe 1995; 45).
Collective identities, like individual identities, are comprised of
multiple factors and are always in the process of being formed and
reconfigured. Nevertheless, key to all collective identities, as
Stuart Hall has reminded us, is the way in which a group or a
nation relates to the narratives of its past. Its relationship to
these narratives is an integral component of a nation's sense of
who they are, of their understanding of the values and ideals that
they see as distinguishing them from other nations. The same may be
said of a nation's dominant image of its own social and cultural
spheres. Ingesting images of their society from representations
produced by social scientists, members of national groups come to
look at themselves as being certain kinds of people.
New Historians
Understandably, therefore, when a group of scholars call into
question or challenge the narratives of a nation's past that had
previously been taken as true, it is perceived as an attack on the
values and ideals that were linked to these narratives and
legitimated by them. Similarly, when the dominant representations
of a nation's culture and society are called into question, this
questioning is also taken to be a challenge to the nation's self
definition - along with its collective values and forms of social
interaction.
In Israel, this is precisely what happened beginning in the late
1980s and early 1990s. At that time, a small but vocal group of
Israeli scholars, historians and social scientists, began to
publish a series of books and articles that called into question
long embraced narratives of Israeli's historical past and widely
accepted representations of Israeli society. These scholars, who
have come to be known as "new historians" and "critical
sociologists," were, for the most part, members of a generation
born after founding of the State of Israel in 1948. They had grown
to maturity during a period in which Israel ruled over a resisting
population now numbering more than one million Arabs.
While the perspective of the older generation had been shaped by
the realities of the Holocaust, the ideology of labor zionism, and
the trauma of the 1948 War, the new generation of scholars had
known a very different set of realities, shaped by the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Yom Kippur War of 1973,
the controversial 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the Palestinian
Intifada that erupted in 1987. Strongly affected by the strength of
the emerging Palestinian nationalism, and confronted with the
increasingly resistant Palestinian population ruled by Israel since
1967, many Israeli intellectuals and academicians had reached the
conclusion that notwithstanding the way in which history had been
taught to them, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stood at the
center of Israeli history and the formation of Israeli society. See
Silberstein; ch. 4)
Reading the writings of this younger generation of scholars, one is
struck by the sense of shock and also disillusionment that they
felt. In the process of working their way through documents that
until the early 1980s had been classified as secret, these scholars
quickly recognized that the versions of Israeli history and the
descriptions of Israeli society currently in vogue among the
majority of scholars were contradicted by new evidence. One
historian, Benny Morris, undertook to examine, village by village,
the factors that had contributed to the flight of 3/4 million
Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Most Israeli accounts placed the
responsibility for the exodus squarely on the shoulders of the
Palestinians and particularly their leaders. Such a view had become
conventional wisdom among Israelis and was taught to generation
after generation of students. In The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, Morris set forth a detailed, nuanced, multi-causal
account of the exodus in which the factors responsible for the
exodus varied according to the place and the conditions. What so
outraged many of Morris's readers was his conclusion that
deliberate expulsions by Israeli military forces and outrageous
acts of mass violence by unofficial Israeli military units had
contributed to the Arab exodus in a significant way.
Gershon Shafir (1988, 1996), applying a comparative approach,
produced a detailed analysis of the effects of zionist settlement
practices on the indigenous Palestinian population that conflicted
with prevailing Israeli interpretations. According to Shafir,
regardless of what the settlers may have thought they were doing,
regardless of what most Israeli scholars took to be the zionist
settlers' well-meaning motives and intentions, the effects of these
practices on the native Palestinian population paralleled the
effects of colonialist settler practices in other countries.
Whereas zionists settlers and their Israeli descendants had
perceived themselves to be moral, principled people seeking only
the liberation of their own nation without any desire to harm the
indigenous population, and notwithstanding the fact that Israeli
scholars had repeatedly rejected all efforts to compare zionist
settlement practices to that of colonialist settlers, Shafir
concluded that such a claim could not be substantiated.
Yet another example of the new direction in Israeli scholars is a
book by Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling and his
American colleague Joel Migdal entitled Palestinians: The Making of
A People. Insisting that it was simply not legitimate to write the
history of Israel without incorporating the Palestinian
perspective, they undertook to provide a framework for that
perspective. Their goal was to produce a non-biased history of the
emergence of the Palestinian nation that took for granted the
national aspirations of that nation - aspirations that until Yizhak
Rabin confirmed their legitimacy on the White House lawn in 1993
had been rejected out of hand by every Israeli Prime Minister since
the emergence of the state.
A final example of the different scholarship being produced by this
generation is the work of sociologist Uri Ram, one of the first,
and still one of the few, to embrace the term postzionism. In two
books, one in Hebrew and one in English, Ram described the ways in
which a small but significant number of Israeli social scientists
had shown that the prevalent representation of Israeli society as
inclusive and egalitarian was, at best, problematic. According to
the scholars cited by Ram and included in his Hebrew anthology
Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives, groups such as women, Jews
of Middle-Eastern origin (Mizrahim), and Palestinians (who are
still frequently called Israeli Arabs) had been systematically
silenced, marginalized, or excluded from positions of power in the
zionist state.
In his 1995 book, The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology,
published in 1995, Ram articulated a perspective that was to become
characteristic of the position labeled postzionist. Whereas, in
Ram's words, "zionist sociology promoted the idea of an identity
among unequals and the exclusion of the others, post-zionist
sociology will be guided by the ideal of a society characterized by
equality among non-identicals and the inclusion of the
others."
According to Ram, the agenda of zionist sociology had basically
been congruous with the founding of the Israeli nation-state. This
sociology presented an image of a society that provided strong
support and legitimization for the zionist vision of a Jewish state
that served as a refuge for Jews from all over the world,
integrating them socially and economically and providing them with
opportunities for economic growth and development, unhampered by
the anti-Semitic views of host societies. Ram argues that "the time
is now ripe for the formulation of a post-Zionist sociological
agenda that would be consistent with a fully democratic Israeli
civil society; a society of free and equal civilians and of diverse
identities. Rather than national integration, the focus of such an
agenda should be the issue of citizenship in a modern democratic
society"
(Ram 1995, 206).
Disempowering Palestinian Israelis
Some of these controversial interpretations, such as the one
concerning the Palestinian flight and the one about zionist
colonialism had been previously argued by Arab scholars and others
who sympathized with the Palestinian cause. These writings had
challenged the official Israeli versions of the events of 1948,
particularly the account of the Arab exodus. What distinguishes
these more recent counter-narratives, however, is that produced by
Jewish scholars whose loyalty to the state was beyond question.
Some, like Benny Morris, considered themselves to be loyal
zionists. Others, while disagreeing with basic components of the
zionist ideology, willingly served in the Israeli military and
were/are prepared, when necessary, to put their lives on the line
to defend the very state whose destruction they have been accused
of fomenting.
While Israeli Jewish scholars were producing these and other
critical studies challenging the previously dominant Israeli
interpretations of history and society, voices of Palestinian
critics were also being heard within Israel. For years, writers
like Anton Shammas had argued that a zionist Jewish state was
simply incompatible with a fully democratic state. Through his many
writings, fiction and non-fiction alike, Shammas sought to educate
Israeli Jews to the basic contradiction at the heart of a state.
Insofar as it defined itself as Jewish and imposed upon its
non-Jewish, primarily Arab citizens, a network of symbols and an
educational system that was shaped by and grounded in Jewish
values, Israel was unable to honor the rights of all of its
minority groups as it was committed to do in the Israeli
Declaration of Independence. Graphically depicting the situation of
the Palestinian citizens of Israel, marginalized or excluded by a
state whose language, symbols, and holidays perpetuated a zionist
Jewish discourse, Shammas insisted that laws such as Israel's law
of return - indeed the entire apparatus around which Israeli
national identity was constructed - privileged Jewish Israelis,
while disenfranchising and disempowering Palestinian Israelis
(Silberstein; ch. 5). The Law of Return, a uniquely zionist
institution that was a source of pride to Jews throughout the
world, is, in his view, incompatible with a fully democratic
society. According to this law, a manifestation of the discourse
that defined Israel as a state of the Jewish people, any Jew from
any place in the world that immigrated to Israel would be welcome
and, with rare exceptions, granted citizenship. In contrast,
Palestinians who had fled the state in 1948 whose families had
lived on the land for generations, even centuries, were denied
permission to return. How is it, argued Shammas, that a non-Hebrew
speaking Jew from Brooklyn who had never set foot in Israel could
be pretty much guaranteed citizenship, while Palestinians fluent in
Hebrew with a map of the landscape inscribed in their consciousness
could not even hope for citizenship.
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