The Idea of Israel (19 page)

All the works discussed above have reaffirmed through archival documents what Flapan found between the lines of the published material available to him at the time. But their significance also lies in the ways they challenged mainstream interpretation of the idea of Israel. The situation was changing. There was now an atmosphere in which it was easier to write a historical version that was as alive to the Palestinian narrative as to the Zionist one. The peace activity on both sides allowed for a more open dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian scholars, and finally one could begin to hear on Israeli university campuses academic versions of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. In some cases, the recognition of the other side of the story, even to the point of adopting it as the rightful interpretation, was the result of a newfound ideological stance; in others, it was the consequence of adopting a more relativist and multi-narrative approach to history; in still others, it was both.

The Significance of the 1948 Historiography

The ‘new history’ signified a new chapter in the production of knowledge in Israel because it was the work of professional Israeli historians whose specialised area of inquiry was the Arab–Israeli conflict. But their impact was limited, because of the scores of Israeli historians who entered the Public Record Office in Kew Gardens and the Israeli State Archives in the basement of the prime minister’s offices in Jerusalem (nowadays it moved to a new place in the south of the city), only a few emerged as ‘new historians’ – that is to say, historians convinced that the evidence they had seen challenged a formative chapter in the consolidation of the idea of Israel. Indeed, documents are not the only bricks with which a historiographical picture is built. The prism through which one interprets the evidence differs from one historian to another, and that prism is suffused with his or her ideological background and political outlook. The documents we have been discussing became an explosive and even sensational discovery only when scrutinised though a highly critical prism on Zionism in general and Israeli contemporary policies in particular.

The ‘new history’ of the 1948 war had a twofold effect on Israeli historiography: it legitimatised the historical narrative of the Palestinians, and it offered a potential for normalising the national collective memory. It did not adopt – and this is worth reiterating – the Palestinian narrative in its entirety. In the case of the 1948 war there are specific chapters in the new Israeli narrative, such as the claim that the British were neutral, that are still rejected by Palestinian historiographers. Nor does the reference to an Arab willingness to compromise with Israel after the 1948 war – even though it portrays Israel as the intransigent party – appeal to what may be called either the collective Palestinian memory of the period or the pan-Arabist memory, inasmuch as it shows a lack of serious Arab commitment to the cause of Palestine. But those caveats do not undermine the overall contribution. With regard to the history of knowledge production on Palestine, and the challenge to the Zionist marketing of the idea of Israel, the ‘new history’ of the 1948 war is the most profound legitimisation given by Israeli scholarship to any chapter in the Palestinian narrative.

The ‘new historians’ thus presented, in a purely positivist way, what they believed was the true nature of Israeli behaviour – or rather, misbehaviour – towards the Arab world and the Palestinians in 1948. They drew a picture of which most Israelis were unaware, and it provoked angry reactions from public figures and press commentators. As mentioned, Shabtai Teveth, the respected biographer of David Ben-Gurion and a senior journalist for
Haaretz
, branded the ‘new historians’ as traitors. Others followed suit, although more soberly, and were willing to engage in some degree of public debate about the findings but a far greater degree of debate about our motives. Name-calling characterised the initial response to the publication of the work of the ‘new historians’. I recall a conference at the University of Haifa, an early conference devoted to the ‘new history’, at which the head of the history department suggested that the research being pursued by the new group was tantamount to treason during a time of war. Later, in an article in
Haaretz
, he called me Israel’s Lord Haw-Haw.
⁴⁰

Nevertheless, when Morris and Shlaim began to study the
aftermath of 1948 and on into the 1950s, the early years of statehood, they took the same critical approach to the Zionist narrative. Before 1967, Israeli policy had never been depicted as aggressive, to say nothing of occasionally brutal and inhuman and quite often morally unjustifiable. While there was little in the work of the ‘new historians’ that dealt with historiography, and specifically Zionist historiography, their/our works did serve to highlight mainstream academia’s repression of the truth and its participation in the fabrication of the national narrative about 1948.

Revisiting the First Decade of Statehood

The research on 1948 that was carried out during the 1980s paved the way for a more fundamental criticism of Zionism and its role in Israeli academia. In addition, the media coverage of this issue encouraged scholars to go beyond the topic of 1948, both in thematics and in chronology. The same socio-economic and political background that produced what I have called the academic pioneers and the new history also contributed to the shaping of a new research agenda about the first decade of statehood. This period, 1948–58, seemed to attract not only professional academics but also novelists, film-makers, playwrights, musicians, poets, artists, and journalists, who represented their version of events in a way that did not tally with the collective memory nurtured and maintained by the state through all its agencies and apparatuses.

What differentiated this new energy, apart from the choice of topics and methodology, from anything that preceded it was its almost matter-of-fact acceptance of Zionism as an ideology and not as an ideal reality. As such, scholars could not be neutral about it; they must be either for or against it. This aspect of the debate was absent from the ‘new history’. Our new history of 1948 was based on a new ideological approach, even though Morris and Shlaim denied that this was the case and thus upheld the claim to academic objectivity with the same vigour and conviction as had their predecessors. As for myself, I was inclined to engage with the impact of power on
knowledge as an overall part of our work. The present book is in many ways the result of this engagement.

The next wave of new historiography in Israel, however, was motivated by just such an impulse. This new approach emerged among a group of young Israeli social scientists who added a historical perspective to their attempt to understand contemporary Israeli society. Their challenge was not based on new evidence; rather, they read the documents differently. More important, they searched for a different kind of evidence that could not necessarily be found in the political archives. As a result, they were as critical of the past as they were of the present social situation in Israel. In fact, they attributed the contemporary unease of, and cleavages within, the society to government policies in the early years of statehood and, in particular, to the inherent contradiction between Zionism and values such as democracy and liberalism.

This new wave of challengers, to which I devote the following chapter, started a conversation at the heart of which lay several questions never before asked in Israel: How is academic knowledge produced? How does it serve or abuse the interests of the society, and how can it be made more equitable and democratic? The answers were drawn both from far away, from the United States, and from very close to home, from the social reality around them.

SIX

The Emergence of Post-Zionist Academia, 1990–2000

I
n the autumn of 1994, a group of mainstream Israeli scholars met their young challengers for an open discussion at the secular mausoleum of Zionism, the burial place of David Ben-Gurion, on the desert plateau that the Israelis call the Negev and the Palestinians al-Naqab. Today the grave is still a ceremonial space for commemorating past glories and spelling out bold visions for the future.
¹

It was a bit ironic that the defamers and violators of the shrine, myself included, were asked to come and share the sacred space. The introduction to the volume that came out of this meeting shows that there was a hope of converting us back to Zionism even while embracing the principle of free exchange of thought and ideas. Nevertheless, since a discussion at Sunday Mass on the existence of God is by itself a refreshing moment in the history of any religion, this discussion on the existence of Zionism was no exception. It was there that I heard the term ‘post-Zionism’ for the first time as a description of the renegades who dared question the truisms of Zionism.

The year 1994 was a good one for apostates like us. It was the year after the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the PLO. There was a hopeful public atmosphere, and it made possible a meeting such as the one that took place at the very heart of the Zionist establishment. Nor was it a unique event. Anyone who
visited Israeli academia in the 1990s would have sensed a changed place, one that had nothing in common with what preceded (or, as it turned out, succeeded) it. From every poster-crammed wall you would be invited to conferences and seminars to discuss topics that had hitherto been taboo in the Jewish state: Zionism as colonialism, the Nakba, discrimination against the Arab Jews, the manipulation of Holocaust memory. Even more daring were the articles you could have read during that period, both in academic journals and in the popular press, about these and similar topics that before (and after) the 1990s were deemed subversive and unprofessional.

These winds of openness and adventure blew not only in the corridors of academia but also across the public domain. New conversations about the past, as well as the present, seeped into chat shows on radio and television. There was a sense that these discussions could perhaps serve as a new source of inspiration for textbooks and high school curricula. Soldiers and officers were invited to attend debates and discussions on ‘the new history of 1948’ or Israel’s policies in the 1950s.

As a whole, the 1990s were a decade in which the entire idea of Israel was questioned. The evidence for this enterprise is readily available: dozens of books in English and Hebrew, hundreds of articles and conference papers, similar numbers of op-eds, numerous appearances on television and radio talk shows. All show academics pointing a guilty finger at their own milieu for providing the scholarly scaffolding for acts of repression, oppression and discrimination. This deconstructive effort affected virtually every discipline in the Israeli human sciences: arts, history, philosophy, political science, literary criticism, and many other fields in the social sciences and humanities. The local press labelled this new energy ‘post-Zionist’, but was ambivalent about whether it was a positive development or a dangerous deterioration. The term ‘post-Zionism’ became generic for describing any academic critique on Zionism from within Jewish Israel. It was used equally by those who complimented themselves and gladly identified as post-Zionists because they challenged Zionism head-on, and by those who condemned the challengers as traitors to the idea of Israel. There is no easy Wikipedia definition for
‘post-Zionism’ and, like so many other such phenomena, it is preferable to describe it in full rather than attempt to define it.

What Is Post-Zionism?

Nearly twenty years after I first heard the term near the burial place of the state’s founder, I think ‘post-Zionism’ warrants some elaboration. In the course of those twenty years, no one has been able to come up with a definition shorter than four pages, dotted with endless recurrences of ‘but’ and ‘nonetheless’, in an attempt to clarify this elusive phenomenon. Clearly there is no simple definition for this working term, whose claim to fame is that it enabled interested parties to lump together a disparate group of a few hundred academics and cultural challengers to Zionism in the 1990s. However, it is worth trying to provide at least a moderately focused and detailed reflection of the motivations of these academics, their areas of inquiry, and their impact on media and society.

But first allow me to chart some common characteristics of these challengers, in so far as that is possible. The easiest way forward is to detect their internal debates so that the scope of their critique may be appreciated. The most important debate among them concerned ideology. This group included anti-Zionists as well as Zionists. The former despised the adjective ‘post-Zionist’ when it was applied to them and insisted that it better suited those who, despite their critique, remained Zionists, whereas the latter gladly adopted an adjective that they hoped would not brand them as traitors to their own society.
²

Another discussion concerned the importance ascribed to the debate about Zionism in the 1990s. Among the challengers one could find those who regarded it as a local conversation about the production of knowledge in Israel and academia’s role in it in particular. Others, by contrast, took it far more seriously and believed they were deliberating the very essence and soul of Zionism, in hopes of impacting the identity and nature of the state in years to come.

The different ambitions were also manifested in the personal projects undertaken by these challengers of Zionism. Some were truffle hunters, if I may use the favourable term employed by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and adopted by the British historian Lawrence Stone when describing microhistorians, who knew everything at the level of historical anecdote about the life of Zionism and Israel but did not contextualise their particular research in a more general challenge to Zionism. Others were parachutists, to use Stone’s image of macrohistorians, who offered a comprehensive overview of Zionist and Israeli past and present realities but without providing concrete evidence for their challenge.
³
The best works were, of course, those that were able to integrate both approaches to history.