The Idea of Israel (22 page)

Ram showed how, in their analysis of Israeli society, Zionist sociologists elaborated theories to fit notions such as the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ and the ‘melting pot’. They described a modernised society
in which the white, Western component – the Jewish immigrants from Europe – coached the rest, be they Jews from Arab countries or Palestinians who remained in Israel, on how to emulate them and become better citizens in a Jewish democracy. The modernisation theories embraced by the Israeli sociological establishment disregarded the heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and multicultural society that had developed since 1948.
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To these sociologists, Israel was a paragon of successful modernisation process and progress. Ram not only challenged the validity of this claim but argued that the sociologists provided academic justifications for the discriminatory and oppressive policies that resulted from such an interpretation of the idea of Israel.

The scholars who worked on the history of the State of Israel were in tune not only with the realities around them but also to the contemporary global debates about power and knowledge. An important component of the new research, in addition to aspects of history and society, was a lively inquiry into theoretical questions. As a result, there arose a vibrant local conversation about knowledge and power that yielded important texts relevant not only for local consumption but for more general use elsewhere.

Because of this interest in theory, tremendous effort was directed towards the translation into Hebrew of major works, foremost among them those of Michel Foucault, as well as the revisiting of archaic translations of Marx and Marxist literature. These books were published by a Tel Aviv publisher, Resling, and the articles in
Theory and Criticism
. This effort also required expertise and familiarity with new methodologies, so that academics, within their professional remit, would be able to expose the production of hegemonic knowledge and, even more important, offer ways to intervene in the process.

Post-Zionist Methodology

Post-Zionist scholars continued to accumulate new evidence about the past and new data about the present, within the restrictions imposed by the thirty-year delay in declassification of materials in
the Israeli archives. The new archival evidence exposed previously unknown domestic and foreign policies, some of them quite horrific. One example was the forced kidnapping of Yemeni Jewish babies in the 1950s from their mothers, on the grounds that they were unfit parents, so that the babies could be given over for adoption by Ashkenazi parents. The babies were taken while the mothers were still in hospital; they were told that the babies were dead. These revelations caused a Yemeni Jewish rabbi, Uzi Meshulam, to barricade himself and family members in a house in the centre of Israel in 1994, demanding truth and justice.
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Also found in the archives were nasty and unpleasant statements about anyone who was not an Ashkenazi Jew – quotes from top ministers and journalists in all the major newspapers. The archives shed new light as well on the activities of the Israeli intelligence services in Arab countries, including both active interference in Arab politics and ways of triggering the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel.

But the vast majority of academics were not focused simply on the collection of new evidence. They were more interested in the deconstruction of existing evidence and knowledge for the purpose of exposing the realities that lay behind the accepted vision of Israel. So they reread newspaper articles, speeches, and novels; they looked again at art and movies. This second look enabled them to pose a more fundamental challenge to the idea of Israel.

Thus, Zvi Efrat revisited the iconic photography of the 1950s, which in fact recorded the destruction of Palestine even though the photographs were commissioned to commemorate the forestation of the country; the Jewish National Fund had planted European pine trees all over the villages destroyed and depopulated by the IDF during the 1948 war.
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Galia Zlamansov Levi examined how the Bible was taught in Israeli schools as a text that justified military occupation and dispossession, minus any exploration of moral issues or questions of justice. Alexander Kedar looked at the Israeli land law regime and presented it as a colonialist structure in its intent, praxis and objectives.
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Haim Bereshit deconstructed the history of urban planning in Jaffa as a microcosm of the Zionist policy of de-Arabisation of the country.
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Ilan Gur-Ze’ev discussed the physical
structure of the University of Haifa, built on Mount Carmel, as a project aimed at ‘erasing the existence of the other cultures on the mountain … its phallic towers eradicating the memory of the destroyed Palestinian villages as well as the natural flora of the area’.
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Every medium through which the historical narrative of Zionism and the essence of the idea of Israel were conveyed was examined, deconstructed and exposed as a text that hid, distorted, rejected and oppressed the Other, whoever that might be. Like their colleagues in the West who ventured in a similarly critical way to question their own national ethos and idealism, the post-Zionists sought to salvage hidden or repressed voices of Israeli society.

Critical theories on nationalism, relativist historiosophies, postmodernist hermeneutical techniques, and deconstructive methodologies were all employed in the service of understanding how the Zionist interpretation of reality affected the life of everyone who lived, or used to live, in Israel and Palestine. Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, for instance, developed a subfield of postcolonial Jewish studies that, among its other issues, examines how Zionism transformed Judaism and turned the Jewish victim into a victimiser, while Hannan Hever reread the literary Israeli canon through the lens of the most up-to-date postcolonial theoretical analyses.
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One of the most intriguing samples of such work was a reaction to the UNESCO declaration that an area of old Tel Aviv that was built in the 1930s–50s be labelled a World Heritage site. Sharon Rotbard, an Israeli architect, used a postcolonial prism to show how the so-called White City could not exist without the Black City, the depopulated and now gentrified town of Jaffa.
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As I am rereading these sources, it seems that whether these and other scholars were using the term ‘postcolonial’ or ‘colonial’ as the preferred adjective in their studies, for ordinary Israeli readers the overall message was the same. Even when a scholar applied updated theoretical prisms to the case study of Zionism, the project could not but be described as a nineteenth-century colonialist enterprise that continues to this day to focus on erasing the Palestinians from the land in any way possible. The only drawback was that the theories, especially when translated into Hebrew, brought with
them a highly specialised language which was not accessible to a wider public.

Two tools attracted this new scholarship in particular: deconstruction, as offered by literary criticism and hermeneutics, and positionality as defined by cultural anthropology. In simple terms, and as it was understood in Israel, positionality is the right of scholars to position themselves vis-à-vis their research in accordance with whatever identity they choose. As a result, whatever your identity, or your politics of identity, it plays a crucial role in why, what, and how you research a given topic. The more representative academia becomes of the full range of positions, the better its work will be – and if significant positions are not represented, then the research will be biased against the very groups whose representatives are absent. The best way to fully appreciate the nature of positionality is to juxtapose it with the older idea that it does not matter who the researcher is, since all research is scientific, even that done by humans on humanity, and is therefore accurate and truthful.

Deconstruction enabled scholars in Israel to treat the Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel as a text that could destroy, or elevate, real people’s lives and fortunes. The gist of the approach was that the power of Zionism, either as a national movement in the eyes of some or as a settler colonialist movement in the eyes of others, is the omnipotent narrator; and that in many ways is lived according to, or in defiance of, this narrator’s script or plot. Consequently, every human cognition, action and emotion can be examined as a literary text in which one can identify the plot, the heroes, the villains, and the genre.

From the deconstructionist perspective, Zionism figures as a powerful story, and one’s place in it determines in real life one’s fate under the Jewish state. If you are a Palestinian, you are the villain in the story; if you are the Mizrachi Jew, you are the primitive relative. Comparing these depictions as they appeared in everything from scholarship to cinema was the first step in implementing this methodology. The second was an attempt to correlate actual policies and strategies from above with the images in both the popular and the high culture of the society. Thus, if you were depicted as marginal
or hostile, this was reflected in the authorities’ attitude towards you in mundane as well as existential matters. What this meant was that the power of the interpretation could be detected in every aspect of life, in such disparate areas as radio commercials, the characters of sitcoms and soap operas, children’s literature and textbooks, the government’s policy papers, politicians’ speeches, and so on.

In addition, one could refer not only to what was present in the written or visual form to find how you, the Other, or anyone else was represented or misrepresented; you could also research what was absent from the text. As Edward Said pointed out, the attitude of Jane Austen and her contemporaries to colonialism was evident from the sheer fact that the colonies are hardly there in the novels. Similar absences of Arabs, Palestinians,
Mizrachim
and women were noted in scholarly Zionist work, films, museums, novels, national ceremonies and emblems – and that is not an imaginary list, as it objectively represents what was deconstructed in the 1990s. In fact, almost everything in sight was deconstructed, so much so that one sometimes had the impression that the process went too far in its depiction of every piece in the puzzle of one’s reality as a legitimate area of inquiry. All in all, though, deconstruction was an impressive salvage operation of hidden or silenced voices, unheard in the texts written by the oppressors or the rulers. It introduced oral history as a legitimate academic genre, and so even those who, because of illiteracy or destruction, left no written evidence could now tell their stories through the work of these scholars.

Nevertheless, the measure of a scholar’s academic relevance had more to do with that other tool, positionality, which was also imported from abroad in the 1990s. This method demanded from scholars that they go beyond the indulgence and pleasure of slaughtering sacred cows or deconstructing to death the presentation of reality by the powerful. Now they were expected also to show commitment to the real people who were being victimised by that presentation. The process was far more difficult and much less enjoyable.

Positionality meant that you had to locate yourself not in the national, Zionist narrative, but against it. When you defied the national claims for a collective past, identity, and future, you entered
the arena of the politics of identity and multiculturalism. The most vibrant academic embodiment of this arose in 1970s America. In those years, quite a few US academics were involved in what became known as the ‘culture wars’ or the ‘campus wars’: heated debates about identity and its politics as legitimate criteria for assessing such matters as admission to the universities (whether as students or staff), promotion, the shaping of curricula, and the quality of one’s academic work.
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Even Hollywood succeeded in conveying that atmosphere in the memorable 1970 film
Getting Straight
, directed by Richard Rush, in which Vietnam veteran Harry Bailey (played by Elliott Gould) appears as a graduate student facing the pressures of the anti-war movement on campus on the one hand, and the conservatism of his examiners on the other.

The striking feature of American identity politics in those years was that they were tangibly manifested on campuses: in the composition of departments, their teaching agenda and research orientation. Thus a department of history was asked to give voice to multiple historical narratives that had been ignored or misrepresented in the past by the hegemonic white American narrative. Hispanic, gender, African American, and gay histories were now offered, along with similar perspectives on culture, literature and other fields of inquiry. At times the debate was regarded as a war, because in some circles it was held that for these points of view to be fairly represented in academia, members of those very groups were the best candidates to put them across. Affirmative action and positive discrimination were sometimes the solution. Lawsuits, the disintegration of departments, and the sacking of staff members were the more extreme manifestations of this discussion. But, as in any academic war, nobody died or was even wounded.

Israeli academics tried to follow suit. They wished to represent the Palestinian, the Mizrachi, and the feminist sides of the story, to demand their introduction into the national narrative, and even to claim a place for them in the cultural canon. They had the strong conviction that by representing these groups within Israeli academia, one was not only exposing their mistreatment in the past and present but also offering redemption for these evils in the future. The former
goal – presenting the trials and tribulations of repressed, oppressed and marginalised groups – was achieved to a certain extent; the second, not at all. Indeed, the only group in Israel that is better represented today than in the 1990s is women. Palestinians, Mizrachi Jews, and in particular Palestinian and Mizrachi women, constitute a mere fraction of the ten thousand or so members of staff in Israeli academia (less than one per cent for Palestinians, 9 per cent for Mizrachi Jews, and one per cent for Mizrachi women).
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