The Idea of Israel (39 page)

The U-Turn

Despite these volleys of angry prose, the post-Zionist point of view continued until roughly 1999 to be held by a relatively large number of academics, artists, film-makers and educators. Local academia’s ability to tolerate, and even for a while to listen to, challenging voices depended very much on the country’s general political mood. As long as the mood was sanguine and the Oslo Accords seemed to be leading somewhere, the mainstream was reasonably tolerant. Oslo’s demise returned the society to a mood of intransigence and narrow-mindedness that left no room for critiques from the left, only from the right. Israel was back at war.

It was with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 that optimism began to wane. Pessimism set in, along with a growing distrust in the Palestinians, a move to the right, and a scaling back of Oslo’s implementation and goals. At the same time, the popular appeal of the ‘new historians’ and their post-Zionist manifestations began to fade away until they were perceived as not only irrelevant but also as embodiments of national treason. What brought the ‘post-Zionist decade’ – and the historiographical debate on 1948 – to a definitive end was the outbreak of the Second Intifada in late September 2000. To be more precise, it was the Israeli narrative
of the causes for the intifada and its overall description that contributed to the conclusion of this rare moment of grace in the history of the State of Israel.

Almost as soon as the first news about Palestinian mass demonstrations and disturbances began to circulate in the early days of October 2000, journalists, academics and politicians re-embraced the Zionist consensus. This newfound unity, arising from the abyss that the Rabin assassination prised open, was greatly facilitated by the fact that Israel’s mainstream media uncritically accepted and widely disseminated the government’s propagandist version of why violence had erupted. In that version, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were not only the initiators of the Second Intifada; they were also fully to blame for the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit, at which Arafat and Ehud Barak, with their host, President Bill Clinton, were supposed to tie up all the Oslo loose ends and present the world with a final settlement to the ‘Palestine question’. From the viewpoint of Jewish society and its political élite, Israel had done all it could do to achieve peace but was met with extremism and intransigence, forcing the government to shift from peace to war. The Palestinians had proved themselves to be enemies, thereby justifying the brutality of the Israeli response to the Second Intifada and the closing of the public mind. Ariel Sharon’s election by a wide margin in February 2001 confirmed the magnitude of public support for the new policies, while the events of 9/11 facilitated the government’s depiction of Arafat as an arch-terrorist associated with Osama bin Laden and of Israel’s response to the uprising as part of the ‘global war on terror’. As in the past, the media and academia were the principal agencies providing professional and even scholarly scaffolding for these interpretations.

The uprising in the occupied territories and especially in Israel itself, where a large number of Palestinian citizens in Israel joined the intifada in demonstrations of an intensity and scope never seen since 1948, had a devastating effect on the movement to foster a post-Zionist critique. Within a few weeks after October 2000, public discourse in Israel had been reshaped along strictly consensual lines. The new discourse of unity engulfed everyone. ‘New historians’ such
as Benny Morris and post-Zionist philosophers such as Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and others, appeared with
mea culpa
statements, reasserting their allegiance to Zionism, declaring their distrust of the Palestinians and their animosity towards the Palestinian minority in Israel. Here is how a right-wing newspaper, the weekly
Makor Rishon
, described Gur-Ze’ev’s transformation: ‘He was the assistant of the notorious post-Zionist philosopher, Adi Ofir … who underwent a philosophical and ideological metamorphosis’. Gur-Ze’ev told the paper: ‘I was part of an intolerant fashion with which I was supposed to collaborate, and even be one of its main heroes’, and he declared, ‘What we were preaching was a new anti-Semitism’.
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The public discourse revealed a sense of relief – a decade of disintegration and disunity was over, replaced by a unity which re-embraced even the settlers’ movement in the occupied territories. This newly birthed consensus was reflected in the new political formations of the twenty-first century. In the century’s opening decade, Israeli politics were dominated by a party named Kadima (Forward). Founded by Ariel Sharon; it comprised major sections of the Labour and Likud parties of the past and was the recipient of two significant electoral successes in 2006 and 2009. In ideological terms, Likud, Kadima, and the Labour Party (currently reduced to insignificance) shared a similar understanding of the idea of Israel, and their interpretation regained the space that had been occupied for a short while by the post-Zionist version of that idea.

From 2000 onwards, there remained no trace of the formerly impressive presence of the post-Zionist point of view. It was replaced by the new, consensual interpretation of Zionism, represented in the Knesset by the main parties. This consensual takeover competed with an even harsher and less compromising version of Zionism, which I shall call here neo-Zionist. In the 2012 elections, its representatives in the Knesset were grouped under a new party, the Jewish Home. The power base for this harsher Zionism were the settlers in the West Bank and in pockets within pre-1967 Israel where fundamentalist Judaism had grown exponentially in recent years. While classical and neo-Zionism seemed to collaborate well politically, they clashed culturally on the degree of religiosity that the society should require and
on the optimal tactics for truly achieving the Zionist project, given the fact that there were still larger numbers of Palestinians than Jews inhabiting the Land of Israel. But since the debates were tactical, and the two streams were equally unwilling to make changes in the occupation or in the oppression of Palestinians inside Israel, the sense was that the Jewish state had nothing in particular to worry about. Hence Ari Shavit’s sigh of relief expressed in
Haaretz
on the occasion of the state’s sixty-fifth birthday, as quoted above.
¹¹
The way he saw the situation, the only ideological rift in Israel was created by post-Zionism, but following its defeat, a more complete Jewish Israel was able to emerge.

The announcement of the untimely (some would say) and long overdue (most Israelis would say) death of post-Zionism was broadcast, as expected, by the liberal Zionist paper
Haaretz
as part of the paper’s overall attempt to assess the impact on Israel of the Second Intifada, then entering its second year.
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Tom Segev, who in 2001 had just published a book in Hebrew on post-Zionists, remarked that post-Zionism had been sent into exile abroad and could become quite popular there.
¹³
In retrospect, one would say he might have been right. But the point is that he, a veteran observer of cultural and intellectual life in Israel, concluded that its demise had already taken place in Israel itself.

Devout anti-Zionists did not lament the disappearance of a term that grouped them with those who were not categorically against Zionism. With the demise of post-Zionism, they now could return to their splendid isolation as eccentric academics and pundits, who were seen by their society as insane at best and traitors at worst. Amnon Raz-Karkozkin told
Haaretz
he detested the term ‘post-Zionism’ – but alas for him he was and still is regarded as a post-Zionist. In 2001 as in 1994, when we first used the term, we included him as someone who dared to question the very essence of Zionism and the idea of Israel. Given the small number of those bold enough to embark on this route, few writers had the tenacity or patience to divide them further into anti- and ‘less anti-’ Zionists. In the West, however, the left has always been more concerned with stressing its differences from the ally next door than with the enemy outside.

Like Segev, Shlomo Sand began to publish books on post-Zionism at an awkward moment – in 2001, when it fell out of favour. But he was given to keeping hope alive: ‘The rumours of the death of post-Zionism are premature’, he declared optimistically. Considering the popularity of his books, which severely attacked the basic historical assumptions underlying the idea of Israel – namely that the Zionist settlers were the genetic and authentic successors of the Jews who had lived in Roman Palestine – he may have had a point. In 2001 he urged me to be more patient, as the process would continue and succeed. For him it did, but alas the rest of academia seemed to go in the opposite direction.

Consider, too, a comment by the political philosopher Yossi Yonah of Ben-Gurion University, who noted that even at the peak of its success, ‘for every post-Zionist member of academia there were ten if not a hundred Zionist academics’.
¹⁴
His university was singled out in 2001 as the last bastion of post-Zionism, centred around a journal called
Hagar
, edited by the post-Zionist geographer Oren Yiftachel. In 2012 the government tried to close the bastion within the larger bastion, the university’s Department of Politics and Government, as it still included too many post-Zionists. So far this effort has not succeeded.
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One remaining point of interest in this situation is to see how mainstream academia – which has always wished to be seen outside Israel as liberal and democratic, a pretence long since dispensed with by Israel’s politicians and diplomats – navigated between its declared noble values and its desire to remain part of the emerging consensus. As I will show later, in the epilogue, academia was recruited once more by the state, this time to a campaign called Brand Israel, meant to counteract what the recent Netanyahu governments saw as a growing delegitimisation of the Jewish state. This recruitment further complicated life for those who wanted to retain at least residual freedom of thought and expression, along with a modicum of self-criticism, within a society that increasingly regarded both (as demonstrated by one survey after another) as redundant values or objectives.

The next chapter will, I hope, illustrate how the idea of Israel has been interpreted in light of new research on the 1948 war, as one
of many indications of the future orientation of the Jewish state. In the present chapter, however, I have the unpleasant task of recording the demise of post-Zionism. I shall do this by highlighting three landmarks, in the fields of politics, legislation and education, that heralded the coming of a neo-Zionist era in Israel. Post-Zionism may have been a bonbon tasted by Israel’s chattering classes, most of whom shunned activism of any kind and disappeared from the ranks of advocates and supporters with the first potential risk to their own career, and perhaps also their own life. But while it occupied a place at the table, those chatterers did illuminate the possibility not only of a different Israel but also of a different Palestine. What we have without them explains the world’s dilemma about Israel, with which I begin and end this book.

The Downfall – Dispensing with Political Plurality

Although post-Zionism had no political representation as such – possibly apart from the Communist Party and the two Palestinian national parties whose political agendas were similar – it produced a certain pluralism in the political discourse of 1990s Israel. That pluralism vanished, and with its disappearance, the gaps between the various political parties narrowed so much that it became difficult to tell the differences between them on the crucial elements of Israel’s twenty-first-century agenda. Most of these parties, as mentioned, were swallowed by one central party, Kadima, notably at its inception, when Ariel Sharon was still active.

This was a long process in the making. It began in 1996, when Labour and Likud decided, following Rabin’s assassination, to adopt a similar interpretation of past and present realities. This joint interpretation envisaged an Israel that extended over parts of the West Bank and the Greater Jerusalem area, and that existed next to a small Palestinian autonomous area or even a state. The newly enlarged state was also to include Syria’s Golan Heights. This view was translated into practical terms through the way succeeding governments of Israel implemented the 1993 Oslo Accords. The reality they created in the
mid-1990s was based on two assumptions. The first was that the pre-1967 Israel was non-negotiable. Hence, the future of the refugees or a discussion about Israel’s role in the making of the problem – were off the negotiating table, not to mention the categorical refusal to include the Palestinians within Israel in any Israeli–Palestinian dialogue on the future. The second assumption was that parts of the West Bank, whose final demarcation would be defined later, would permanently be part of Israel; in 2013 these were more clearly marked and constituted nearly 40 per cent of the West Bank.

In the remainder of the space that had been Mandatory Palestine, Israelis would control the perimeters while the Palestinians would have a measure of autonomy. This formula had already been devised in the first days after the June 1967 war, as I have shown elsewhere, and was legitimatised internationally as a peace plan that even won Nobel Peace Prizes for some Israeli politicians along the way. It also won over a Palestinian partner for a while and, in 1994, brought the world the Palestinian Authority, an entity that was expected to bless a scheme which would make Palestine a bantustan occupying less than 60 per cent of the West Bank plus 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip until 2005 and the whole of Gaza after that. There would be a mini-capital at Abu Dis (a neighbourhood on the eastern slopes of Jerusalem’s mountains), but no solution for the refugee problem and no dismantling of Jewish settlements.