The post-Zionists reject Zionism as a valid ideology and insist it does not fit the needs of our times … [T]hey do not necessarily adopt the old anti-Zionist position. For them the social, political and cultural problems Israelis and Jews abroad face cannot be tackled within the Zionist discourse and cannot be solved through the current Zionist political and ideological agenda.
– Adi Ofir, founder and first editor, Theory and Criticism1
If the Second Intifada did not totally obliterate post-Zionism, it definitely sent it underground. Even before, the members of this school found it hard to infiltrate academia, but now they shun the term.
– Neri Livneh, journalist, Haaretz2
You couldn’t mistake the atmosphere that enveloped Independence Day this year: It was an atmosphere of satisfaction … [W]hat best explains this optimistic mood is the invalidation of post-Zionism. Since the start of the 1990s, Israel was under heavy attack by the post-Zionists. For some twenty years they enjoyed the halo of being fashionable, of being at one with the times. For all that they claimed we were ugly, they were beautiful. For all that they claimed we were evil, they were good. For all that they portrayed us as South Africa, they portrayed themselves as Nelson Mandela.
The post-Zionists’ systematic attacks on the Jewish national home, on the Jewish national movement and against the Jewish people won them global acclaim. Their unconscious cooperation with anti-Semites, old and new, made them the darlings of international academia and the world media …
Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Israelis are now being exposed – whether they know it or not – to the enormous gap between the (human) dimensions of Israeli injustice and the (inhuman) intensity of the brutality that surrounds it. This gap has opened people’s eyes and explains some of the things we’ve had to do and the immense accomplishment we’ve achieved. It has made post-Zionism obsolete, explains the feeling of deep pride that we felt on Independence Day, and defines the challenge that we face in our 66th year.
– Ari Shavit, senior correspondent, Haaretz, on Israel’s Independence Day, 20133
In the mid-1990s a young American Jewish scholar by the name of Yoram Hazony founded a new institution, the Shalem Center, a think tank (and now a college) intended to confront what he saw as the dangers posed by post-Zionism. At one point, Hazony served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s ghost writer and was part of his team of advisers. In 1996 Shalem published the first issue of its journal, Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation. Money came from the prime minister’s office (and from conservative US funders), as did some of the centre’s senior writers and fellows.
Hazony expressed his vision of the corrupting force of post-Zionism in Azure in the summer of 1996:
By now post-Zionist truths have become so self-evident as to constitute an Israeli ‘political correctness’ justifying – let no one be surprised – the censorship of opposing views … [N]owhere has the strange fruit of post-Zionist policy been more apparent than in the Foreign Ministry … The Jewish state is first and foremost a political idea. Armies may menace it physically, but it is on the level of ideas that the gravest threats are registered.
Azure provided the ideological infrastructure for a new era in the history of the State of Israel, in which the idea of Israel would be interpreted as an existential struggle against the Palestinians, particularly those who were Israeli citizens, as well as against the enemies from within, which is to say, whoever would be deemed a post-Zionist. The first struggle would be conducted in the Knesset and the second in academia. But the battlefield also extended to foreign policy – aggression towards the state’s neighbours and the Palestinians under occupation – and towards the educational system and the media.
Ofir Haivry, the editor of the new journal, explained that his team hoped to set up in the near future a Zionist academia and media, since these realms had, from his point of view, been overtaken by post-Zionists. At the time, the centre and its members looked esoteric at best and pathetic at worst. Within a decade, however, their agenda had become the idea of Israel in the twenty-first century. Not only was it a far cry from post-Zionism; it was also a very different animal from the Liberal or Labour Zionism that had informed the idea in the previous century. The gist of it is quite familiar today: a highly nationalistic, racist and dogmatic version of Zionist values overrule all other values in the society, and any attempt to challenge that interpretation of the idea of Israel is considered unpatriotic and in fact treasonous.
Let us examine first if indeed post-Zionism was as prevalent and hegemonic as the founders of the Shalem Center and their supporters asserted it was. As mentioned in the two previous chapters, the post-Zionist interpretation of Israel’s past and present was widely filmed and broadcast. But merely the fact that it had been adopted by the knowledge producers was not an indication that their message was widely accepted in 1996 by the knowledge consumers. We now know, in 2014, that it was in fact basically rejected by the vast majority of them, though we did not know this at the time.
In general, it would be fair to say that the novels, plays and films that seriously transcended the Zionist narrative and its negative portrayal of Arabs did not become part of the Israeli canon, even in the heyday of post-Zionism. They did not represent a dominant cultural position, and their producers were not among the leaders of the Israeli cultural scene. Nonetheless, the ‘new historians’, poets, writers, film-makers, and playwrights did operate within the system that produced and shaped the country’s cultural identiy, and they could conceivably have affected the society had they been able to persist with their critique beyond 2000.
The continuing scholarly debate, joined by other cultural producers, signalled not merely a scholarly rift but an identity crisis in a society that had been exposed to the possibility of peace in 1993. Peace had the potential to undermine the national consensus, which was based on the need to act jointly against common enemies. Relative economic success and security had already led deprived groups to demand a fairer share, just as it encouraged the Palestinians in Israel to lay bare the tension between the country’s pretence of being a democracy and its insistence on remaining a Jewish state. Genuine peace demanded a radical change in the Israeli mentality and in the basic Jewish views about Arabs, specifically Palestinians. So a small number of people, with access to the public via the universities, schools, press, and movie screens, began to offer starting points for such a transformation. The point of departure was the acknowledgement that reality could be interpreted in a non-Zionist way, or at least that Israel’s cultural identity must be more pluralistic.
The cultural identity of a society is shaped by historical and contemporary reality as well as by how this reality is interpreted by those who control sociopolitical power. By the time of this exceptional chapter in Israel’s history, the nation’s cultural identity could be characterised as a cultural product, shaped by the heritage and human geography of the land of Palestine and by the conscious national (that is to say, Zionist) attempt to change the identity of that land. From the very beginning, Zionism rejected the Palestinian identity of Palestine and successfuly used force and power to Judaise it. However, certain people and groups challenged the Zionist identity: Palestinians, some of the Jews who had been brought in from the Arab countries, and a small number of individuals, such as this writer, who were born in the country after the establishment of the state and who voiced their dissent in the 1990s.
The Zionist identity of the land and the society was continuously the challenged not because of ‘new historians’ or anti-Zionist novelists. The political demands of the deprived groups, the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the frozen peace accord all contributed to a process capable of turning Zionism into either an anachronism or a concept that could be implemented only through an aggressive policy such as that adopted by the settlers. These processes of challenge began in 1977, when the hegemony of the Ashkenazi élite was questioned; they continued with the 1982 Lebanon War and the First Intifada; and they culminated with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the May 1996 election, which brought a tougher kind of Zionism – the Likud version – back to power.
So yes, there was some truth in what the Shalem Center insisted on, but what they described was not the reality but rather a possible path that Israeli Jewish society could have chosen in the mid-1990s. But it did not do so. Not only was the path not taken, but those who pointed to it were gradually silenced and crushed. And in fact, it was not Hazony and his colleagues who began the counter-attack; instead, it was the Liberal Zionists who took the lead in closing the minds of those whose job and duty it was to produce knowledge for the benefit of the society as a whole.
From the perspective of mainstream Zionists, the post-Zionist interpretation of the past had gained a large following within Israeli universities and centres of cultural production by the 1990s. It was further believed that although every known historian in the Zionist camp had been recruited to refute the post-Zionist version of the past, it won legitimacy in the Western world. At the time, it was also wrongly assumed that because of its relative academic success, post-Zionism won over large segments of the Israeli public as well. For the briefest moment in the state’s history, its parliament discussed post-Zionist legal initiatives that all, in one way or another, pointed towards a transformation of Israel from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens. These suggestions had no chance of being endorsed by the parliament, but it was not forbidden by law to present them. As a result, at this peculiar juncture, these initiatives were put on the Knesset’s agenda. But that chain of events was a rare exception. The rule was that the critical, and therefore far more pro-Palestinian, evaluation of past and present has not led to the wide acceptance of a non-Zionist, let alone an anti-Zionist, vision of the future.
When it became clear that a sizeable number of Israeli academics were not toeing the ideological line, mainstream academic institutions and persons began to react. As the dominant group, these mainstreamers could best be called, in hindsight, classical Zionists. Later they would be challenged not only by post-Zionist scholars but also by neo-Zionist academics, the kind associated with the Shalem Center, which helped to define their boundaries in a clearer way.
Classical Zionists were those who were neither non- or anti-Zionist Jews in Israel nor fundamentalist or ultra-Orthodox Jews. Ever since 1948, and even when classical Zionism’s political fortunes had run down as they did in the 1970s, mid-1990s, and early twenty-first century, they continued to occupy a prominent, indeed a hegemonic, presence as a socio-ideological group within Israeli academia and media. Many, if not a majority, of those who controlled the academic and polemicist venues in Israel defined themselves as Zionists who were utterly opposed to ‘both extremes’ of the Israeli political spectrum.
For a long period there was no need for articulators of the classical Zionist view to clarify their positions on the past. It was the appearance of what was dubbed post-Zionist scholarship that forced the gatekeepers of classical Zionism to reassert their historiographical interpretations as well as their moral convictions. Collective memory and moral self-perception are closely linked, and it is no wonder that the post-Zionist critique on the past triggered a public debate from which much can be learned about classical Zionism’s position on history. This position fed the policies of the first Netanyahu government, as well as the Barak, Sharon and Olmert governments, which takes us to the spring of 2009. Several members of the classical Zionist camp have remarked, albeit disparagingly, that the only merit they saw in post-Zionist scholarship was that it compelled them to redefine, clarify, and update their understanding of the Zionist and Israeli past.
The first scholars to attack the post-Zionist position did so in a very angry way. They denounced the new works as a purely ideological attempt to de-Zionise Israel or as a typical intellectual manoeuvre by self-hating Jews in the service of the enemy. Yoav Gelber, the head of the Herzl Institute for the Research and Study of Zionism at the University of Haifa, likened me and my colleagues to collaborators with the Nazis. Similar views were voiced by a leading liberal jurist, and for a while Israel’s minister of education, Amnon Rubinstein, who already in 1995 wrote in Haaretz that post-Zionists were Holocaust deniers and haters of Israel who wished to eradicate Zionism.4 Their work was ‘an onslaught on the very essence and right of existence of the Jewish people and homeland … it is not an academic work but a frontal ideological attack’. Another liberal professor of culture, Nissim Calderon, supported Rubinstein’s view and described the latter’s article and subsequent book on the topic, From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism, as representing the enlightenment (Zionism) in its war against the darkness of post-Zionism.5
The attack intensified in the latter part of the 1990s. The post-Zionist scholars were not simply attacking Zionism; they were, in the words of two of Israel’s most prominent scholars, determined to end academic discourse in Israel altogether. These two, Anita Shapira, the doyen of Israeli historiography, and Moshe Lissak, the state’s leading sociologist, depicted post-Zionism as a corrupting method and theory.6 They joined a group of Israeli historians and sociologists who in 2003 published a huge volume under the title An Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague.7 In it, post-Zionists were depicted as self-hating Jews and bad scholars, who were intentionally or unintentionally cooperating with anti-Semites. Elhanan Yakira, of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University, devoted an entire book to establishing the connection between Holocaust deniers, old and new anti-Semites, and post-Zionism; it bears the dramatic title Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel.8
It took some time, but Zionist academia did decide it needed to bring down the influence of post-Zionism. It was seen, in the words of a self-recruiter for the mission in the late 1990s – one of the shining new knights of Zionism, David Ohana – as a salvage operation. (The title of his book, too, is rather dramatic: The Last Israelis.)9 The rescue operation was meant to salvage Zionism from both its neo-Zionist enemies on the right, and its post-Zionist foes on the left. This rescue operation was done in the name of liberalism and humanism as well as Zionism. In the eyes of these self-appointed rescuers, Zionism was a national movement, humanist, liberal, socialist, which brought modernisation and progress to primitive Palestine, caused the desert to bloom, rebuilt the ruined cities of the Land, and introduced modern agriculture and industry for the benefit of everyone, Arabs and Jews alike. In this version, Zionism was resisted due to a combination of Islamic fanaticism, pro-Arab British colonialism, and the local culture of political violence. Against all odds, and despite a most cruel local resistance, Zionism remained loyal to humanist precepts of individual and collective behaviour and stretched its hand, unrelentingly, to its Arab neighbours, who kept rejecting it. Against all odds, the Zionists also miraculously established a state in the face of a hostile Arab world – a state that, notwithstanding an objective shortage of space and means, absorbed one million Jews who had been expelled from the Arab world and offered them progress and integration in the only democracy in the Middle East. It was a defensive state, trying to contain ever-growing Arab hostility and world apathy; it was a state which took in Jews from more than a hundred diasporas, gathered them in, and made of them a single, new Jewish people. It was a moral and just movement of redemption, which unfortunately found other people on its homeland, but nonetheless offered them a share in a better future, which they foolishly rejected. This idyllic picture, so runs the reconstruction, was undermined and riven by the evil consequences of the 1967 war and the political earthquake of 1977 that brought the Zionist right to power. After and because of 1967, the state may have developed negative features, such as territorial expansionism and religious fanaticism on the right, and self-doubt and hatred on the extreme left. But it was a reversible development, which could be stopped by returning to old and traditional Zionist values of humanism, democracy and liberalism.
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’.10
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.12 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.15
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.
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.
This vision also had an economic dimension, which cut across national boundaries. Part of it involved the introduction of a capitalist, free-market economy that would connect Israel and the future ‘Palestine’. Under the Paris Protocol, which was the economic component of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1994, Israel and Palestine were to be a single economic unit. This can be seen in the connections between the customs bureaus and the imposition of a joint taxation policy. This unification was ensured by the decision to postpone any substantial negotiations over the introduction of a Palestinian currency. Furthermore, the protocol granted Israel the right of veto on any development scheme put forward by the Palestinian Authority. What all this meant was that the monetary and developmental policies of Israel and its currency exchanges were to play a dominant role in the Palestinian economy. Other aspects of the Palestinian economy, such as foreign trade and industry, would also be totally dominated by the Israelis.
The introduction of the Israeli version of a capitalist society into the Palestinian areas soon proved disastrous. With a very low GNP and the absence of a democratic structure, such an introduction and integration as offered by the Oslo/Paris agreements turned the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority into the slums of Israel. An excellent example of such a development was evident already then in Erez, the buffer zone between Israel and the Gaza Strip. There the Israelis, with the blessing of the Americans and the European Union, opened an industrial park. Let the name not mislead the readers: it was a production line where all the workers were Palestinians and all the employers Israelis, who could enjoy the very low wages they paid their workers. Israel had similar visions for such parks on the border with Jordan and the West Bank – which was why industrialists in Israel saw themselves as belonging to the peace camp. Another aspect of the capitalisation of the peace process was the support given by a limited number of Palestinians who could benefit from such economic transactions.
Perceptive observers understood that the double burden of economic misery and the lack of genuine progress on the national front could lead to a Palestinian attempt to revolt against the post-Oslo reality; similarly, there was obviously nothing in that reality that could have served as an incentive for the Israelis to alter the post-Oslo situation. For the majority of the Jewish population in Israel, the peace was based on an unbeatable logic, a logic often reiterated by the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. According to his vision, the Palestinians were locked in a dismal situation prior to Oslo; they were now offered an improvement – not a very impressive sort of improvement, but nevertheless better because it would mean that Gaza, Jericho, and Ramallah would fly the Palestinian flag and be guarded by Palestinian policemen. Most Palestinians saw it differently; what was on offer was a non-democratic authority that replaced Israeli occupation with Palestinian security services. But for most Israelis this was peace, provided there was no terror and no bombs; peace was equated with their daily security, and by around 2005, it was enhanced by the Oslo process.
The two main political parties, then, shared this vision of the future. They also saw eye to eye on the method needed to implement it: dictating the solution to the Palestinians. This line of action became evident soon after the Oslo Accords were concluded. The notion of dictation enjoyed wide support among the Jewish population and still does so today, and that support was clearly manifested in the 1996 election results, when a vast majority of Jewish voters elected parties which vowed to impose the Oslo reality on the Palestinians in even harsher conditions, the ones suggested by Likud. The same public mood informed the Barak government, which succeeded the first Netanyahu government in 1999. The latter’s fall from power arose from his overall incompetence and a downturn in governability. The composition of the 1999 Barak government and its teams of principal negotiators (ex-generals such as Matan Wilnai, Dani Yatom, and Yossi Peled) produced a similar approach, even if the Likud chose not to join the new government.
So by the time the Second Intifada broke out, there was already a political consensus, and when Sharon came to power in 2001 he upheld that consensus, with one caveat – he was not interested in keeping settlers in the Gaza Strip and preferred to focus instead on turning the West Bank into the future Israel. As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass commented, at that point the vast majority of Jews in Israel lost interest in the Palestine question. The next election campaign proved the point – the issue of Palestine was absent from the agenda of the various parties. For all intents and purposes, it had been solved.
Even the Mizrachi ultra-Orthodox party Shas and the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael were willing to go along with this geopolitical vision. But this vision of the future was not just a matter of defining borders or containing Palestinian national aspirations and rights. It was also a matter of the identity and essence of the society. And here we encounter the neo-Zionist vision, shared by the settler community and by supporters of the National Religious Party, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and a new secular right that was closely associated, both financially and ideologically, with the New Right in the United States. Among its adherents was a new right-wing party of Russian immigrants that would be a powerful actor in the next few years: Yisrael Beiteinu – Israel Our Home, led by Avigdor Lieberman.
Unlike the post-Zionists, following the 1999 elections the neo-Zionist alliance had representation in the Barak government – about six ministries, although compared with Netanyahu’s government, they had of course lost power. They were able to join the Barak government because their interest had shifted from territoral and political borders to socio-cultural questions. They regarded the mini-state offered by Barak to the Palestinians to be irrelevant, but they decided not to insist on their ultimate vision: a completely de-Ara-bised West Bank, along with the construction of the Third Temple instead of the Muslim mosques in the heart of Jerusalem.
In elementary sociological terms, they thrived on the link between the decrease in external tension and the rise of internal tensions. Post-Oslo Israel was more than ever a multi-ethnic, multicultural society, deeply divided on issues of culture, law, morality and education. The Jewish population shared the same attitudes towards the Palestinians wherever they were, but basically differed on everything else. When there was no sense of external or existential threat, the various groups that constituted Israeli society tended to stress their separate identities at the expense of the state’s identity, a tendency manifested in the way that questions of taxes, of conforming to general civil duties, or of a commitment to shared causes were handled. It was also apparent in the 1996 elections that the particular interests of Ethiopian, Russian, North African, secular Tel Avivian, and Palestinian Israelis could be best served in sectarian voting. The 1996 elections were carried out after a revision in the election law: Israelis would now vote separately for a prime minister and a party. Now they could divide their loyalties by voting realistically for one of the usually two possible candidates for prime minister, but voting more emotionally for the party which represented their narrower interests. This dangerous fragmentation ended with the abolition of this provision in the electoral laws in 2001.
During the 1999 elections, however, the trend towards fragmentation only strengthened. Neo-Zionism’s greatest attraction for the Jewish majority in Israel was its simplicity. It conveyed confidence, not confusion, about the future. Its main tactic was to present itself as having the key to the unification of a disintegrated and polarised Israeli society, that key being a crystal-clear version of Judaism as a national movement, which the spokespeople and intellectuals of Labour Zionism never succeeded in promulgating. The neo-Zionists could present themselves as a unifying force, bridging the wide spectrum of conflicting interpretations of Judaism, both as a religion and as a national movement. While the post-Zionist scholars suggested that the fractured reality be understood as an indication for the need to turn Israel into a state for all its citizens and not try to identify the state with one group at the expense of others, the neo-Zionists proposed that only a Jewish religious and nationalist cement would secure Israeli society from further fragmentation and disintegration.
Four parallel processes forged this neo-Zionist option: the radicalisation of the national religious groups in Israel (whose strongholds were in the settlements and in a wide network of state-funded yeshivas); the Zionisation of the previously anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews; the ethnic insulation of segments of the Mizrachi Jewish community, caused by their being pushed to the geographical and social margins of society; and finally, the rapid integration of Israel into the stream of capitalist globalisation, which added to the alliance an intellectual neoconservative component, à la the American New Right (to which the Russian immigrants were mainly attracted).16 These four groups shared the vision of an ethnic Jewish state stretching across most of what had been historical Palestine.
They were divided, however, on the issue of religion. The Russian immigrant community, almost one-sixth of the Jewish population by then, wanted the state to be a secular nationalist entity. The other groups envisaged a theocracy as the best means of facing Israel’s external and domestic problems. The dominant group among them were religious leaders, be they rabbis, magicians, healers, politicians or educators. This new religious élite shared a highly derogatory view of secular Jews and non-Jews in Israel. According to one account, this alliance of fanatics saw secular Jews as the ‘Messiah’s donkey’: having done their job in carrying Jews back to the Holy Land, they were now obsolete and could be treated as non-Jews. In other words, non-Jews are like beasts; Jews are allowed to utilise and exploit them, and may at times fear them, but always hold the moral high ground above them. As Sefi Rachlevsky’s book Messiah’s Donkey and similar publications show, medieval Jewish thinking, constructed to provide balance and solace in the face of a profoundly hostile Gentile environment, is reused here as a basis for a racist modern ideology that constructs a clear axis of exclusion/inclusion for the future. Its goal is an Israel without secular Jews and non-Jews.17
This concept was formulated and upheld by the national religious thinkers, primarily rabbis. It was presented as Zionism, not Judaism, and was connected to the Zionist precept of fulfilment, Hagshama, which, according to its old interpretation, meant only one thing: settling the Land. At first, neo-Zionists regarded settlement of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights as the ultimate act of patriotism and felt connected to all the previous colonisation projects of the Land that had been initiated since the late nineteenth century. But earlier settlement targets there had been almost met in full. Fulfilment now meant geographically reorientating settlement energy into the heart of mixed Palestinian–Jewish towns in Israel, such as Ramla, Lod, Jaffa and Acre – a move that had already sparked many violent clashes and heightened tensions in places where Palestinians and Jews had coexisted quite peacefully in the past. Such actions are upheld by rabbis who issue injunctions prohibiting the letting or selling of flats to Arabs, befriending Arabs, and most definitely marrying an Arab.
Neo-Zionist energy was also directed towards the attempt to impose stricter religious rule over public space, over the judiciary and on legislation. Its main target was the Supreme Court, because of its attempt to safeguard the public sphere from religious interference. So far, the secular Jews in certain areas, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa, have quite successfully rejected these initiatives, whereas those in Jerusalem decided to leave and rebuild their lives in suburbia.
The neo-Zionist view on the past is even more nationalist and romantic than the consensual Zionist view of it. Israel of the Second Temple era was the glorious past which must be reconstructed. The resemblance between the neo-Zionists and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party adherents is quite striking. Both here and there, these groups wished to demolish a past of several hundred years in the name of a more distant past of several thousand years. As a result, neo-Zionists took seriously the idea of rebuilding a Third Temple to replace Haram al-Sharif and preparing cadres of priests to serve there when the time would come – although they differ on how to achieve this goal, whether by exploding the two mosques on the Temple Mount, or waiting for divine intervention to pave the way for their scheme.18
Apart from having a principal role in every Israeli government since 1996, the neo-Zionists’ greatest success was having prolonged control over the educational system in Israel. In the late 1990s, they still shared the office with Meretz, a left Zionist party that was soon pushed out of mainstream politics. This impossible double control over the educational system, of a leftist minister of education and a neo-Zionist deputy, reflected the post-Zionist period of knowledge production in Israel. Throughout the 1990s, the balance of power in academia tilted towards the post-Zionist view, whereas the balance of power in the political field was still in the hands of classical Zionism; given the strong neo-Zionist opposition, the field of education had an unclear balance of power. But by the time the decade had come to an end, the academic as well as the educational system had shed all post-Zionist inclinations and resumed knowledge production in a classical Zionist way, with a growing tendency to paint history in neo-Zionist colours. For most of the first half of the twenty-first century the Ministry of Education was under the firm control of the Likud and oversaw the ousting of all textbooks that were suspected of being even slightly influenced by post-Zionist scholarship. The Knesset’s education committee assisted enthusiastically in this process, so all in all there was no need to have a neo-Zionist minister from the extreme right to execute the new strategy.
Under the Likud ministers of education, in cooperation with a cohort of academics, many of whom hailed from the national religious Bar-Ilan University and its satellite, Ariel University, in the occupied West Bank, the neo-Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel constituted the ideological infrastructure for the official educational system. The neo-Zionists produced several educational kits (textbooks, curricula, and so on) which would have the power to impact the next generation of Jews in Israel. These kits could produce only one type of graduate: racist, insular, and extremely ethnocentric. The message that came through clearly, as found in research conducted by Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University and, more recently, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan of the Hebrew University, is to fear the Other inside and around you – the Other being the Arab world around Israel, the Palestinian neighbourhoods, the Palestinian citizens inside Israel, and non-Jewish immigrants. A good example of that sort of thing is the school textbook titled Those Were the Years – Israel’s Jubilee, which covers the state’s chronicles since its foundation in 1948.19 The Palestinians barely figure in the book – they are not mentioned with regard to the 1948 war, or as citizens of Israel under a military regime up to 1966, or as an occupied population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967. The presence of Palestinian refugees is something the readers will not know about. They will only become aware of the existence of Palestinian terrorism, which emerged sometime in the 1960s for unknown reasons.
Another crucial element was the militarisation of the educational system. In 1998 the Ministry of Education announced a new master plan devoted to linking students more closely with the army. The basic idea was to follow children from kindergarten through high school graduation so as to ensure that they would be well prepared for ‘military environment and values’ and that they would ‘be able to cope with situations of pressure and developing leadership skills on a battlefield’.20 The level of physical fitness required by the army would be a precondition for matriculation and graduation, and an obligatory, integral part of the future educational system would be participation in army manoeuvres and military indoctrination. This was to be complemented by enriched lessons on Zionism and Eretz Israel studies. In the final three years of high school, the scheme aimed at ‘increasing the motivation and preparedness for the IDF’. During the initial year there would be a focus on ‘the individual’s commitment to his or her homeland’, and in the following two years, on ‘actual participation in military life’.21 In a way, this had always been done at schools, but always as a marginal part of school life; moreover, its features were formulated by more mainstream Zionists. Now the individual pupil would learn the history of the land according to the neo-Zionist interpretation – an education bound to shape his or her vision of the future. At the time, the universities seemed to offer some sort of counterbalance, but already, even before the demise of post-Zionist scholarship, it was doubtful how much a post-Zionist lecturer could do, even if he or she were lucky enough to have the opportunity to voice different opinions.
While the neo-Zionist education plans began to be implemented, the final products of the post-Zionist era didn’t arrive at the Ministry of Education until the Ehud Barak government was in office (1999–2001). After all, it took several years for the books that had been commissioned back in 1993 to be produced. Consequently, the finished post-Zionist products were handed to a minister from the left Zionist party Meretz, who, as mentioned, had a neo-Zionist deputy in keeping with the impossible coalition that Barak tried to sustain. So, while the schools were slowly being introduced to the new version of neo-Zionism, they were also being given post-Zionist textbooks. This contradiction created a bit of mayhem that even reached the front page of the New York Times.22 The fact was, these were only mildly post-Zionist textbooks that probably would not have attracted any special attention in the early 1990s, but that later, when they actually entered the classroom, represented sacrilegious and heretical views. In any case, they were soon cleansed from the system.
But they were worth looking at, again as an exercise to gauge where the post-Zionist challenge could have, but has not, taken Israel. How hopeful and naïve in a way were those who prepared the books one can gather from a statement by a member of a committee preparing such books, Avner Ben-Amos of Tel Aviv University, who explained to Haaretz in 1996 the raison d’être of the project:
In the past the teaching of history [in Israel] was dominated by a version which claimed that we [the Israelis] had an unquestionable right to the land to which we returned after 2,000 years of exile, and we reached an empty land. Nowadays we cannot divorce the teaching of history from the debate inside academia and the professional literature. We have to insert the Palestinian version into the story of Israel’s history, so that the pupils would know that there is another group that was affected by Zionism and the Independence [1948] war.23
From the vantage point of 2013, when this book is being written, the saddest and in many ways most disappointing aspect of my survey of the post-Zionist decade is its almost complete lack of influence on the educational system in Israel. Despite, or perhaps because of, the impossible wedding of post-Zionist and neo-Zionist control over the educational system during the days of the Barak government, only one side left a legacy that endured into the next century – the neo-Zionist’s. When the new Netanyahu government came into office in 2009 (and again in 2012), both the mandatory and optional kits available for teachers in the State of Israel conveyed the neo-Zionist point of view.
But far worse was the absolute absence of any post-Zionist influence on legislation in Israel, especially legislation in the area of human and civil rights in ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’.
An especially intensive and energetic wave of legislation against the Palestinians in Israel began in the twenty-first century. The Second Intifada was only a pretext for this; the true trigger was a demographic anxiety, prevalent in the very centre of the establishment, that natural birth and immigration could not tip the population balance in such a way as to ensure Jewish exclusivity and supremacy.
These phobias were articulated most clearly in the annual meeting devoted to the ‘national agenda’, which took place at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (now a private university) on the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv. Ever since the late 1980s this venue had served as a kind of old people’s home for famous Israeli academics, most of whom identified with the Labour Party. Every year they published a report on the state of the nation, based on speeches delivered to them by the country’s top politicians, generals and strategists. Their report, commissioned by successive Israeli governments, set the national agenda for the next few years.24 From the 1990s onwards the report included implicit recommendations for the transfer of Palestinians from Israel if and when they doubled their share of the population (from 20 per cent to 40 per cent) and for the reintroduction of nationalist indoctrination into the school system, a recommendation enthusiastically endorsed by all the governments, as we have seen.
It took a few years for the first recommendation to be implemented; apparently, implementation required the shock of the October 2000 events inside Israel to be activated. That month, the Palestinians in Israel joined in massive demonstrations in support of the Second Intifada, and the brutal police reaction left thirteen Palestinian citizens dead. The vast majority of media regarded these protests as acts of treason, and the politicians followed suit by blaming the Palestinians and their leaders for the bloody outcome of the protest movement.
And yet until 2009, no initiative for apartheid-like legislation succeeded in passing the final stages required for such initiatives to become law. This self-imposed inhibition disappeared with the re-election of Netanyahu, however, although it must be acknowledged that the prior governments – those of the political midgets who succeeded Sharon, such as Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni – were already giving vent to policies from which Israel had refrained during the 1990s, instigating two brutal and massive assaults, one on Lebanon in 2006 and one on the Gaza Strip in late 2008.
Domestically, it was Netanyahu’s government that channelled this aggression towards the Palestinians inside Israel as well as dissenting Jewish voices in the society. The Knesset became a venue for legalising neo-Zionist attitudes towards these two groups. The former were far more important and in much greater danger of being affected by such new legislation. Numbering a million and a half, they were already living under a regime of oppression that unfortunately was unknown and unnoticed outside Israel. It did not help that even the consensual NGO in the state, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, reaffirmed the deterioration in the conditions and rights of this minority since 2000. Its 2012 report summarised the reality for this group of Israeli citizens as follows:
Aside from the violation of Arab citizens’ right to equality, their lack of access to services, and the discomfort inflicted on them, the exclusion of Arabic from the public space infringes on the dignity of a fifth of Israel’s population and generates a feeling of discrimination and alienation, testifying to their inferior status and damaging their feeling of belonging in Israeli society. On the symbolic level, the absence of Arabic delegitimises the presence of Arabs in the public space.25
Below are listed just a few of the laws that make the Israel of 2014 what it is. This is the Israel that must be marketed inside and outside as the fulfilment of Yosef Gorny’s and Ari Shavit’s claims of its being the most successful modernisation and enlightenment project in modern history.
The Nakba Law of 2009 is probably the most outrageous. It stipulated that whoever would commemorate Israel’s day of independence as a day of mourning would be arrested. Under international pressure it was slightly revised: arrest was replaced by the denial of any public funding to any entity that would commemorate the Nakba. There is not one Palestinian school, cultural centre, NGO, or home in Israel that does not remember and commemorate the Nakba.
The 2011 amendment to the Citizenship Law of 1952, called the Law to Revoke Citizenship for Acts Defined as Espionage and Terrorism, along with similar laws from that year, allows the state to revoke the citizenship of anyone accused of terror and spying. Needless to say, support for the Palestinian struggle against the occupation is declared a terrorist act by Israeli law.
Another law from 2011, the Admissions Committees Law, legalised a known practice in Israel that can ban Palestinian citizens from living in areas that Jewish citizens wish to keep free of Arabs. The law allows existing and new Jewish-majority communities, wherever they are and however they live, to reject requests by Palestinian citizens of Israel to live among them, on the basis of their ‘social suitability’, in other words their ethnicity or nationalism.
And finally, more than once a bill has been introduced in the Knesset that would give preference to Jews (defined in the law as those who served in the Israeli army) in public service, jobs, salaries, and houses, which would compound the effect of a law to mandate every non-Jewish new citizen to swear allegiance to the ‘Jewish and democratic’ State of Israel.26
And that is just a short list of the worst. Ever since 2000, discriminatory practices and informal policies have been legalised by the Knesset, and this is still taking place. The construction of the legal infrastucture for an apartheid state is important for Israel, because its recent governments, including the one elected in 2012, believe in a unilateral annexation of Area C, 40 per cent of the West Bank, as a final act of geographical expansion, even though it adds Palestinians to the overall demographic balance. In that area, Israeli law would be imposed, hence the need to prepare a racist infrastructure for the future, expanded, and possibly final State of Israel.
Post-Zionists were also targeted. The most important law in this respect is the 2011 Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel Through Boycott, which defined as a criminal act, bearing the risk of lengthy imprisonment, any support for a boycott of Israel or for an action abroad considered to constitute delegitimisation. To this was added more recently a proposal for a law that would limit foreign funding for human and civil rights organisations in the state. As yet it has not passed.
Finally the legal reality in Israel reflects the ideological stance of the powers that be. Past ambiguities, remorse, and debates about the idea of Israel – all are gone, replaced by the joy felt on Independence Day by Shavit and most other senior journalists.
With the legal, political, and educational systems almost completely taken over by this new, energised version of the idea of Israel, one might have looked to the media and the universities to provide counterbalance and response. The media, however, became so united in its reactions after 2000 that it does not warrant further discussion. As for academia, I return at the end of this book to that domain and illustrate, for the sake of comparison, the earlier scholarly engagement with the history and historiography of Israel’s foundational year of 1948 (after all, it was the work of a handful of serious historians concerning that particular year that triggered the unique 1990s in the Jewish state), on the one hand, and new research on the other, in which one can see how that hesitant journey into the past, fuelled by hopes of creating a different future, ended as if it had never existed at all.