Shapiro is, in large measure, the father of the “critical” revolution in Israeli sociology.¹² In books such as The Formative Years of the Israeli Labor Party (1975) and Democracy in Israel (1977), he explored the oligarchical role of the Israeli political elite and the harm it caused to the development of Israeli democracy.¹³ In later works he assailed the political establishment, particularly Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party, for failing to encourage a sense of civic duty among Israelis.¹⁴ Yet Shapiro was not nearly as hostile as the critical sociologists writing today. In a memorial issue of Israeli Sociology in 1999, editors Hanna Herzog, Adriana Kemp, and Lev Luis Grinberg attested that Shapiro actually viewed his work as an expression of fidelity to Zionism. “Although he himself was one of the major critics of the dominant narrative, and encouraged many younger scholars who helped bring about the collapse of the Zionist narrative,” they explain, “he did not consider this a destructive or unpatriotic act…. Shapiro believed that criticism was vital to Israeli democracy and its ability to craft new policies that could save us from the errors of the founding generation.”¹⁵ 

The works of Sammy Smooha, especially his pioneering essays on the status of Arabs in Israel, reveal the beginnings of a more radical approach. Smooha directed his criticism not only at the political establishment, but at the very idea of a Jewish state. According to Smooha, the desire to build a nation led “of necessity” to “institutional segmentation and the absence of biculturalism.” Israel might have boasted of its aspirations to democracy, but it systematically oppressed its Arab minority. Smooha wrote in 1980 that for Israeli Arabs, “not only is there no assurance of minority rights or any limits to the government’s authority, there is also the problem of the ‘tyranny of the majority’… and the extensive use of governmental power to keep the minority in its place.”¹⁶ Discrimination against Arabs, he argued, is inherent to Israeli society, and the integration of Arabs into that society is primarily a result of “negative and involuntary forces such as economic dependence, political coercion, and ecological-social isolation.”¹⁷ At the root of this continued oppression, he argues, lie economic interests:

In the last two decades, claims of this type have become very popular with Israeli academics, and have increasingly come to define the agenda of the social sciences as a whole. Yet it would be a mistake to say that Shapiro and Smooha are solely responsible for this trend. Their views, in fact, must be understood in the context of the larger theoretical developments in sociology over the past half-century, in Israel and abroad.

Starting in the 1960s, Israelis studying abroad came under the influence of the new intellectual trends on American and European campuses. The spirit of the New Left, which attacked the “repressive” order of the capitalist West, soon made itself felt in Israeli universities as well: In Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba, young lecturers and students emerged who saw themselves as the intellectual vanguard of the revolution.

The surprising defeat of the Labor Party in the 1977 Knesset elections, and, even more so, the outbreak of the war in Lebanon in 1982, also sent shock waves through Israeli campuses.¹⁹ These events—which for many students and faculty signaled the demise of the reigning views on politics and the military in Israel—increased the radicalization of Israeli intellectuals, who expressed their discontent in works of a clearly ideological nature. The diplomatic process that began with the Oslo accords in 1993 also had a significant impact.²⁰ At the time, many scholars accepted Sammy Smooha’s view that “the Israeli-Arab conflict is coming to an end. It has been fading for two decades. The end of the conflict is a non-reversible process, which advances in stages, backed by international support and grounded in both Jewish and Palestinian public opinion.”²¹ The belief that peace was at hand, that Israel’s existence was no longer threatened, transformed the sociological discourse. Scholars began to devote their research to the advancement of the peace process, and were increasingly vocal in their condemnation of Israeli policy towards Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular.

Finally, as improved communication strengthened ties between Israeli scholars and international academic associations, Israeli sociologists looking to enhance their international standing adopted, to some extent, the anti-Israel attitude common in foreign academic circles since the 1980s, and still prevalent today: In 2002, for instance, when an international academic boycott was organized to isolate Israel for its “war crimes” against Palestinians, Baruch Kimmerling of the Hebrew University distributed an open letter to his colleagues overseas, insisting that severing ties with Israeli academics would only interfere with their own vigorous opposition to the “fascist rule” of the Israeli government.²²

The critical trend has become so dominant in Israel that it has effectively ended genuine pluralism in Israeli sociological research. The radicalization that began in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba later spread to nearly every center of sociological research in Israel. Two milestones were passed in 1993: The publication of Uri Ram’s Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives, which I discussed earlier; and the founding of the journal Theory and Criticism, which has become the flagship of post-Zionist writing. In 1999, Theory and Criticism published a special issue, entitled Fifty to Forty-Eight: Critical Moments in the History of the State of Israel, which attempted to present an alternative, critical history, but was really little more than a catalogue of the crimes purportedly committed by an Israel that is “totalitarian, oppressive, and lacking in tolerance towards others.”²³ The journal’s editor, Adi Ophir of Tel Aviv University, explained that the essays were written “out of fear that control over the Palestinians in particular, and the adoption of the political forms of an ethnocentric and racist nation state in general, are turning Israel into the most dangerous place in the world for the humanity and morality of the Jewish community, for the continuity of Jewish cultures, and perhaps for Jewish existence itself.”²⁴ 

As part of their critique of the country’s founding ideology, most critical sociologists prefer to assail Zionism as a repressive and racist enterprise, rather than to undertake a dispassionate study of Israeli society. “Despite the diversity of its practitioners’ approaches and beliefs,” writes Michael Shalev, until recently chairman of the Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University, “critical scholarship has consistently called into question taken-for-granted assertions and assumptions that have been central to the legitimacy of Zionism and the authority of the Israeli elites.”²⁵ In this spirit, Ben-Gurion University’s Oren Yiftachel, who since the late 1990s has edited the quarterly Israel Social Science Review,²⁶ lists the injustices the Jewish state has committed since 1948:

According to Yiftachel, the dispossession of the Palestinians and their characterization as enemies of the state are direct results of Zionist ideology. “The Judaization program,” he writes, “was premised on a hegemonic myth cultivated since the rise of Zionism at the beginning of the century, which claimed that ‘the land’ belongs to the Jewish people, and only to the Jewish people. In time, this myth created powerful patterns of ethnic settler nationalism in Israel.” This myth, Yiftachel asserts, is to blame for the oppression of ethnic minorities in Israel. Moreover, it impedes the country’s political and moral development: “Continuing to define the state as ‘Jewish’ does not permit non-Jewish citizens full entry into the political collective, and thus, from the outset, precludes the founding of a modern democracy.”²⁸