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PDF FormatThese claims fit nicely into the post-colonial outlook, but they are difficult to reconcile with the historical reality. Jewish settlement, at least in its early stages, did not, in fact, aim to create a sectoral labor market in Palestine, nor did the patrons of the nascent Jewish settlement, foremost Baron Edmond de Rothschild, follow the pattern of colonial employers in the European tradition. Instead, as the historian Ran Aharonson has shown, during the twenty-two years of the First Aliya, Jewish laborers worked alongside Arabs under similar conditions.40 The division occurred only later, when violent Arab opposition to Jewish immigration made continued integration of the labor force impossible.
Determination to make the facts fit a historical narrative of oppression and exploitation also explains the arguments made by Yehuda Shenhav, the former head of Tel Aviv University’s Sociology Department and now editor of Theory and Criticism, in a 1998 article in the daily Ha’aretz entitled, “The Perfect Robbery.” The essay, which attempted to revisit the history of the immigration of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1951, described the State of Israel as seeking to exploit both the Palestinians and the Iraqi Jews:
The immigrants from Iraq lost all the property that they left behind in their homeland as the result of a cynical political exercise by the Israeli government, intended to avoid paying compensation to the Palestinian refugees…. In those years, 1948-1951, the Israeli government found itself faced with two intersecting claims. One was the demand by the United Nations and the governments of the United States and Britain to compensate the Palestinian refugees of 1948 for their property, which had been nationalized by the custodian general of the State of Israel. The second was that of Iraqi Jewry and their representatives in the Israeli government, such as Minister [of Police] Bechor-Shalem Sheetrit, to compensate them for the nationalization of their property by the Iraqi government. Trapped between these two claims, the Israeli government took advantage of the opportunity that had come its way, created a linkage between the property of the Arabs of 1948 and that of Iraqi Jewry, and thereby freed itself of both claims.41
Shenhav’s claim is remarkable: He appears to believe not only that Israel did not have Iraqi Jewry’s best interests in mind, but that it should, in effect, have compensated both the Jews whose property was nationalized by Iraq and the Arabs whose property was nationalized by Israel; and that the linkage was, in essence, a scheme to avoid having to do either one. According to Shenhav, most Iraqi Jews “were well-established bourgeoisie” until the Zionist activists intervened, triggering what he calls a “psychosis of aliya.” Shenhav accuses both Zionism and the Israeli government of destabilizing the world of Iraqi Jewry and of driving a wedge between Iraqi Jews and the local Arab population. He concludes that only “towards 1947-1948 did the situation of Iraqi Jewry begin to be become intolerable” as a result of “the aggressive activity of the Zionist movement…. At the same time, nationalist chauvinism intensified in Iraq and adopted an anti-Jewish stance.”42
The distortions and half-truths in Shenhav’s essay were pointed out in a rejoinder by Shlomo Hillel, former speaker of the Knesset and aliya activist in Iraq. Hillel demonstrated that Iraqi hostility towards the Jewish population did not emerge as a result of Zionist activity in 1947-1948, but in fact appeared as early as 1933, after the Iraqi declaration of independence and the death of King Faisal I, when the country was swept by a wave of xenophobia. Tension again turned to violence on the eve of Britain’s 1941 invasion of Iraq—an attempt to thwart the Iraqi government’s alliance with Nazi Germany—which triggered anti-Jewish riots in Baghdad on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. No fewer than 179 Jews were murdered, many others were injured, and scores of businesses and homes were looted—all of which Shenhav conveniently neglects to mention.43
Lapses of this sort, it would appear, attest to critical sociologists’ reluctance to let facts stand in the way of a good theory. However, their theoretical orientation has an additional consequence, no less problematic than the damage it does to their credibility: In their attempt to fit Israeli life into imported theoretical models, they end up ignoring those unique features of Israeli society which ought to be of greatest interest to their field. Thus one finds scholars such as Deborah Bernstein of Haifa University arguing that, “Israeli society in the past and the present can be understood by a comparative analysis, since its singularity does not fundamentally differ from the essential singularity of any historical case.”44 For critical sociologists, denying the uniqueness of the Zionist enterprise serves an important purpose, for it allows them to apply off-the-shelf theoretical models to Jewish and Israeli history, and simultaneously frees them of the need to formulate new research methods for dealing with Israeli society. The result, in many instances, is the outright distortion of their research.
The clearest example is the way in which the remarkable differences between historical Zionism and European colonialism are either downplayed or ignored. Baruch Kimmerling, for example, has this to say about Jewish attitudes to the land of Israel during the centuries of exile:
The two thousand years of longings by the Jews for Zion are a cultural and historical fact, and are indeed part of the “narrative” as it should be studied. Nevertheless, this does not in any way change the “colonial situation,” that is, the situation whereby groups of people from different locations immigrated to a certain place and built a society and state on the ruins of another society. They did not succeed in eliminating this society, nor did this society succeed in expelling them, as happened in other, very well-known instances.45
Nowhere does Kimmerling mention that the founders of the Zionist settlements rejected classical hierarchical structures in favor of a community founded on the principle of equality, an aspiration completely alien to European colonizers. Furthermore, unlike the European settlers, the Jews living under the British Mandate did not enjoy preferential treatment, and in many cases suffered from clear discrimination at the hands of the British authorities—a fact that is nearly impossible to square with the claim that Zionism was a British colonial project. Finally, the Zionists’ attempt to effect a Jewish cultural renaissance in the land of Israel, including a revival of the Hebrew language, without imposing their culture or language on the indigenous population, has no parallel in the history of colonialism.46
The critical sociologists’ failure to recognize the unique aspects of the Zionist enterprise is merely one symptom of a much larger trend. A study of the articles presented from 1998 to 2002 at the annual conferences of the Israeli Sociological Society, at which the most important subjects in Israeli sociology are addressed, shows that out of approximately five hundred papers delivered, only one in seven was devoted to anything uniquely Israeli or Zionist.47 Of these, for example, five essays addressed anti-Semitism and the memory of the Holocaust; six mentioned Israel-diaspora relations; and five dealt with the social and psychological characteristics of life in settlements over the Green Line. In contrast, 320 articles—about two out of every three—mentioned Israel only in connection with phenomena not particular to Israeli society, while 73 others made no mention of Israel at all.
Nor is this trend limited to academic publications in Hebrew: Of the 18 sociological studies about Israel that have appeared in the world’s five leading sociological journals since 1989, not one has addressed uniquely Israeli or Zionist issues.48 In other words, it has been at least fifteen years since international sociological discourse has included any discussion of issues particular to Israeli society.
IV
There is one area, however, in which critical sociologists do address something that is uniquely Israeli: When they abandon the study of present-day Israeli society altogether and turn their efforts to rewriting the Zionist past.49 One of critical sociology’s principal targets is Israel’s own collective memory, which, like any historical consciousness, is shaped by symbols, milestones, and narratives. Laurence Silberstein, in his 1999 study, The Post-Zionism Debates, which is generally sympathetic to the critical school, explains the true impact of sociology’s challenge to the Zionist narrative:
For Israelis, as for all national groups, the narratives of their nation’s past provide a framework through which to interpret the events of the present. In calling into question prevailing Israeli historical narratives, the new historians, together with a group known as critical sociologists, render problematic the very foundations on which Israeli group identity has been based.50
