Print
PDF FormatThe majority of critical sociologists, like the “new historians” who have pursued similar goals in history departments across Israel, regard the disproving of the Zionist narrative as a means of effecting far-reaching political and social change.51 Only if Israel is freed from the ideological grip of nationalist chauvinism, they claim, can it become a progressive and enlightened country, a “state of all its citizens.” Uri Ram presents the debate as follows:
A struggle is being waged in Israel for our collective memory…. This is a battle among three main historical approaches: The national approach to history, with its inherent and insoluble contradiction between democracy and Jewishness; the nationalist approach to history, which resolves the contradiction by forgoing democracy; and the approach to history based on citizenship, which resolves the contradiction by relinquishing the ethnic past. This is a conflict between a past that seeks to bury the future, and a future that looks to shake off the past. This is the choice: A troubled past, or a reasonable future.52
In Ram’s view, Israeli society has no choice but to adopt the third, “citizenship” approach, the implication of which is that only by overcoming the Zionist obsession with Jewish history will Israel see any real progress. “The historiographical change signals the beginning of the end of a historical consciousness suited to a time of conquest, settlement, and nation-building…,” he writes, “and the beginning of the creation of a new historical consciousness characteristic of a civilian, consumer, and perhaps even multicultural society.”53
In 1999, at the thirtieth annual conference of the Israeli Sociological Society, Uri Davidson spoke in a similar vein. Israeli education, he argued, is held captive by Zionist indoctrination, which in turn leads to intellectual stagnation. In his view, the centralization of Israeli education under government authority
lent the Zionist narrative a monopoly in education…. Exclusive legitimacy was given to the Hebrew language, and the historical consciousness linked to the pre-diaspora period. This intellectual fixation has existed since the founding of the state, and has brought about stagnation in the national educational system… which remains locked into the old ideals, and is at an evolutionary dead end. It is capable of imparting knowledge, but incapable of fashioning a personality suited to a global, post-modern society.54
Such statements, made frequently by prominent Israeli sociologists, have helped place historical questions at the top of Israel’s sociological agenda. As Baruch Kimmerling correctly observes, “Every statement connected to the past immediately makes waves, and is naturally linked to the present, and possibly also to the future.”55 The boundaries between the recent and distant past are therefore blurred in the work of many critical sociologists, since both can serve as a “usable past,” a selective narrative employed for political and cultural purposes.56 Two books published in the mid-1990s serve as powerful examples of this approach: The first, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (1995), by Yael Zerubavel of Rutgers University, shows how the dominant Israeli “meta-narrative of memory” transformed debacles such as the fall of Masada, the Bar Kochba rebellion, and the defense of Tel Hai into heroic tales.57 The second, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (1995), by Nachman Ben-Yehuda of the Hebrew University, seeks to expose the ways in which the “heroic” story of Masada was fabricated, promoted, and maintained by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army, archaeologists, the mass media, and the tourism industry.58 In his recent book on the same topic, Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada (2002), Ben-Yehuda accuses Yigael Yadin, the archaeologist who excavated Masada in the 1960s, of going down “a dubious road which was to include suppressing information, concealing evidence, and structuring a historical tale of Masada which was falsified and deceptive,” a narrative that concocted a “twentieth-century myth of Jewish heroism.”59
But of all the historical “myths” being addressed, by far the most popular concern the Israeli-Arab conflict and Zionist history, both of which have attracted so much attention from critical sociologists that it is often difficult to distinguish their writings on these topics from those of their “new historian” colleagues. Indeed, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and other revisionist historians frequently quote sociological works in their own analyses of the encounter between the Jewish national movement, the Palestinians, and the Arab states. Likewise, sociologists Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, in their book Palestinians: The Making of a People (1993), engage in a socio-political analysis of the War of Independence that relies in large part on arguments and data provided by Benny Morris in his landmark work, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.60
The sociological literature on the root causes of the Israeli-Arab conflict leaves little doubt, of course, as to who is at fault. In the critical sociologists’ view, the Jews bear direct, if not exclusive, responsibility for the creation and perpetuation of the conflict. Gershon Shafir, for instance, blames the Zionist immigrants, whose “goal… was to successfully colonize Palestine while at the same time justifying the creation of a homogeneous Jewish settlement through an intensifying denial of Palestinian national aspirations.” Shafir argues that this Zionist-colonialist policy was “the main reason for the intractable nature of the conflict….”61 Other scholars claim that it was in the interest of the leadership of the yishuv and later the state to perpetuate the violent conflict between Jews and Arabs. In The Making of Israeli Militarism (1998), Uri Ben-Eliezer of Haifa University maintains that Arab violence provided the perfect opportunity for the younger generation of Zionist leaders to assure their place in the leadership of the yishuv.62
Yagil Levy, a student of Yonatan Shapiro’s at Tel Aviv University, who also examines the roots of Israeli “militarism,” takes an even more radical approach. In a 1998 essay in Theory and Criticism, Levy offers the following analysis of Israel’s early years:
As the hostilities intensified, the main Jewish groups benefited.… direct achievements such as material resources, social prestige, electoral gains, and the like, combined with indirect achievements resulting exclusively from acts of reprisal, such as gaining Palestinian lands and property and removing Arab workers from the labor market, in order to perpetuate the conflict. Moreover, the more the escalation of the conflict established the state’s superiority internally… the greater was the state’s ability to legitimize the construction of a non-egalitarian society in which Ashkenazi groups were dominant.63
Thus the various theories that drive critical sociology are woven into a comprehensive indictment of Israel in general, and Zionism in particular. Yet unlike the scholars of the Zionist Left, who tend to blame the country’s ills on the “occupation” that began in 1967, critical sociologists locate the roots of evil in Israel’s War of Independence, or even earlier. Yoav Peled and Yagil Levy stress this point in a 1993 article published in Theory and Criticism: “To our mind, the Six Day War was not a turning point, but rather an integral part of the Israeli-Arab conflict that has been going on for a hundred years. This conflict in itself… constitutes a cornerstone of the Israeli socio-political order.”64
The inevitable price for this preoccupation with history is, of course, the neglect of subjects far more relevant to what is traditionally associated with sociological inquiry. The ongoing violence between Jews and Arabs, for example, continues to play a decisive role in shaping Israeli society, yet such issues are surprisingly ignored in most of today’s sociological research. The impact of continued terror attacks on the Israeli public, the societal repercussions of the collapse of the Oslo accords, and the increasing extremism among Israeli Arabs have gradually been removed from sociological discourse. Indeed, of some 500 articles presented at the annual conferences of the Israeli Sociological Society between 1998 and 2002, only 4 focused on the societal implications of the current Israeli-Arab conflict.65 Moreover, of 18 studies on Israel appearing in the top five international sociology journals since 1989, only 2 have addressed the current conflict, and both focused on the Palestinians from a sympathetic point of view, presenting them as victims of Israeli oppression and occupation.66 Finally, of the 30 doctoral theses in sociology approved by Israeli universities from 1999 to 2002, only 1 discusses current aspects of the conflict.67
These statistics are grim indeed: A generation of sociologists has emerged that is dedicated not to the objective study of Israeli society today, but to furthering their ideological agenda and undermining their country’s collective memory. It is no surprise, then, that critical sociology has become little more than an offshoot of post-Zionist historiography.
