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While it is still too early to gauge the impact of critical sociology on Israeli public opinion, the movement has already damaged the credibility of Israeli sociological research and, perhaps more importantly, has had significant influence on thousands of students in Israeli sociology departments. None of this is meant to deny the importance of critical thinking; on the contrary, it is only through the critical eye that intellectual endeavor maintains its credibility. In the case of Israeli sociology, however, criticism has taken the place of a sustained analysis of what makes Israeli society different from other societies—that is, of what makes Israelis who they are. Critical sociologists may fear that a scholarly commitment to Israel’s uniqueness will make them less respected by their colleagues abroad, yet it should be remembered that the founding generation of Israeli sociologists attained worldwide recognition through their pioneering studies on precisely the subjects that today’s scholars ignore. The early sociologists understood that Israel is an unparalleled social laboratory precisely because it does not fit into preconceived theoretical models.68
There remains a wealth of topics neglected by Israeli sociologists, and much that both Israelis and outside observers could gain from examining them in depth. These include the renaissance of the Hebrew language and culture; the establishment of democratic institutions and their functioning in an ongoing state of emergency; the impact of terrorist attacks on Israeli society; the lack of a sense of unity in Israeli culture and identity in the past decade; the failure of the kibbutzim and moshavim to create an egalitarian society; the social and psychological aspects of life in the West Bank settlements; the memory of the Holocaust and its ongoing impact on Israeli culture; Israel-diaspora relations; and the military service of women and new immigrants. Some of these subjects were studied in the past, and are in need of renewed attention, while others have never been properly examined.
A revival of the pluralistic spirit in Israeli sociology would be good news not only for scholars, but for Israeli society as a whole. For in the final analysis, the importance of sociology goes far beyond the realm of pure intellectual inquiry. Sociology holds up a mirror to society, contributing to its understanding of itself and its ability to address its own shortcomings. To fulfill this role, however, Israeli sociologists must also learn to cast a critical look at themselves.
Alek D. Epstein is an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center, and a lecturer in sociology and political science at the Open University of Israel.
Notes
The author wishes to thank Michael Uritsky for his considerable assistance in conducting this study; Moshe Lissak and Yohanan Peres, who contributed their ideas and thoughts; Victor Azarya, chairman of the Israeli Sociological Society; and Neta Arnon, coordinator of the society, for providing me with information and publications from the annual conferences of the society in previous years.
1. Uri Ram, ed., Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives (Tel Aviv: Breirot, 1993), p. 5. [Hebrew]
2. According to data from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of students enrolled in programs in the social sciences at major universities rose from 14,475 at the end of the 1970s to 33,680 at the end of the 1990s.
3. S.N. Eisenstadt, Israeli Society (New York: Basic Books, 1967); Joseph Ben-David, ed., Agricultural Planning and Village Community in Israel (Paris: unesco, 1964); Moshe Lissak, The Elites of the Jewish Community in Palestine (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1981) [Hebrew]; Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity: Palestine Under the Mandate (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978); Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Albany: suny, 1990).
4. At that time, the dominant sociological paradigm, both in Israel and abroad, was the functionalist approach, which perceives society as a self-sustaining system that preserves cultural cohesion and a structural-functional division. The criticism currently directed at functionalism does not change the fact that it was this approach that brought Israeli sociology professional prestige, and paved the way for cutting-edge research in the social sciences.
5. Cf. Alek D. Epstein, “Defending Democracy and Civil Rights: Jerusalem’s Academic Community in the Era of State-Building,” Jewish Political Studies Review 13 (Spring 2001), pp. 63-103.
6. Michael Keren, The Pen and the Sword: Israeli Intellectuals and the Making of the Nation State (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1991), p. 74. [Hebrew]
7. See, for example, Uri Ram, The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology: Theory, Ideology, and Identity (Albany: suny, 1995), pp. 23-46.
8. Their findings were summarized in S.N. Eisenstadt, The Absorption of Immigrants (London: Routledge, 1954), and Judith Shuval, Immigration on the Threshold (New York: Atherton, 1963).
9. Aryeh Simon, “On the Scholastic Achievements of Immigrant Children in the Lower Elementary Grades,” Megamot 8 (October 1957), pp. 343-368; Leah Adar, “A Study of the Scholastic Difficulties of Immigrant Children,” Megamot 7 (April 1956), pp. 139-180; Sarah Smilansky, “Children Who Fail in the First Elementary Grades and Their Parents,” Megamot 8 (October 1957), pp. 430-445.
10. Moshe Lissak, Social Mobility in Israeli Society (Jerusalem: Israel Universities, 1969); Judah Matras, Social Change in Israel (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).
11. Thus, for example, an article by Sammy Smooha, “Ethnicity and the Military in Israel: Theses for Discussion and Research,” appeared in the December 1983 issue of State, Government, and International Relations along with a response by Moshe Lissak, “A Reply: Theses for Discussion or Preconceived Notions?” State, Government, and International Relations 22 (Winter 1983), pp. 5-38. In February 1985, Megamot published another critical article by Smooha, “A Critique of an Updated Establishmentarian Formulation of the Cultural Perspective in the Sociology of Ethnic Relations in Israel,” Megamot 29 (February 1985), pp. 73-92; and six months later a response by Eliezer Ben-Rafael was published in the same journal, “Ethnicity: Theory and Myth,” Megamot 29 (August 1985),
pp. 190-204.
pp. 190-204.
12. For the intellectual heritage of Yonatan Shapiro, see Ze’ev Sternhell, “Yonatan Shapiro: A Pioneer of Critical Research,” Israeli Sociology 2:1 (1999), pp. 11-21. [Hebrew]
13. Yonatan Shapiro, The Formative Years of the Israeli Labor Party: The Organization of Power, 1919-1930 (London: Sage, 1976); Yonatan Shapiro, Democracy in Israel (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1977). [Hebrew]
14. See the following books by Yonatan Shapiro: An Elite Without Successors: Generations of Political Leaders in Israel (Tel Aviv: Poalim, 1984) [Hebrew]; The Road to Power: Herut Party in Israel, trans. Ralph Mandel (Albany: suny, 1991); A Society Held Captive by Politicians (Tel Aviv: Poalim, 1996). [Hebrew]
15. “A Word from the Editors,” Israeli Sociology 2:1 (1999), p. 7. [Hebrew]
16. Sammy Smooha, “Existing and Alternative Policy Toward the Arabs in Israel,” Megamot 26 (September 1980), p. 33. Cf. Sammy Smooha, “Existing and Alternative Policy Toward the Arabs in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 5:1 (January 1982), p. 80, where Smooha states that “the Jewish majority has neither an ideological commitment nor a willingness to invest the immense resources to shatter the institutionalized ethnic stratification…. As much as measures are taken to promote equality… they are directed towards achieving other goals, viz. to strengthen Arabs’ loyalty to the state, to prompt them to resign themselves to their fate as a vulnerable minority and to keep them away from the Palestinian people”; and p. 93, where he argues that Israel “managed to neutralize Arabs as a threat to… the Jewish-Zionist nature of the state as well as to harness their services in manpower, lands, and other resources.” Cf. also Sammy Smooha, “Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution: National Security and the Arab Minority,” in National Security and Democracy in Israel, ed. Avner Yaniv (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993), p. 109: “Discriminatory policies, widespread Jewish ethnocentrism, persistent Arab-Jewish socioeconomic inequalities, a virtual exclusion of Arabs from the national power structure, and systematic denial of Arab institutional autonomy all act to discourage Arab loyalty. These phenomena are no doubt reinforced by genuine security concerns, but the pronounced ethnic nature of Israeli democracy is a prime source of alienation from the state for the Arabs.”
17. Sammy Smooha, “Arabs and Jews in Israel: Minority-Majority Relations,” Megamot 22 (September 1976), p. 420.
18. Smooha, “existing and Alternative Policy,” p. 17.
19. For the importance of the Lebanon War in shaping the political identity of Israeli academics, see Keren, The Pen and the Sword, pp. 93-98.
20. Cf. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, “Critical Versus Non-Critical Sociology: An Evaluation,” Israel Studies 2:1 (Spring 1997), p. 190.
21. Sammy Smooha, “Changes in Israeli Society: After Fifty Years,” Alpayim 17 (1999), p. 249.
22. As Baruch Kimmerling wrote in his open letter of April 6, 2002, distributed by e-mail: “Many of the Israeli academic community strongly oppose the present regime in Israel. In fact we’re the only effective opposition to this fascist rule…. Boycotting us is counterproductive and causes great damage for the cause of ending the subjugation of the Palestinian people.”
23. Henriette Dahan-Kalev, “The Events of Wadi Saliv,” in Fifty to Forty-Eight: Critical Moments in the History of the State of Israel, ed. Adi Ophir (Jerusalem: Van Leer, 1999), pp. 148-157. [Hebrew] Published as a special issue of Theory and Criticism 12-13 (1999). Cf. Assaf Sagiv, “Fifty Faces of Post-Zionism,” Azure 8, Autumn 1999, pp. 23-31.
24. Adi Ophir, introduction to Fifty to Forty-Eight, p. 12.
25. Michael Shalev, “Time for Theory: Critical Notes on Lissak and Sternhell,” Israel Studies 1:2 (Fall 1996), p. 170.
26. Upon Yiftachel’s appointment, he changed the name and tone of the journal, which is now called Hagar: International Social Science Review.
27. Oren Yiftachel, “Ethnocracy, Geography, and Democracy: Notes on the Politics of the Judaization of Israel,” Alpayim 19 (2000), p. 80. Cf. Oren Yiftachel, “Ethnocracy: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations: International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 6:3 (September 1999), p. 372, where he claims that “1948 should be regarded as a major political turning point… as the beginning of a state-orchestrated, and essentially non-democratic, Judaization project.”
28. Yiftachel, “Ethnocracy, Geography, and Democracy,” p. 97.
29. Uri Ram, “The Secret of Secular Weakness,” Ha’aretz, May 14, 1998.
30. This is also the place to take note of the radical feminist approach, whose proponents do not concentrate exclusively on women’s place in the social order, but also analyze the social order from the viewpoint of women they define as “underprivileged.” A considerable portion of the research by Deborah Bernstein, Barbara Swirski, Dahlia Moore, Henriette Dahan-Kalev, Tamar Rapoport, and other scholars has been written from this perspective. While they generally accept the fundamental assumptions and findings of the Marxist scholars, they believe that the Marxists pay insufficient attention to sexual discrimination.
31. Deborah Bernstein, “Seen from Above and from Below: Major Trends in Israeli Historiography,” Israeli Sociology 2:1 (1999), p. 30. [Hebrew]
32. See Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (London: Zed Books, 1989).
33. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, “The Emergence of Militaristic Nationalism in Israel,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3:1 (Fall 1989), p. 40.
34. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, “The State Economy of Militaristic Nationalism in Israel,” in Ram, Israeli Society, pp. 286-287.
35. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: University of California, 1983); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1989); Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: Tauris, 1992).
36. Gershon Shafir, “Land, Labor, and Population in the Zionist Colonization: General and Unique Aspects,” in Ram, Israeli Society, pp. 104-119; quotation found on p. 105. Cf. also Gershon Shafir’s “Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach,” in Israel in Comparative Perspective, ed. Michael Barnett (Albany: suny, 1996), where, on pp. 230-231, he claims that “the dilemma facing the early Zionist immigrants in Palestine was whether to aim for an ethnic plantation or a pure settlement colony. It was the pure, or homogeneous, type of colonization that won out…. Many of the unique characteristics of Zionist colonization were rooted not in the purportedly non-colonial character of Zionism but were intended to compensate the settler-immigrants for the adverse conditions prevailing in the land and labor markets of Palestine precisely in order to ensure the successful colonization of Palestine and the creation there of a pure, or homogeneous Jewish, settlement.”
37. Shafir, “Land, Labor, and Population,” p. 112. Cf. Shafir, “Zionism and Colonialism,” pp. 233-234, where he says that “in 1905… Jewish workers abandoned the aim of downward wage equalization and substituted for it a struggle for the ‘conquest of labor’…. This attempt to monopolize for Jewish workers, at first all manual labor, subsequently at least skilled jobs, indicated a desire for exclusion of Palestinian workers from the new society in the making…. The directors of the World Zionist Organization’s Palestine Land Development Company sought to emulate in Palestine the ‘internal colonization’ model developed by the Prussian government in order to create a German majority in its eastern, Polish, marches.”
38. Shafir, “Land, Labor, and Population,” p. 112.
39. Uri Ram, “Society and Social Science: Established Sociology and Critical Sociology in Israel,” in Ram, Israeli society, p. 31. It is important to note that Ram here uses the word hitnahalut for “settlement,” rather than hityashvut, the former having a negative connotation and an implicit connection to West Bank settlement after 1967.
40. See a more comprehensive discussion of the subject in Ran Aharonson, “Baron Rothschild and the Initial Stage of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (1882-1890): A Different Type of Colonization?” Journal of Historical Geography 19:2 (April 1993), pp. 142-156; Ran Aharonson, “Settlement in Eretz Israel: A Colonialist Enterprise? ‘Critical’ Scholarship and Historical Geography,” Israel Studies 1:2 (Fall 1996), pp. 214-229.
41. Yehuda Shenhav, “The Perfect Robbery,” Ha’aretz weekend supplement, April 10, 1998, pp. 14-15.
42. Shenhav, “The Perfect Robbery,” p. 16.
43. Shlomo Hillel, “The Perfect Distortion,” Ha’aretz holiday supplement, April 29, 1998, pp. 51-52.
44. Bernstein, “Seen from Above and from Below,” p. 31.
45. Baruch Kimmerling, “The Anxiety Merchants,” Ha’aretz weekend supplement, June 10, 1994, pp. 50-52.
46. For a comprehensive critique of the colonialist analogy, see Moshe Lissak, “‘Critical’ Sociology and ‘Establishment’ Sociology in the Israeli Academic Community: Ideological Struggles or Academic Discourse?” Israel Studies 1:1 (Spring 1996), pp. 247-294.
47. A total of sixty-nine such studies were presented, that is, approximately 14 percent of the total number of studies.
48. These journals are American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Problems.
49. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University observes that to a large extent, the critical sociologists led the opposition to the Zionist historical narrative:
The ideological and institutional limitations of the corps of historians specializing in the areas of Zionism and Israel led to the appearance of researchers with a critical, comparative, historical approach, specifically in sociology. Zionism and Territory [by Baruch Kimmerling] was not the only book that denied the traditional conventional conceptual narratives. From many points of view, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Gershon Shafir… complemented the work of Kimmerling, but instead of restricting himself to specific aspects of the conquest of the land, he preferred to focus on the development of the world of labor in the Zionist undertaking…. What is fascinating is that it is the clearly sociological modes of expression… that imparted universal legitimacy to the negation of the uniqueness traditional historiography attributes to it. The struggle by the historiographical establishment to maintain this uniqueness… began to be undermined from an unexpected direction.
Shlomo Sand, “The Post-Zionist as an Agent of ‘Unauthorized’ Memory: On the Structures of the Production of the Past in Israel,” Alpayim 24 (2002), pp. 224-225.
50. Laurence J. Silberstein, The Post-Zionism Debates (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 2.
51. For a summary of the parallel development in Zionist historiography, see Daniel Polisar, “Making History,” editorial, Azure 9, Spring 2000, pp. 14-22.
52. Uri Ram, “The Right to Forget,” in Ophir, Fifty to Forty-Eight, p. 349.
53. Uri Ram, “Memory and Identity: The Sociology of the Dispute Among Historians in Israel,” Theory and Criticism 8 (1996), p. 20.
54. Uri Davidson, “Rigidity and Evolution in the Educational Narrative in Israel,” lecture delivered at the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Israeli Sociological Society; see the booklet of abstracts from the conference (Rishon Letzion: Hamichlala Leminhal, 1999), p. 14. [Hebrew]
55. Baruch Kimmerling, “The Debate over Zionist Historiography,” lecture delivered at the Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the History of the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1994), p. 1. [Hebrew]
56. Yaakov Shavit, “Nationalism, Historiography, and Historical Revision,” in Pinhas Ginossar and Avi Bareli, eds., Zionism: A Contemporary Controversy (Sede Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1996), p. 264. [Hebrew]
57. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995).
58. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1995).
59. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada (New York: Humanity, 2002), p. 180.
60. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: Free Press, 1993).
61. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), p. xiii.
62. Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: Indiana, 1998); see also Uri Ben-Eliezer, “State vs. Civil Society? A Non-Binary Model of Domination Through the Example of Israel,” Journal of Historical Sociology 11:3 (September 1998), pp. 370-396.
63. Yagil Levy, “Belligerent Policy, Interethnic Relations, and the Internal Expansion of the State: Israel 1948-1956,” Theory and Criticism 8 (Summer 1996), p. 218.
64. Yagil Levy and Yoav Peled, “The Breaking Point that Never Was: Israeli Sociology in the Mirror of the Six Day War,” Theory and Criticism 3 (Winter 1993), p. 115.
65. Only the article presented at the 1998 conference by Tamir Sorek, then a master’s student at the Hebrew University, was concerned with an analysis of the terrorist activities of the Palestinian organizations. Cf. Tamir Sorek, “The Sacrificing of Life in a Society with a Religious-National Identity,” lecture delivered at the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Israeli Sociological Society; see the booklet of abstracts from the conference (Haifa: Haifa University, 1998), p. 40. [Hebrew]
66. See James Ron, “Savage Restraint: Israel, Palestine, and the Dialectics of Legal Repression,” Social Problems 47:4 (November 2000), pp. 445-472; Andre Elias Mazawi and Abraham Yogev, “Elite Formation under Occupation: The Internal Stratification of Palestinian Elites in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” British Journal of Sociology 50:3 (September 1999), pp. 397-418.
67. This thesis, entitled, “The Influence of Continuing Uncertainty on Personal and Social Processes: Individual and Community in the Golan Heights under the Threat of Uprooting in the Years 1995-1996,” [Hebrew] was submitted by Sarah Arnon and approved by Haifa University.
68. A similar understanding was also reached by political scientists engaged in the study of Israel, as is stressed by Asher Arian:
Political scientists who compare political systems find difficulty in fitting Israel into their schema. Discussing political parties, Giovanni Sartori found the extended dominance of Mapai exceptional; Arend Lijphart, in his study of relations between major ethnic, religious, and language groups, left Israel outside his framework because of its uniqueness; when studying the relations between the military and civilian sectors, or the success in curbing runaway inflation without causing large-scale unemployment or political and social upheaval, Israel is often regarded as special; and discussions of political modernization point to Israel as falling outside many general patterns.
Asher Arian, The Second Republic: Politics in Israel (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham, 1998), p. 4.
