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The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics
Political Geography 24 (2005) 121–135 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Book reviews The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics Ephraim Nimni (Ed.); Zed Books 2000, hardbound, ISBN 1-85649-893-X-Hb, paperback 1-85649-894-8-Pb Post-Zionism, as Ephraim Nimni points out in his introduction to this collection, is a term of both hope and abuse with a ‘vagueness [that] generates an interpretive ambiguity that sometimes borders on confusion’ (p. 1). Nonetheless it has provided the framework for a vigorous debate in Israel over the past decade and more as to whether and in what sense Israel can be both a Jewish and a democratic state. For decades the social sciences in Israel were essentially ideological, pressed into service supporting the grand myths of the Zionist movement: Israel as the goal, the natural culmination, of two thousand years of Jewish history and of exile. Even after 1948 and 1967 it was seen as so fragile that one dared not cast a critical gaze upon it. A number of developments, internal and external, conspired to challenge that nation-building perspective. The ‘new historians’, Morris, Schlaim, Pappe, Segev and others, delved into the archives from the 1980s onwards and found different truths that challenged the foundational myths and essentially affirmed the derided Palestinian narrative of dispossession and expulsion. Independence day for Israelis was al-nakba, catastrophe, for the Palestinians. Hard on the heels of these historians came the new sociologists and political scientists, exposing the divisive and discriminatory nature of the Zionist project and its implementation (vis-a`-vis Israeli Arab citizens, North African Jews, women in general, Russians.). That intellectual challenge was paralleled by a fast-changing world: the disintegration of the Soviet empire, globalisation, the immigration to Israel of around a million Russian speakers, large numbers of whom are not ‘proper’ Jews, the pressure on Israel in the nineties to make peacedall called for reassessment. Other democracies have tended towards multicultural, civic, liberal, ‘postnational’ forms of state identity under the pressure of population movements, economic restructuring in a globalising world, and claims for rights by indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities. In what sense can or should Israel be different? And does the concept of post-Zionism help in answering this question? For Uri Ram, post-Zionism has to be seen alongside neo-Zionism, both challenges to, but emerging out of, the hegemonic Zionist discourse: neo-Zionism pointing towards messianic, ethnic exclusiveness, post-Zionism to a liberal, civic inclusiveness. He envisages what he describes as a crisis of identity as Israeli society is pulled in different directions, resulting in an increasingly tenuous relationship between state and nation.
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Book reviews / Political Geography 24 (2005) 121–135
Ilan Pappe shares this categorisation and describes traditional Zionism (which includes Labour and Likud) fighting for its life against neo- and post-Zionist ideologies: ‘These three streams seem to engage in a battle over memory, reality and vision, or over the past, present and future’ (p. 43). For Pappe, traditional Zionism has lost the battle over the past but still determines the present anddit hopesdthe future. Indeed his condensed account of what traditional Zionism hoped for from the Oslo Agreement is a tour de force of insight and compression (pp. 50–53). But it is the neo-Zionists with their ethnic, theocratic vision who have the wind in their sails, increasingly willing to purge not just Palestinians but even secular Jews from their reconstruction-of-the-Temple vision. For Avishai Ehrlich the fundamental line of cleavage in Israel is not related ‘primarily to the question of the territorial boundaries of the state, but rather to the Jewish nature of Israel’ (p. 77). For him post-Zionism is really a liberal form of antiZionism. He is sceptical about it at many levels: its rosy view that the Arab-Israeli conflict is about to end; its assumption that a willingness for peace sprang from the dynamic of Israeli society rather than being imposed from the outside; its optimism that following formal peace Israel would become more secular and democratic and its starry-eyed view of globalisation believingdjust as liberals did before World War Idin peace through commerce. For As’ad Ghanen yet another tenet of post-Zionism is based on wishful thinking. The evidence simply does not support any notion that Israelis are moving towards more post-Zionist, civic notion of citizenship and equality. Jews in the main sustain traditional, ethnocentric Zionist values and there is no sign of a shared ‘Israeli’ identity emerging. These values, Ghanen shows, remained remarkably stable in the period 1980–1995, despite the radically different political contexts. At the same time, the Arab minority is unhappy with the multifarious discriminations it suffers, wants full equality and reject the Jewish–Zionist character of the state, attitudes that Ghanen believes are hardening, saying of the minority that ‘they will no longer accept being discriminated against’ (p. 114). In his own contribution Ephraim Nimni analyses the potentially positive effect of post-Zionism on diaspora Jews. He believes that a parting of the ways is inevitable (for example with the emergence of Hebrew Israelis whom he believes are ethnically distinct from diaspora Jews) and that this will enable diaspora communities to concentrate on what really concerns them: Jewish continuity and the development of vibrant diasporic institutions. These communities need to break with what became the dominant choice post-1967: either Zionism or assimilation, and the emergence of multiculturalism today, with its recognition of collective rights, provides a real alternative and an option for their survival as communities in their own right, not simply as supporters of Israel. For Hannah Hertzog, post-Zionism is first and foremost ‘a social condition’ arising from ‘a deepening awareness among all the peoples in the region that the state of Israel is a fact of life and not a passing phenomenon’ (p. 153). Her analysis is concerned with the numerous ways in which feminist discourses are contributing to the challenge to a unified state-national Zionist discourse, redefining politics in a process of civilising Israeli society.
Book reviews / Political Geography 24 (2005) 121–135
123
Henriette Dahlen-Kalev’s essay ‘You’re so prettydyou don’t look Moroccan’ is a cri de coeur. Passionate and immensely sad, it tells her story of attempted assimilation into the dominant European ethos from her arrival as a 4-year old in 1949. It was a process she calls Ashkenazification, through which North African Jews found their past denied (and many, like Dahlen-Kalev, denied it themselves, in her case inventing a French background in order to be acceptable). In a few telling pages she lays bare the process by which theyda majority of Israeli Jewsdwere steamrollered into conforming, unevenly and at enormous psychological cost, to the image of the truedEuropean, Zionist, AshkenazidIsraeli. In her conclusion Nira Yuval-Davis takes post-Zionism, as a political/social characterisation of Israeli society post the cold-war and in the epoch of globalisation, to task. It simply leaves too much out. Basically what is de-emphasised is Israel as a colonial settler society (but differentiated from other settler societies in important ways). What Yuval-Davis wants to warn against is a complacency that allows the conflict to be seen ‘as a conflict on borders between two neighbouring nations, each with its own distinct homeland, rather than a conflict between an ethno-settler project and a resisting indigenous population’ (p. 193). It doesn’t make a resolution of the conflict any easier but it does guard against the kind of illusions which were so cruelly shattered when the second intifada broke out and left the Israeli peace movement in utter disarray. All in all, this is an interesting and useful collection of essays, though it is doubtful whether the concept of post-Zionism as such contributes much to the perceptive analyses it contains. Richard Kuper 10 St George’s Avenue, London N7 0HD, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.05.024
The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States David Maybury-Lewis (Ed.); Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 2002, 386 pages Without a doubt the emergence of indigenous movements on the political scene throughout Latin America is one of the crucial aspects for understanding recent developments in Latin American societies. This development is most visible in the recent constitutional changes in a number of countries (e.g. Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador) and in mass mobilisations of indigenous peoples against neoliberal policies. As one of the contributors to the present compilation explains, we are faced with a ‘resignification of the indigenous’ (Jackson, p. 111).
Book reviews The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics Ephraim Nimni (Ed.); Zed Books 2000, hardbound, ISBN 1-85649-893-X-Hb, paperback 1-85649-894-8-Pb Post-Zionism, as Ephraim Nimni points out in his introduction to this collection, is a term of both hope and abuse with a ‘vagueness [that] generates an interpretive ambiguity that sometimes borders on confusion’ (p. 1). Nonetheless it has provided the framework for a vigorous debate in Israel over the past decade and more as to whether and in what sense Israel can be both a Jewish and a democratic state. For decades the social sciences in Israel were essentially ideological, pressed into service supporting the grand myths of the Zionist movement: Israel as the goal, the natural culmination, of two thousand years of Jewish history and of exile. Even after 1948 and 1967 it was seen as so fragile that one dared not cast a critical gaze upon it. A number of developments, internal and external, conspired to challenge that nation-building perspective. The ‘new historians’, Morris, Schlaim, Pappe, Segev and others, delved into the archives from the 1980s onwards and found different truths that challenged the foundational myths and essentially affirmed the derided Palestinian narrative of dispossession and expulsion. Independence day for Israelis was al-nakba, catastrophe, for the Palestinians. Hard on the heels of these historians came the new sociologists and political scientists, exposing the divisive and discriminatory nature of the Zionist project and its implementation (vis-a`-vis Israeli Arab citizens, North African Jews, women in general, Russians.). That intellectual challenge was paralleled by a fast-changing world: the disintegration of the Soviet empire, globalisation, the immigration to Israel of around a million Russian speakers, large numbers of whom are not ‘proper’ Jews, the pressure on Israel in the nineties to make peacedall called for reassessment. Other democracies have tended towards multicultural, civic, liberal, ‘postnational’ forms of state identity under the pressure of population movements, economic restructuring in a globalising world, and claims for rights by indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities. In what sense can or should Israel be different? And does the concept of post-Zionism help in answering this question? For Uri Ram, post-Zionism has to be seen alongside neo-Zionism, both challenges to, but emerging out of, the hegemonic Zionist discourse: neo-Zionism pointing towards messianic, ethnic exclusiveness, post-Zionism to a liberal, civic inclusiveness. He envisages what he describes as a crisis of identity as Israeli society is pulled in different directions, resulting in an increasingly tenuous relationship between state and nation.
122
Book reviews / Political Geography 24 (2005) 121–135
Ilan Pappe shares this categorisation and describes traditional Zionism (which includes Labour and Likud) fighting for its life against neo- and post-Zionist ideologies: ‘These three streams seem to engage in a battle over memory, reality and vision, or over the past, present and future’ (p. 43). For Pappe, traditional Zionism has lost the battle over the past but still determines the present anddit hopesdthe future. Indeed his condensed account of what traditional Zionism hoped for from the Oslo Agreement is a tour de force of insight and compression (pp. 50–53). But it is the neo-Zionists with their ethnic, theocratic vision who have the wind in their sails, increasingly willing to purge not just Palestinians but even secular Jews from their reconstruction-of-the-Temple vision. For Avishai Ehrlich the fundamental line of cleavage in Israel is not related ‘primarily to the question of the territorial boundaries of the state, but rather to the Jewish nature of Israel’ (p. 77). For him post-Zionism is really a liberal form of antiZionism. He is sceptical about it at many levels: its rosy view that the Arab-Israeli conflict is about to end; its assumption that a willingness for peace sprang from the dynamic of Israeli society rather than being imposed from the outside; its optimism that following formal peace Israel would become more secular and democratic and its starry-eyed view of globalisation believingdjust as liberals did before World War Idin peace through commerce. For As’ad Ghanen yet another tenet of post-Zionism is based on wishful thinking. The evidence simply does not support any notion that Israelis are moving towards more post-Zionist, civic notion of citizenship and equality. Jews in the main sustain traditional, ethnocentric Zionist values and there is no sign of a shared ‘Israeli’ identity emerging. These values, Ghanen shows, remained remarkably stable in the period 1980–1995, despite the radically different political contexts. At the same time, the Arab minority is unhappy with the multifarious discriminations it suffers, wants full equality and reject the Jewish–Zionist character of the state, attitudes that Ghanen believes are hardening, saying of the minority that ‘they will no longer accept being discriminated against’ (p. 114). In his own contribution Ephraim Nimni analyses the potentially positive effect of post-Zionism on diaspora Jews. He believes that a parting of the ways is inevitable (for example with the emergence of Hebrew Israelis whom he believes are ethnically distinct from diaspora Jews) and that this will enable diaspora communities to concentrate on what really concerns them: Jewish continuity and the development of vibrant diasporic institutions. These communities need to break with what became the dominant choice post-1967: either Zionism or assimilation, and the emergence of multiculturalism today, with its recognition of collective rights, provides a real alternative and an option for their survival as communities in their own right, not simply as supporters of Israel. For Hannah Hertzog, post-Zionism is first and foremost ‘a social condition’ arising from ‘a deepening awareness among all the peoples in the region that the state of Israel is a fact of life and not a passing phenomenon’ (p. 153). Her analysis is concerned with the numerous ways in which feminist discourses are contributing to the challenge to a unified state-national Zionist discourse, redefining politics in a process of civilising Israeli society.
Book reviews / Political Geography 24 (2005) 121–135
123
Henriette Dahlen-Kalev’s essay ‘You’re so prettydyou don’t look Moroccan’ is a cri de coeur. Passionate and immensely sad, it tells her story of attempted assimilation into the dominant European ethos from her arrival as a 4-year old in 1949. It was a process she calls Ashkenazification, through which North African Jews found their past denied (and many, like Dahlen-Kalev, denied it themselves, in her case inventing a French background in order to be acceptable). In a few telling pages she lays bare the process by which theyda majority of Israeli Jewsdwere steamrollered into conforming, unevenly and at enormous psychological cost, to the image of the truedEuropean, Zionist, AshkenazidIsraeli. In her conclusion Nira Yuval-Davis takes post-Zionism, as a political/social characterisation of Israeli society post the cold-war and in the epoch of globalisation, to task. It simply leaves too much out. Basically what is de-emphasised is Israel as a colonial settler society (but differentiated from other settler societies in important ways). What Yuval-Davis wants to warn against is a complacency that allows the conflict to be seen ‘as a conflict on borders between two neighbouring nations, each with its own distinct homeland, rather than a conflict between an ethno-settler project and a resisting indigenous population’ (p. 193). It doesn’t make a resolution of the conflict any easier but it does guard against the kind of illusions which were so cruelly shattered when the second intifada broke out and left the Israeli peace movement in utter disarray. All in all, this is an interesting and useful collection of essays, though it is doubtful whether the concept of post-Zionism as such contributes much to the perceptive analyses it contains. Richard Kuper 10 St George’s Avenue, London N7 0HD, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.05.024
The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States David Maybury-Lewis (Ed.); Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 2002, 386 pages Without a doubt the emergence of indigenous movements on the political scene throughout Latin America is one of the crucial aspects for understanding recent developments in Latin American societies. This development is most visible in the recent constitutional changes in a number of countries (e.g. Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador) and in mass mobilisations of indigenous peoples against neoliberal policies. As one of the contributors to the present compilation explains, we are faced with a ‘resignification of the indigenous’ (Jackson, p. 111).