To Build and to Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall

Paradigm Shifts in Israeli Studies

IN ISRAEL, AND IN ISRAELI studies, "the paradigms, they are a-changin'." On 10 July 1994, more than 500 people packed themselves into a lecture hall at Tel-Aviv University to hear several historians and sociologists revile each other's work. The event was the climax of several months of controversy in the national media. Several "established" Israeli historians, sociologists, and writers charged that a new crop of post-modernist, post-Zionist, unpatriotic, disrespectful, dangerous, and unprofessional academics (including some of their own students!) was denying Israel's heroic past and endangering national morale by questioning long-established but unspoken rules about the boundaries for acceptable interrogation of the history of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

The "new" historians and sociologists, some self-described as post-modernist, some not, some self-described as Zionists, and some not, responded by recounting egregious discrepancies between the archival record, as revealed by recently released Israeli government documents, and the official myths of Israeli civil religion (in school curricula, national holidays, and popular beliefs)—myths elaborated and still fostered by the academic establishment. Among the most vulnerable and sensitive of these myths have been beliefs about Arab responsibility for the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948, the decisiveness of liberal and socialist Zionist ideals in the construction of Israeli institutions (including the Histadrut [United Labor Union], the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, and the Israel Defense Forces), the unavoidability of Arab-Israeli wars, the devotion of Zionist and Israeli leaders to finding peace agreements with "implacable" Arab foes, the historical "artificiality" of the Palestinian national movement, and the ready acceptance by Ashkenazi Jews of their brothers and sisters from Asian and African countries.

This is a momentous debate. The fundamental and decisive question it reveals is the legitimacy of applying universalist criteria to the performance of the Zionist movement as the sole legitimate expression of Jewish nationalism. Indeed the very existence of the debate therefore challenges the notion of Israel as a "Jewish" or "Zionist" state whose parochial imperatives justify suppressing or avoiding public disclosure of inconvenient truths. The debate's persistence contributes to a profound reshaping of the boundaries of political culture, political discourse, and political competition in Israeli politics.

The single most important strand within this multi-faceted, and often highly personalized, public argument is the image of the confrontation with the Arabs. The received view portrays the "Arab problem" as a tragic, painful, and/or irritating adjunct to the Zionist saga, rather than as a formative or constitutive element. Expressed with different political emphases by scholars and writers such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Moshe Lissak, Dan Horowitz, Daniel Elazar, Amos Elon, Anita Shapira, Yehoshua Porath, and Aharon Meged, the established position has been that the confrontation with the Arabs was an important, unforeseen, and difficult problem for a Zionist project whose contours nonetheless were shaped independently of it. In this master narrative of Zionism and the rise of Israel, Jewish national decisions and the carefully worked-out formulas of Zionist ideology (such as "redemption" and collective ownership of land, economic self-reliance, Jewish labor, pro-active self-defense, and an exclusivist Jewish ethos) were the framework within which devoted idealists (mainly socialist and Ashkenazi) implemented their dreams and the dreams, ancient and modern, of all Jews. The view of "new" Israeli researchers, such as Yoav Peled, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Yoram Peri, Gershon Shafir, Ilan Pappe, Lev Grinberg, Yagil Levy, Uri Ram, Uri Ben-Eliezer, Baruch Kimmerling, and Michael Shalev, as well as non-Israeli specialists such as Joel Migdal, Myron Aronoff, Yael Zerubavel, Avi Shlaim, Mark Tessler, and myself, is that the struggle with the Arabs was of fundamental, constitutive importance for the kind of state that Jews built in the Land of Israel, the norms and institutions that were enshrined as ineluctably "Jewish," "Zionist," and then "Israeli...