Paradise Lost: A Review of Laurence Silbersteinis The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culturei

Introduction

POST-ZIONISM HAS BEEN A growing focus of public as well as academic debate in Israel and abroad for much of the past decade. Though the term loosely relates to a composite community of scholars, essayists, writers, artists and intellectuals, who by no means share the same views, methodological approaches or even fields of inquiry, the term somehow stuck and by and large has become accepted. Given the growing relevance of the phenomenon and the amount of debate it has generated both among supporters and critics, Laurence Silberstein's book, The Postzionism Debates (PD), is a welcome contribution to the broad field. Four years after it was published, PD is still the only comprehensive scholarly English language textbook on post-Zionism. ¹ Its aims are therefore laudable and its goals desirable,; given the importance of the phenomenon and its diverse manifestations. PD should be welcomed as the first comprehensive attempt to fill this gap in scholarly literature, and it is with a view to the way this task was pursued that PD should be judged. Based on this standard, PD will disappoint anyone interested in learning about post-Zionism in a dispassionate, critical and scholarly manner.

A 'Post' Critique

PD portends not so much to provide a history of post-Zionism but to "examine the ways in which it functions" (Silberstein, 1999:10) ² . However, understanding the inner workings and logic of an intellectual phenomenon is not the same as uncritically embracing both its premises and conclusions. Yet, PD does precisely that, as Silberstein welcomes the post-Zionist project and sets out to endorse a phenomenon his work should have assessed, not promoted. Silberstein's view is that "at the heart of the controversies over postzionism are issues of knowledge and power" (5), an obvious Foucaldian echo, which appears in the PD's subtitle and to which Silberstein explicitly refers in his introduction, quoting Foucault: "Power and knowledge directly imply one another; there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose or constitute—at the same time—power relations." ³

The theoretical groundwork laid out in the same opening pages puts this work firmly in the camp of post-modern scholarship. To Silberstein's credit, he does not hide this, as he argues in the opening chapter, which he devotes to Zionism:

My goal . . . in not to add to an existing body of knowledge about Zionism, which presumes a conception of knowledge that I find problematic. Instead, I wish to reframe the discourse through which Zionism is discussed. Thus, my analysis is already a "post" analysis, that is, I already take for granted many of the problems and criticisms raised by discourses such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and postzionism. ⁴

The difficulty with this premise is that if Zionism is a discourse, and objectivity is nothing but the travesty of power, what is post-Zionism? It must be a discourse as well. But if post-Zionism is another discourse, it cannot be a more accurate representation of truth. In that case, post-Zionism is subject to the same criticism and characterizations of Zionism—namely a discourse that engenders power relations, and a narrative aimed at empowering some and excluding others. If Zionism's characterization as a discourse—presupposing the lack of truth—is wrong, then post-Zionism must confront Zionism squarely within the modernist tradition of inquiry and prove that its reading of history, memory and identity is a closer approximation of the truth.

Silberstein does not shy away from the argument that post-Zionism is indeed an attempt to reshape relations of power through a conscious effort to remodel identity, memory and history: "the conflict over post-Zionism is, among other things, a conflict over national memory." ⁵ He fails to recognize the implications of treating post-Zionism as discourse...