Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

Conclusion

Conclusion In examining the unofficial implementation of hegemonic Israeli ideals in daily life, this book began and ended with two central modes of social interaction. Its first main chapter, following a general discussion of a freak snowfall, was dedicated to linguistic policies and practices, and its last discussed behavioral norms, conventions, and manners. In between we have also covered two issues of public reference and three public spaces. The rationing regime permeated many aspects of daily culture, as we learn from the humor woven around it; comparably, security issues were not confined to the idf, and cultural militarism could be found in several civilian areas. By reconstructing the experiences of taking the bus and going to the movies, we have studied the common way of transport and the common form of entertainment. We have also visited the communal dining hall, the central public space of the kibbutzim—the Israeli communities most closely associated with the hegemonic ideals of the 1950s. The picture that emerges from this tour of daily public interactions and sensibilities is much more heterogeneous and disordered than that yielded by accounts from studies of the political, ideological, and intellectual spheres. The newness of the state and its “frontier” characteristics are blatantly apparent when we turn our gaze to the practical facets of the everyday. After encountering so many symptoms of raw beginnings and expressions of hectic disarray, we might wonder, by the time we reach the final chapter, why, in such chaos, anyone would even bother about polite manners.1 While studying Jewish collective memory in prestate Palestine and Israel , historian Billie Melman challenges the presentation of local culture as a uniform and cohesive entity. She argues that cultural hegemony was not omnipotent and demonstrates that memory, as part of the everyday, was pluralistic and “polyphonic.”2 And indeed, the scholarly focus on Israel’s statism and centralism often blurs, and sometimes unintentionally conceals, the messy confusion of daily life. The well-founded conclusion about a successful national hegemony is mistakenly interpreted to show that Israeli society 188 ■ b e c o m i n g i s r a e l i achieved relative homogeneity. And as long as our research is confined only to formal layers (state institutions, political parties and ideologies, “high culture ,” education, and so forth), findings will usually support and enhance this orderly portrait of decisive hegemonic control, on the one hand, occasionally encountered by conscious political opposition, on the other. And no wonder: formal institutions and set doctrines serve as the agents that promote hegemonic ideals, and they are also the loci at which the same hegemonic ideals can be explicitly contested. The research of these institutions and doctrines certainly produces interesting and convincing results, but these results contain only the clear-cut outlines of formal hegemony and the equally straightforward contours of opposition. Studying hegemony from the angle of mundane daily practices provides a fresh viewpoint, because this informal layer of social interaction does not lie under the political and ideological lamppost. Here we find a wide array of intermediate positions, which are often indefinite and vague. Uncharted by official doctrines, these informal sensitivities, norms, and convictions are enacted in ordinary practices . In order to view the effects of hegemonic ideals on people’s actual lives, not only on their conscious ideology, we should avoid limiting our study to narrated principles and formal policies; and as we envelop more daily practices and informal interactions, the picture that surfaces becomes increasingly multifaceted and versatile. If we wish to understand the workings of Israeli hegemony, a mere distinction between those associated with a hegemonic position and those who remained outside its borders does not suffice. We ought not to presume that while the latter were not always successfully blended in the national melting pot, the former were a unified unit that either fulfilled hegemonic ideals or manipulated them knowingly. Tracing the mechanisms of a successful hegemony requires a closer look at the tangible conduct, rather than the stated doctrines, of the populations who shared, supported, and promoted hegemonic ideals. Thus, directing our attention to the daily practices of longtime Jewish Israelis, mainly members of the European founding generation and their Sabra offspring, has taught us that hegemonic ideals were neither wholly fulfilled nor treated with total cynicism. National ideals were only partly implemented by the dominant Israeli groups and, when so, they were modified in various manners, not always intentionally or even consciously. Indeed, cultural practices can be intentional actions, but they...