The Radical Social Scientists and Israeli Militarism

As israel approaches its jubilee, it has become an iconoclastic society. The myths established during its formative years are now being destroyed. The first to attack received truths since 1987 were the revisionist historians, followed by the critical sociologists. It is now the turn of the radical social scientists, who focus on the central question in the experience of Israeli society: the war. ¹ They have determined that, "like it or not, ours is a militaristic society par excellence. This militarism is the central organizing principle around which Israeli society revolves, works, determines its boundaries, its identity and the accepted rules of the game." ²

The three groups—the new historians, the critical sociologists, and the radical social scientists—read Israeli historiography and academic research on Israeli society in an identical manner. They throw down the gauntlet not only to the hegemonic meta-narrative—which has survived in Israel since the beginnings of the Zionist movement—but also to the methodology used by the "other" researchers, who, in their opinion, have created a false picture of social and symbolic reality, which, they contend, has been intended solely to serve the needs of those who have shaped the dominant national discourse.

The object of the attack of the new historians is Zionist historiography, particularly that of the War of Independence in the late 1940s, and early 1950s. They see their main contribution to the study of this period in the deconstruction of the hegemonic Israeli narrative of the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict: that is, the claim that Zionism was a moral movement that aspired toward the maintenance of peaceful, good-neighborly relations with the Palestinians; that the 1948 war only broke out because the Arabs wanted to destroy the newly created state; that the war was one of the few against the many; that Israel is not responsible for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem and that the blame is with the Arabs alone; that, after the establishment of the State, the Israeli governments persisted in their attempts to make peace but did not succeed due to Arab opposition. In short, that the conflict was forced upon Israel from without, against its will and contrary to its policy. ³

The faulty narrative, according to the new historians, is the result of the methodology of the traditional scholars. Zionist historiography was, they claimed, positivistic, and therefore void of scientific validity. It was written by scholars faithful to the Zionist ideology, with the purpose of serving Zionist propaganda even when the facts opposed the official story and may have embarrassed the state and its helmsmen. Only through the use of a critical research paradigm can the historical truth be reached. ⁴

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new school of thought also began to emerge in sociology. A group of scholars proposed alternatives to the hegemonic framework for the analysis of Israeli society, based on the functionalist definitions of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak. The initial assumptions of the critical sociologists regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict were similar to those of the revisionist historians. They claim that the traditional sociologists perceived the Palestinians in the Yishuv period as being outside the system. Thus, the organized Jewish Yishuv was analyzed as a "whole society," while most of the processes in the Yishuv society were presented as internal and independent of the Arabs' existence.

After the establishment of the State, according to the critical school, traditional sociologists continued to ignore the fact that the Israeli Arabs were part of Israeli society, and, thus, their analysis of this society was mistaken. ⁵ But the main point is the Israeli-Arab conflict. The critical sociologists accuse the traditional school of seeing the conflict as an external matter, and of not understanding that it is a substantial, internal part of the society—one that has built and shaped societal patterns. Furthermore, they claim, the conflict existed, and continues to exist, because it is...