Time for Theory: Critical Notes on Lissak and Sternhell

I

During the last few years, rivalry between advocates of conservative and critical approaches to understanding Israeli society has reached new heights as the critical approaches have acquired greater currency and influence, and their principal targets, Shmuel Eisenstadt and his colleagues Moshe Lissak and Dan Horowitz at the Hebrew University have drawn closer to retirement.¹ With the publication in the previous issue of Israel Studies of Moshe Lissak's defense-cum-counterattack, the debate has finally reached maturity. Instead of having to content ourselves with ritualized confrontations staged within the halls of academe, or vituperative exchanges in the mass media, it is now possible to engage in a two-sided scholarly debate. The disinterested reader—if there are any left—can form his or her own opinion, and the interested parties, myself included, can use the discourse we know best to justify our positions and try to confront our opponents.

Despite the diversity of its practitioners' approaches and beliefs, critical scholarship has consistently called into question taken-for-granted assertions and assumptions that have been central to the legitimacy of Zionism and the authority of Israeli elites. It is clear from Lissak's article, as well as his earlier comments in public appearances and the media, that this is what he finds most objectionable about critical scholarship. Yet the debate is not just about the credibility of historic myths. It is also about analytical choices; above all, how students of Israeli society should define both their dependent and independent variables.² Faithful to in-house accounts of Zionist history, traditional scholarship concentrates on intentions rather than actions; it sees these intentions as the outcome of ideological choices tempered by "reality," paying little attention to how material and other contextual forces shape both action and ideals; and it treats the Yishuv (and later Israel) largely as a self-contained unit. Critical scholars like Gershon Shafir, Lev Grinberg and myself, working from a political economy perspective,³ have presented Labor Zionist ideology more as consequence than cause, and have emphasized the contingent role of the Jewish settlers' economic and political conflicts with the indigenous Arab population in shaping Zionist strategy and Yishuv society.

For reasons that will be explained below, I find that Lissak's article fails to really address the theses of the political economists. Paradoxically, this is also true of some of the work that has been done under the banner of critique. Zeev Sternhell's recent book, Nation-Building or a New Society? The Zionist Labor Movement (1904-1940) and the Origins of Israel, discussed elsewhere in this and the previous issue of Israel Studies, exemplifies the point: fiercely iconoclastic in tone and thoroughly objectionable to conservative scholars like Lissak, Sternhell's volume nonetheless faithfully reproduces the voluntarist and Judeo-centric biases of Israeli social science that critics like myself find so problematic.⁴ Both Lissak, in preserving sacred cows, and Sternhell, in slaughtering them, are unwilling or unable to give the theoretical claims of political economy an adequate hearing.⁵

Intellectual curiosity is rarely unbounded. Rather, both the social context in which social research is carried out and the social biography of researchers have an obvious impact on the questions we ask, and the types of answers we look for. Yet Lissak insists on denying this self-evident truth. He poses a rigid distinction between defenders of science, like himself, and those who would prostitute it to their political agenda. This position is so absurd that it cannot be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it must be conceded that the provocative nature of some of the arguments made by critical sociologists may be partly to blame for the degeneration of the debate to this level.

It has certainly been necessary, and important, to uncompromisingly expose the implications of the functionalist legacy of conservative sociology in Israel. These implications are well-known. Functionalism privileges questions having to do with order rather than disorder; in focusing on consensus and integration, it...