The Politics of Academic Teaching in Israel: How the War Affects Our Teaching of Ethnicity, Gender, and Social History

War in the Middle East has focused attention on the protracted national conflict between Jews and Arabs or, in strict political terms, on the competing struggles for statehood by the Israeli Zionists and their Palestinian neighbors. In the context of such ongoing regional conflict, it is not surprising that mainstream Israeli historiography worked for almost half a century to legitimize and consolidate the national memory by tracing the "main events" of what it described as the "process of nation building," and by focusing on the "key players," political and national leaders. The more recent, critical approach by a small group of "new historians" (for example, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin) has attempted to present a more balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but has not reversed the tendency to focus on wars and political events. As a result, two alternative models of historical research have been largely neglected in Israel: social history and feminist history.

In a 1988 essay, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims," cultural studies scholar Ella Shohat brought to light the direct link between the war in the Middle East, Zionist ideology, and conflicting intra-Jewish versions of social history.¹ Jews who emigrated to Israel from Arab countries after the 1948 war, Shohat argued, were victims of a Zionist ideology that orientalized them and accepted them into mainstream Israeli society only if they left behind their Arab identities. Israeli historiography subsumed the experience of displacement and relocation of these Arab Jews (more often known in Israel as Mizrahim or Sephardim) within the larger hegemonic Zionist narrative. Shohat's work, and more recent critical historiogrpahic work in Israel, has begun to explore the perspective of Arab-Jews in Israel.²

A historiography written to justify or contest the process of national identity building in times of war is also largely male-centered. Women enter such historical accounts only if they act in the public sphere as part of the male-centered effort of nation-building. For example, the feminist history that considers the role played by Jewish women pioneers³ or the more recent work that examines the resistance to male-centered militarism of organizations like Women in Black are both framed within a national Zionist narrative.⁴ Mizrahi or Arab-Jewish women in Israel do not belong to either of these categories. Locked within the same larger orientalist discourse that treats Mizrahi males as silent historical subjects in an Ashkenazi (European Jewish)-centered Zionist history, they have only recently begun to draw the attention of a few critical researchers who have challenged the hegemonic Eurocentric Zionist historiography. Indeed, a conference held at an Israeli university almost three years ago was the first to focus on the history of these Jewish "women of the East."⁵ Thus, one of the first challenges in teaching about the history of Arab-Jewish women is the glaring lack of adequate teaching materials. But that is not the whole story. Even if we overcome such research lacunae and produce solid historical accounts about Arab-Jewish women in Israel, the reception of such teaching within the larger frames of academic knowledge remains a problem. In the rest of this essay I will discuss four questions that explore the challenge of teaching about the gendered Other in Israel in the context of war.

Who is the audience for such feminist teaching in times of war?

In a recent essay titled "Teaching the 'Other,'" American feminist geographer Janice Monk argues that teaching students about the Other helps not only to develop tolerance of cultural difference among students but also to foster informed understanding, respect, and empathy.⁶ Indeed, for the majority Ashkenazi students in Israel, teaching about the history of Mizrahi women can serve as a lesson for developing tolerance, respect, and empathy. But what about the Mizrahi student body, often found in the less-prestigious newly established colleges? Are the few Mizrahi women students who make it to the ranks of university or college education more open, interested...