The Post-Zionist Discourse and Critique of Israel: A Traditional Zionist Perspective

THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to identify and survey some significant voices in the current post-Zionist critique of Israel among Jews and Israelis, and assess their development and political impact through the present. Based on a conceptual framework offered by Hedva Ben-Israel, a historian of nationalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, this essay will examine selected critical views of Zionism since the early years of the Jewish Yishuv in British Palestine. However, its main contribution will be in exploring the Holocaust as a source of criticism of Zionism in general and of Labor Zionism in particular. I have further expanded on Ben-Israel's paradigm, and added my own explanations of thinkers and other anti-and post-Zionist personalities, and have especially dealt with the political ramifications of their critique. I conclude that their criticism has contributed to eroding the pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, Labor Zionist legacy, while strengthening the Zionist Right.

Various schools of thought will be presented, that illustrate historical continuity and dialectical changes. Each contributed its share to the erosion of Labor Zionism and its pragmatic approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, based as it was on the partition of Western Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and upon the principle of avoiding a Jewish rule over a large number of Arabs. Furthermore, these earlier critiques have been adapted to an analysis of current events and have resulted in misleading revisions of earlier periods of Israel's history.

The interpretations included for this discussion are:

• Idealistic German-Jewish criticism of Jewish nationalism
• Neo-Marxist criticism of Zionism
• Dialectical, geopolitical criticism of Zionism
• The empirical critique of Zionist operations during and immediately after the Holocaust; the revival of the Bund'slegacy
• The Frankfurt School's critical attitude towards Zionism
• The use of European Social Democracy as a critical model for Labor Zionism

National Identity and the Study of Nationalism

In a recent (2002) essay entitled "National Identity and the Study of Nationalism," Ben-Israel noted a phenomenon common to the study of nationalism in general and Zionism in particular. ¹ According to Ben-Israel, the study of nationalism—one of the outstanding phenomena of modern history—has developed in three distinct waves, or phases, of academic focus in the last 80 years. The first wave concentrated on nationalism's literary expressions that appeared mostly in the texts of its prophets in various countries. Nationalism was judged according to moral and political standards such as selfishness or generosity, militarism or spirituality, liberalism or oppression, democracy or authoritarianism. Historical evaluation in this phase presumed that nations and states embodied proclivities towards "good" or "bad" nationalisms. This view, which developed in the shadow of the growing hyper-nationalism and totalitarianism of the twentieth century, conferred high scores on Western nationalism but disparaged Central and Eastern European nationalisms because of their despotic, anti-democratic propensities.

Scholars of the second wave were mainly social scientists, who rejected the first approach and sought explanations for nationalism as a product of social, economic, and material conditions in the realms of urbanization, industrialization and transportation. According to this view, the study of nationalism should be free of ideological explanation and value judgment and anchored firmly in the domain of quantifiable analysis. Ben-Israel argues that this approach led to a third wave of research in which "some kind of removal of [nationalism's] cultural and historical contents took place that resulted in a blurring of the concepts of nationalism and nation by transforming them into figures of speech and linguistic constructs not necessarily containing actual historical substance." Behind the third wave, Ben-Israel concluded that a theory could be detected showing that intellectuals had invented nationalism either as a detached, literary phenomenon or as an instrument in the hands of small, ruling elites.

This is the starting point for the following discussion of Jewish and Israeli academics and writers.

The Jewish People and...