Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture

Introduction: Toward Rediscovery of the Present in the Past

Introduction Toward Rediscovery of the Present in the Past To a remarkable extent, the “bitter and terrible truth[s]” that Yosef Eliahu Chelouche directs at the Zionist project sound very much like the “truths” of the contemporary critical revision of the Zionist project ; the objectives of Chelouche’s disapproval seem to anticipate the Zionist discourses of negation that many years later became the targets of the so-called post-Zionist critical trend. I examine these discourses at length in subsequent chapters. Here I briefly wish to introduce the Zionist twofold concept of negation that elicited Chelouche’s passionate objections. The first is the Zionist refusal to acknowledge the existence of the Arab population in the land, an ideological position encapsulated in the catchphrase “the empty land”; the second is the Zionist denial of the Jewish heritage and tradition, a credo encapsulated in the catchphrase “the negation of the Diaspora.” Chelouche’s disapproval, expressed in the first decades of the twentieth century, shows how early critical views of the Zionist ideology were articulated. This realization helps to dispel the notion of the “post-Zionist” critique of Zionism as a new historical development in the history of Zionism. At the same time, early criticism of Zionism by dedicated builders of the land, such as Chelouche, calls into question the seemingly antithetical positions of establishment Zionists and post-Zionists. Is it possible that perceptive and ardent 19 20 Zionism and the Discourses of Negation Zionists, such as Chelouche, could intuitively foresee the end (the “post”) of viable Zionist ideology embedded in the very politics of the Yishuv? Is it possible that today’s critical voices, bolstered by academic research and scholarly evidence, largely reconfirm the failings that others, such as Chelouche, observed when Zionism was in the making? Chelouche, a prominent member of the pre-Zionist Yishuv, was passionately engaged in establishing the Jewish community in Eretz Israel; he was especially proud of being one of the founders of Tel Aviv. Born in 1870 in Palestine, Chelouche truly believed in Jewish renewal in the land and considered himself a Jewish nationalist.1 A deeply religious Jew dedicated to building the Jewish homeland, he lived and worked closely with Arabs—both Muslims and Christians —before the advent of Zionism. It is therefore in light of his particular life experience that one should understand the criticism of the Zionist enterprise as expressed in his memoirs. Chelouche deplored the Zionist disregard of the Arab population, an attitude that destroyed the peaceful relations he himself had cultivated. At the same time, he claimed that the Zionist rejection of Jewish tradition and observance deprived Zionist nationalism of its roots and therefore rendered it meaningless. As I will show, this early criticism echoed even earlier voices belonging to such prominent Zionists as Ahad Ha’Am (1856–1927) and Martin Buber (1878–1965). The consciousness of these voices of criticism puts into question today’s vehement rejection of the postZionist revisionist approach to Zionism by establishment Zionists. Today’s criticism of the Zionist doctrine calling for separation from the Arab population and a rejection of the Jewish heritage is not new; in effect, it can be traced to the very inception of the movement. One could argue that in a very real sense post-Zionists differ from people like Chelouche not so much in terms of what they say but rather in how the former substantiate their ideas through academic formal methods. The dividing lines between establishment Zionists and postZionists may not be as clear-cut as the opponents of the post-Zionist critique assume. It may prove useful to examine briefly the establishment Zionist and post-Zionist evaluations of the Zionist project taking place Introduction 21 now, half a century after the establishment of the Zionist state and over a century since the inception of the movement. In a fairly recent essay Adi Ophir, a philosopher and a prominent post-Zionist, has claimed that post-Zionist academics do what any researcher is supposed to do, namely, distance themselves from the object of research and look at it from a different perspective. In terms of their scholarship , they reexamine the existing ideological concepts, “calling in question the polarized, teleological Zionist narrative, which constructs a monolithic, immutable Jewish identity and confronts it with [a] no less monolithic and immutable identity of the non-Jewish world.” Ophir claims that the novelty of this research lies mainly in the fact that...