The New Post-Zionist Historians

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Yoav Gelber

THE NEW POST-ZIONIST HISTORIANS

DOROTHY AND JULIUS KOPPELMAN INSTITUTE

ON AMERICAN JEWISH-ISRAELI RELATIONS

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE



Yoav Gelber

THE NEW POST-ZIONIST HISTORIANS

DOR OTHY AND J UL I US K OP P E L MAN I NS T I TUT E

ON AMERICAN JEWISH-ISRAELI RELATIONS

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE

The mission of American Jewish Committee is:

—To safeguard the welfare and security of Jews in the United States,

in Israel, and throughout the world;

—To strengthen the basic principles of pluralism around the world as the

best defense against anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry;

—To enhance the quality of American Jewish life by helping to ensure

Jewish continuity, and;

—To deepen ties between American and Israeli Jews.

To learn more about our mission, programs, and publications, and to join

and contribute to our efforts, please visit us at www.ajc.org or contact us

by phone at 212-751-4000 or by e-mail at [email protected].



iii

Yoav Gelber, a professor of Land of Israel Studies at

the University of Haifa, is currently a visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin. After a career as an officer in the IDF in paratrooper units, he earned a Ph.D. in history from the Hebrew University in

Jerusalem. Head of the Herzl Institute for Researchand Study of Zionism since 1987, he was the chair of Haifa University’s School of History.

Copyright © 2008 American Jewish Committee All Rights Reserved.May 2008

Contents

Preface v

The New Post-Zionist Historians 1

Post-Zionism and Anti-Zionism 1

Innovation, Objectivity,

and Politicized History 4

Post-Zionism and

Postmodernism 8

The Uniqueness of

Jewish Nationalism 10

Opposition to Jewish Nationalism 12

The Denial of Jewish Nationality 13

The “Israeli Nationality” 14



Preface

Scholars of a nation’s history often find themselves embroiled bothin questions of national identity and in historical controversies with

attendant contemporary political implications. The old adage “He who controls the past controls the future” is doubtless an exaggera-tion, but it is suggestive of the enormous role that historical narra-tives play in formulating contemporary political positions. At a minimum, the study of history touches upon collective historicalmemory, which is essential to formulating national culture andidentity. At a maximum, how one reads a particular historical inci-dent or epoch may shape policy prescriptions for future directions.

Israel as a nation-state has been no stranger to historical contro-versies. In the early years of statehood, Israeli historians were oftenreferred to as the “Zionist school of historiography.” Israeli histori-ans underscored the overall continuity of the Jewish experience andidentified territory and homeland as the essential elements of thatcontinuity. In effect, their historical writings validated Israel’s claims

to constitute fulfillment of age-old Jewish aspirations. These histori-ans generally downplayed Diaspora Jewish existence as an extendeddetour rather than as a center of Jewish creativity. Similarly, Israeliarchaeologists uncovered the material evidence for Jewish presencein the Land of Israel in biblical and post-biblical times.

In terms of public education, history, in effect, became a train-ing ground for Israeli citizenship, providing a coherent narrative

with which young people could identify and take pride in the Jew-ish return to homeland and sovereignty. Or, as the Zionist philoso-pher Ahad Ha’am put it in his justly famed essay “Past and Future,”nations, like individuals, survive on the basis both of collective

The Colonialist Paradigm of Zionism 20

Post-Zionists and Other Detractors 22

Why Zionism Is Not Colonialist 26

A New History of the

Arab-Israeli Conflict 31

The Holocaust and Jewish Statehood 35

The Alleged “Zionist Appropriation”

of the Holocaust 38

From “Melting Pot” toMulticultural Society 41

Influence of the New Historians 46

Notes 49

v



demic disciplines. The “new archaeology” in some respects was mostdangerous, for it denied the material claims of Jewish presence inthe homeland as an artificial and ex post facto construction. Simi-larly, post-Zionist sociologists challenged Israel’s treatment of minorities and called into question its self-definition as a liberaldemocracy.

At the core of post-Zionism, however, lay the critique of thenew historians. To some extent, these individuals formed part of a global postmodernism that challenged the very idea of historicaltruth. All history, in this view, constituted merely “narratives” ratherthan objective facts that could not be denied. Thus postmodernismmutated into an historical relativism that dismissed questions of right and wrong in favor of viewing the past as a collection of view-points in which “truth” was merely a function of which group hadpower.

How important is post-Zionism? Certainly its significance doesnot lie in vast numbers. Nor are its intellectual arguments particu-larly compelling. Professor Shlomo Avineri of the Hebrew Universi-ty, for example, has dismissed these arguments as echoes of an olderanti-Zionism rather than consisting of new and original ideas.

Yet the influence of the post-Zionists should by no means beunderestimated. Given their prominence at leading Israeli universi-ties and their access to significant Israeli media, their impact far

transcends their numbers. Arab-Israeli intellectuals often invoketheir arguments in their efforts to redefine the nature of Israel as a nation-state. Some post-Zionists have taken up key academic posi-tions in Europe, where they often serve as public intellectuals whoare “exceptional Israelis.” Similarly, Israel’s detractors in the UnitedStates, e.g., the recent volume by Professors Stephen Walt and JohnMearsheimer, frequently rely upon evidence marshaled by post-Zionist historians to buttress their case against continued Americansupport for Israel.

The American Jewish Committee commissioned Professor Yoav Gelber of the University of Haifa, and currently a visiting professorat the University of Texas, to demystify the phenomenon of the revi-

preface vii

memory of where they have been and future aspirations of wherethey wish to be.

Yet by the late 1980s a counterschool of historians was rewriting large portions of the “heroic” narrative of Israel. For these youngerhistorians Israel as a nation-state had been born in sin. For some,the sin constituted Zionist exploitation of the Holocaust as moral

weapon. Others depicted Israel as colonialist—dispossessing native Arabs and evoking the specter of “ethnic cleansing.” Still othersreconstructed the Six-Day War as an unnecessary military adventureeagerly sought by overzealous Israeli politicians. Lastly, still otherspointed to internal Jewish sins, such as poor treatment of Holocaustsurvivors or Jews who had fled Arab countries. Perhaps most shock-ing was the charge of some intellectuals that contemporary Israelishad become the Nazis of our time.

In a limited sense, these historians were acting as a corrective tosome of the excesses of more traditional Zionist historiography. By deconstructing some of the myths of the Zionist narrative, these his-torians were adding a more nuanced and balanced view of Israelihistory. Yet in the broader context, these revisionist historiansformed a critical element within the broader cultural phenomenonof post-Zionism. Post-Zionist intellectuals maintained that Zion-ism, at best, had run its course as a political ideology and, at worst,had defined Israel as a tool of Western imperialism in the Middle

East. Indeed, the agenda of post-Zionism was quite ambitious.Seeking to integrate Israel into the Middle East, post-Zionists criti-cized Israel’s relationship with world Jewry as retarding the processof integration. They viewed the concept of Jewish peoplehood itself as problematic. Israel’s Law of Return, bestowing automatic andimmediate citizenship to any Jew the world over upon immigrationto Israel, symbolized all that was wrong with the Jewish state.Instead they sought to redefine Israel as a state of all of its citizens.In their view the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva , constituted anoffensive statement that upheld the historical aspirations of the Jewsas a people while negating the claims of Arab-Israeli citizens.

Moreover, post-Zionism drew upon the energies of diverse aca-

vi preface



1

sionist historians and assess their role within Israeli society. A decadeago, AJC published Post-Zionism by Rochelle Furstenberg, a mono-graph that provided a detailed overview of post-Zionism as an intel-lectual current. Professor Gelber’s work assesses historical writingspublished within the past decade and engages their arguments con-cerning Israel’s alleged misdeeds. His work should prove an impor-tant resource in understanding both how reading of the past affectscontemporary politics, and how the case for Israel remains very much part of contemporary debates concerning the role of ideas insociety and politics.

Steven Bayme, Ph.D. Harold T. Shapiro, Ph.D.Director, Koppelman President Emeritus,Institute on American Princeton University,

Jewish-Israeli Relations Chairman, KoppelmanInstitute on American

Jewish-Israeli Relations

viii preface

The New Post-Zionist Historians

Post-Zionism and Anti-Zionism

Zionism, the ideology that connected European-born Jewishnationalism with the Land of Israel, has been considered, since1948, when Israeli independence was declared, one of the most suc-cessful creeds of the twentieth century. During the last threedecades, however, it has come under growing attack—first abroad,and then within Israel—from those who deny Jewish nationalism atlarge, reject its affiliation with the land, and accuse it of colonialismor Orientalism. At the spearhead of this onslaught demonizing Zionism and Israel’s past and present have stood academics, artists,and journalists who define themselves as post-Zionists. Sometimesthey also call themselves new historians or critical sociologists.

Since the 1980s, postcolonial and postmodern fads have occu-pied a growing place in public and academic life in Israel and haveposed new challenges to Israeli historiography and cultural dis-

course. Post-Zionism consists of two distinct aspects. The first ismainly an internal development within Israeli academe stemming from Western influences; the accessibility of new source material;the introduction of new research methods, and the suggestion of new interpretations. Controversial issues have been debated, mainly in professional academic circles, and the participants have articulat-ed their opposing stances in scholarly books and journals.

The second aspect is a broad meta-historical debate, with post-Zionists challenging the values, beliefs, assumptions, methodolo-gies, and objectivity of their Zionist colleagues. This debate hasspawned a public and ideological atmosphere of controversy thatthe writing of op-eds, essays, and academic studies emanate fromand reflect at the same time.



post-zionism and anti-zionism 3

Post-Zionists, and others who quietly support and follow them,accuse Zionist scholars of enlisting voluntarily in the service of Zionist ideology and trying to impose “hegemonic” Zionist con-cepts on Israeli culture and national identity.1 Such criticism may betrue in specific cases of articles or books, but there are no groundsfor an implied sweeping generalization.

Post-Zionism is difficult to label, and definitions are not univer-sally agreed upon. Sociologist Uri Ram of Ben-Gurion University inBeersheva, who was the first to coin the term post-Zionism, definedit vaguely as a fashion. He emphasized its cultural features andnoted that it should be understood in the context of the changing

world: the impact of globalization, poststructuralism, and postcolo-nialism; the transformation of “identity” and its competing con-cepts such as “otherness,” “difference,” and “hybridism.”2

Ram himself focused on the writing of Israeli history. LikeEuropean national historiographies, he argued, Zionist historiogra-phy was intended to cultivate national identity. Post-Zionism corre-sponds to posthistoricism, dismantling national identity and the“historical laws” that shaped it. Historicist memory built nations,and posthistoricist memory shatters them. Post-Zionist historiogra-phy writes the history of “others,” while Zionist historiography leaves room only for the history of self-identity.3

Another sociologist (and radical left-wing activist), Avishai

Ehrlich, defines post-Zionism as the Israeli form of assimilated anti-Zionism. This genre of anti-Zionism, which was earlier representedin the United States by the American Council for Judaism,4 a groupformed in the 1940s to oppose the notion of a Jewish state, hardly existed in Palestine during the Mandate period and early years of statehood. In Ehrlich’s view, post-Zionism of the liberal variety is a product of capitalist globalization, and therefore is the opposite of the anti-Zionism that derives from religious (ultra-Orthodox) orsocialist convictions.5

Historian Eyal Naveh, who teaches American history at Tel Aviv University, and his colleague, Esther Yogev, have portrayed post-Zionism as a contemporary “mood”: the inclination of scholars,

2 the new post-zionist historians

thinkers, journalists, and artists to challenge Israel’s collective mem-ory and the Zionist narrative. They have identified a variety of sources for this mood: the traditional anti-Zionism of the Diaspora;groups on the periphery of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv

(the prestate Jewish community in the land of Israel), such as theCanaanites or Brit Shalom; persons not admitted into the Israeliacademy; and the impact of imported postmodernist crazes.6

Mordechai Bar-On—a retired IDF colonel and former Meretz(left-wing) member of Knesset turned scholar—has made the mostsystematic effort to define post-Zionism, and describes two variants:The first considers Zionism an ideology and movement that accom-plished its goals and became redundant. Bar-On calls this trend,

which ponders what should succeed Zionism, “post-Zionism”; oth-ers prefer to call it “neo-Canaanism.” Prominent examples of thisvogue are novelist A.B. Yehoshua of Haifa, one of Israel’s mostfamous and prolific writers; the philosopher, literary scholar, andpublicist Menachem Brinker of the Hebrew University in

Jerusalem; and historian Motti Golani of the University of Haifa.7

The second variant of post-Zionism rejects the Zionist ideology and its basic assumptions lock, stock, and barrel. It disapproves of the Zionist movement’s policies in all fields and all time periods,rebuffs the very notion of the existence of a Jewish nation, anddenies the need for a Jewish nation-state. Post-Zionists deny the

connection between historical Judaism and the State of Israel andstrive to transform the nation-state of the Jewish people into a liber-al, multinational, and multicultural state. Their ideal state would bedevoid of any Jewish identity, secular or religious, and of any uniquemoral and social pretensions. They call it “a state of all its citizens,”but do not mean a pluralistic society on the model of the UnitedStates or Canada. Their goal is a binational state, as proposed by Hashomer Hatza’ir and the political parties of immigrants fromGermany in the 1930s and 1940s, or a Palestinian state as envisagedby the British White Paper of May 1939 (and rejected by the Pales-tinians)—that is, “a one-state solution.” In Bar-On’s eyes, this brandof post-Zionism is simply a new form of the old anti-Zionism. He



not much younger, if at all, than their colleagues who do not sharetheir revisionist approach.10

Ram attempted to classify Israeli historians according to thetemplate of knowledge (objectivists vs. relativists) and the body of knowledge (apologetic vs. critical).11 This analysis, too, yieldsstereotypes that do not stand up to close examination. Not all theobjectivists are apologetic, nor are all the critics relativists. Further-more, applying these concepts to Israeli historiography becomesideological rather than methodological when every Zionist histori-an, according to Ram’s analysis, is considered apologetic, and every anti-Zionist critical.

Kimmerling insisted that a Zionist worldview contradicts thenorms of the academic community. He accused the Zionist histori-ans of preferring Zionist values over academic ones whenever thetwo conflict. Kimmerling also held that the true division was notbetween old and new historians, but between more and less ideolog-ically committed historians.12

To read this sermon against ideology from Kimmerling’s penproduces an odd feeling in light of his most recent book, Politicide .Kimmerling has written extensively on both sides of the Israeli-Arabconflict, and his books make him a qualified authority on the topic,

whether one concurs with or opposes his conclusions. None of thesebooks, however, prepared the ground for his last book nor support

its content in terms of relevant historical evidence.Kimmerling’s Politicide is an inventory of past sins allegedly

committed by Israel, the IDF, and Ariel Sharon, in particular,against the Palestinians since the 1950s. The list begins with young Major Sharon’s actions as commanding officer of Unit 101 and laterof the paratroopers fighting fedayeen in the 1950s, through MajorGeneral Sharon’s campaign against Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip during the early 1970s, to the politician Sharon’s patronage of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, on to the 1982 war inLebanon, and finally to Sharon’s tenure as prime minister and hisrepression of the second intifada. Basing his allegations on what heclaims to be common knowledge (i.e., gossip), Kimmerling citeshardly any references.

innovation, objectivity, and politicized history 5

also dismisses the sincerity of those anti-Zionists who claim thatthey do not oppose Israel’s existence, but only its exclusive nature asa Jewish nation-state.8

Innovation, Objectivity, and Politicized History

When he coined the phrase “new historians” in its Israeli context,Benny Morris—then a freelance scholar and now a professor at Ben-Gurion University, author of several books on the Arab-Jewish con-

flict that received wide academic and public recognition—meantprimarily historians who use archival material comprehensively, without self-censorship of unpleasant events. On the basis of thearchival sources, the new historians question the older, official ver-sion of Israeli historiography.9

In contrast to Morris, post-Zionists such as sociologist UriRam; Ilan Pappé, a radical pro-Palestinian activist and lecturer onMiddle East history who recently left the University of Haifa and

joined the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom; and BaruchKimmerling, a professor of cultural sociology at the Hebrew Uni-versity who died recently, have stressed the ideological rather thanthe methodological facets of the “new history.” Unsophisticatedopponents frequently have disregarded this basic difference. Themore recent split between Morris and his former comradesemanates precisely from this distinction.

The new historians have described themselves or have been por-trayed as a movement within Israeli historiography. However, they are not a school and not even a coherent group sharing a worldview,program, or methodology. They are individuals who come fromdiverse backgrounds and hold distinctive stances and professionalapproaches. Trying to characterize the new historians, Anita Shapi-ra, who heads the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism atTel Aviv University and is a leading historian of the Zionist labormovement, underlined the differences that make any generalizationabout them difficult. She suggested age (biological and academic) asa common denominator, but even this observation is unsatisfactory,as the new historians vary in age and academic seniority. Some are




Pappé’s later books, and Baruch Kimmerling’s above-mentionedPoliticide are examples of politicized history.15 Emotional invest-ment is not a monopoly of the old historians. Every historian bringssome degree of emotional involvement to his subject, and the differ-ence is not in the involvement but in the emotions: loyalty, admira-tion, and, occasionally, excessive idealization among the oldhistorians as contrasted with self-hatred, cynicism, and disrespectfor their objects among the new ones.

The new historians have succeeded, at least partly, in revising the accepted account of Israel’s birth. However, their differentmethodological approaches, the varied quality of their scholarship,and the validity of their analyses and interpretations are open tocriticism no less than those of their predecessors and “old” contem-poraries. Their claim to be free of bias, sympathies, and ideologicalloyalties is totally groundless. Derek Penslar, an American Jewishhistorian of Zionism of the University of Toronto, has noted thatthe new historians’ claims to objectivity notwithstanding, they aremotivated by exhaustion from the ongoing Zionist struggle ratherthan by objectivity and incline toward cynicism rather than irony.16

Ram views these controversies as an outcome of “the end of thecreative phase of the project of settling and building the Israelination-state.” The disputes articulate the transition from a homoge-neous historical recognition of a dominant version, or a grand story,

to a variety of versions typical of “a civil, consumer and, perhaps,multicultural society.” In Ram’s eyes, the controversy is not in factover historical issues, but rather symbolic of:

A [political and ideological] struggle over collective memory inIsrael ... that is likely to bring about transformation of the defi-nition of Israeli identity.... On the contextual level, this is a comprehensive controversy about the official, national, histori-cal consciousness of Israel, which is also the dominant popularconsciousness, namely Zionism.17

In this debate, Israeli sociologists play a role similar to that of literary theorists in the West who engage in debates about historiog-raphy: They release the discussion from the rules of the discipline

innovation, objectivity, and politicized history 7

Politicide is neither an academic study nor a synthesis of previ-ous research. It is a polemical and propagandist pamphlet, openly motivated by resentment, frustration, and fear—bordering on hate.Its object is Sharon, but the ad hominem onslaught masks a power-ful subtext rebuking Israeli society at large for allowing Sharon’scareer to flourish for several decades and electing him (democrati-cally) to lead during the crisis of the second intifada. At the sametime, Kimmerling’s subtext glorifies the cadre of Israeli dissidents

who identify with the Palestinian cause.13

Sharon deserves criticism for various acts committed during hislong military and political career, as well as praise for his accom-plishments (which Kimmerling chose to ignore). One does nothave to be a sociology professor to praise Sharon or condemn him,nor does a professorship endow political criticism or praise with any special scientific or moral authority. To be convincing, allegationsrequire a documentary basis that is lacking in Kimmerling’s book,and without that, there is nothing scholarly, original, or innovativein his comments.

Politicide is a clear illustration of the abuse of academic statusfor ideological and political ends. Of course, Kimmerling was enti-tled to his views, but regretfully, he did not stop at presenting hispersonal opinions, but waved his academic credentials to supportthem. Disguising personal views behind titles and studies, thereby

leading readers to regard a book as the product of knowledge gainedthrough research, is—in my view—academically and ethically inap-propriate.

The proclivity for innovation that the new historians boast alsoimplies objectivity and open-mindedness. Allegedly, these qualitiesare lacking in the old historians, who belong to the generation thatimplemented Zionism and who are therefore biased, take one-sidedpositions, and display emotional involvement.14 However, one-sided viewpoints are no less typical of new historians, and probably more so than among old ones. Interdisciplinary Center lecturerIdith Zertal’s Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood , aboutZionism’s exploitation of the Holocaust to advance its cause, Ilan




and transfer it into a speculative and ideological plane—changing itfrom a debate about what happened in the past into a dispute about

what should have taken place or what should occur in the future.

Post-Zionism and Postmodernism

Many, in Israel and abroad, perceive post-Zionism as a particularly Israeli brand of the postmodernist torrent that flooded the world inthe 1980s and 1990s.18 The Israeli version, however, is more politi-

cal than the Western prototype. The Israeli postmodernists are lessinterested in epistemological and methodological abstractions. What interests them most is using these issues to advance politicalgoals, primarily the dismantling of the Jewish nation-state.

Post-Zionism has applied postmodern theories and discourse tothe Israeli reality. Pappé pointed to “a leap from positivist prehistory to postmodern meta-history” in the development of Israeli histori-ography. In Israel, as elsewhere, the majority of participants in thetheoretical debates about history are not historians. Nonetheless,Pappé asserted, the postmodern discourse influenced Israeli histori-ans indirectly through indicating ways “to dismantle the domina-tion of the hegemonic, white and masculine narrative over thehistorical story of the ‘others’ and ‘otherness’ in this country.”19

In the Israeli version of postmodernism, the native postmod-ernists endeavor to undermine the Zionist order. For that purpose,

they attack both the history of Zionism and its study. Their criti-cism aims to destroy the “Zionist discourse,” depicting it as a delib-erate distortion of historical truth. They strive to shake up Israelihistorical consciousness, deconstruct Israeli identity, take apartIsraeli collective memory, and present it as a Zionist meta-narrativethat has usurped Jewish history and identity.

To the usual list of the deprived and discriminated-against vic-tims of modernism, Israeli postmodernists have added the Palestini-ans, in Israel and abroad; the former dwellers of the ma’abarot (thetransit camps for new immigrants) and their descendants; the sec-ond generation of Holocaust survivors, and those who spent theirchildhood in the shared children’s homes of the kibbutzim. They


have taken theories of identity and “otherness” drawn from post-structuralism, Foucault’s doctrine that “knowledge is power,” andthe postcolonialist and antiorientalist discourses in the West, andthen applied the techniques of deconstruction. Nevertheless, theconnection between the parables of a Michelle Foucault (the Frenchphilosopher who was one of the gurus of postmodernism), JacquesDerrida (the French-Jewish literary critic and founder of decon-structionism) or Edward Said and the Israeli and Middle Easternreferents is strained and artificial.

Most post-Zionists are faithful to the postmodern axiom thathistoriography is politics. By dismissing Jewish nationality, con-demning the negation of the Diaspora, describing the surviving remnant of the Holocaust and Jews from Muslim countries as theprey of Zionist manipulations, and the Palestinians as innocent vic-tims of collusions and atrocities, they add weight to the allegationthat Israel was conceived and born in sin. Pappé, who led this linefor years, abandoned all academic disguise at the beginning of thesecond intifada and enlisted in the service of Palestinian propaganda in Israel and abroad.20

Humility and modesty are often discarded qualities among Israeli “posties.” They lavish superlatives upon one another some-times without regard for attendant realities. For example, TomSegev, the Ha’aretz journalist and historian who wrote The Seventh

Million, One Palestine Complete , and 1967 , declared that the new historians “are the first to make use of archival source material.... Itis the first generation of [true] historians. They plow a virgin soil.”21

Knowingly and deliberately, Segev thus distorted the truth: Many historians of Zionism and the Yishuv worked in Israeli, British,

American, and other archives, long before the advent of the new his-torians, simultaneously, and subsequently. Yehoshua Porat, Anita Shapira, Shabtai Tevet, and myself are but few examples of histori-ans who utilized archives long before Morris or Pappé.

The difference between those who speak of being innovatorsand those who dispute them is not in the use of archives. It lies inthe difference between the often pervasively ideological writings of

post-zionism and postmodernism 9



from other European national movements in its attitude toward itsnational language. The East European movements cultivated localvernaculars as a counterweight to the languages of the imperialauthorities—German or Russian—and as means to shape nationalidentities and cultures. Zionism discarded the Jewish vernaculars—

Yiddish and Ladino—and returned to ancient Hebrew as a basis forcreating a modern national Jewish culture and identity.

A territorial basis—the foundation of any national move-ment—was theoretical in Diaspora Judaism and was expressedmostly in the prayer book. Zionism revived this dimension by revolting against the reality of Jewish life in exile and advocating thetransfer of the Jews to the national territory of the Land of Israel.

Just as the Jews saved their language as a holy language, so they hadmaintained throughout history their affiliation with a particular ter-ritory that they regarded as their holy homeland. This linkage wasbased on distant historical memories, religious doctrine, and mes-sianic expectations for the future. The traditional religious and spir-itual affiliation to the land shaped the consciousness that eventually led Jews to regard the Land of Israel as their national territory. In itsearly years, the Zionist movement wavered between loyalty to theland and concern for the people. The decision was made only afterthe crisis created by the Uganda Plan of 1904. Ever since, the Zion-ist movement has regarded Jewish nationalism as inseparable from

the Land of Israel and rejected any other territorial solution to the Jews’ plight.23

Zionism contrasted with other national movements, such asthose of Poland, Serbia, or Bohemia, that had revived and highlight-ed a relatively close past that preceded their occupation by ruling empires. The Zionists rejected the recent historical experience of the

Jews, namely the Diaspora, and described Zionism as the oppositeof exile. To reach the distant historical experience that it sought torevive, Zionism had to skip 1,800 years of communal Jewish life inexile and return to the political history of the Jews in their landprior to the revolts against the Romans.

Of all the elements that constitute a national movement—lan-

the uniqueness of jewish nationalism 11

the new historians (though they do sometimes innovate and illumi-nate) and the more academic writing (which does sometimesrequire deviation into various ideological directions) of those whodo not identify themselves with this adjective.

The Uniqueness of Jewish Nationalism

The post-Zionists were not the first to dispute the national elementof the essence of Judaism. Since its emergence, modern Jewish

nationalism was the subject of a heated debate over the question of how deeply rooted was the national idea in Jewish history: Was it a revolutionary innovation or had it manifested continuity? Thisdebate took place between Zionists of competing trends as well asbetween Zionists and their opponents—i.e., between supporters of other versions of Jewish nationalism and those who objected to any form of it. Some participants in this discussion have argued thatnationalism is foreign to Judaism and constitutes a revolt against theanomaly of Jewish history, an attempt to break from the unique

Jewish past and return to world history. Others have retorted thatZionism is the outcome of Jewish history’s continuity, but haveoffered a new interpretation.22

Modern Jewish nationalism emerged in the footsteps of a gener-al nationalist awakening in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europefollowing the Napoleonic Wars. It was influenced by this revival and

adopted many of its concepts and vocabulary. Nonetheless, it dif-fered in several significant respects from the European prototype.

Just as Judaism defied any comprehensive theory—religious, Marx-ist or postcolonialist—so it also posed a problem for theories of nationalism and dissented from the model on various issues.

The familial roots of Jewish nationalism, as well as its ethnic,linguist, and cultural origins, are much older than those of theEuropean national movements. As a historical phenomenon,

Judaism antedated them by many centuries, though after thedestruction of the Second Temple, Jewish history lacked politicaland military expression, but played out in the religious, cultural,communal, social, and economic dimensions. Zionism also differed




in Palestine did not solve the Jews’ plight but created a new one (the Arabs’) and opened new avenues for Jew-baiting. Unlike the JewishCommunists in the Soviet Union and the Bund in Poland, the PKP(the Palestinian Communist Party) totally ignored the Jewish prob-lem in exile and identified entirely with the national Arab stances. 26

The post-Zionists in many ways carry forward the tradition of thePKP. Like their predecessors during the riots of 1929 and during thePalestinian rebellion of 1936-39, they oppose Zionism, and thisopposition brings them to identify with its Palestinian adversaries.

The Denial of Jewish Nationality

The objection to Jewish nationalism derives support from relatively new theories of nationality and colonialism. Primarily, the post-Zionists quote Cornell University professor emeritus of Internation-al Studies Benedict Anderson, who defined a nation as an“imagined community”—imagined by its members, and manipulat-ed by bureaucrats and educators. Additionally, they frequently citeBritish Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis that the allegedly old national traditions of Europe were invented in the nineteenthcentury to cultivate national myths. Usually, they ignore or refuteother theorists of nationalism, such as Anthony D. Smith, editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Nations and Nationalism, who regardsnationality as the continuation of an older ethnic identity, or the

late Ernst Gellner, who asserted that nationalism is an outcome of modernization. They hardly relate to earlier scholars of nationalism,such as Hans Kohn or Friedrich Hertz, and they disregard com-pletely the original philosophers of nationalism such as Jean-JacquesRousseau, Johann Herder, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.27

Theories that link nationalism with modernization, like Gell-ner’s, may explain the disintegration of traditional corporative socie-ty, emancipation, and assimilation—trends that are opposite to thedevelopment of Jewish nationalism—but they ignore the growth of

Jewish self-consciousness, whose roots were in the ethnic elementsof Jewish existence. Thus, Smith’s theory, if any, appears more suit-able for explaining Jewish nationalism.28

the denial of jewish nationality 13

guage, territory, culture, economy, and common destiny—the Jewshad mainly a common heritage that shaped their identity. Onecould adopt Jewish tradition as it was, as did the Orthodox, use itselectively or reinterpret it as did the Reform and Conservativemovements, but no one, including the opponents of tradition,could simply ignore this heritage.24

Opposition to Jewish Nationalism

From its beginnings, Zionism has provoked adversaries who object-ed to Jewish nationalism or, at least, to its linkage with the Land of Israel. Orthodox, Marxist, and assimilated liberal Jews regardedZionism as a panicked response to anti-Semitism, an imitation of European nationalism, and a distortion of Judaism’s true essenceand image. These varieties of anti-Zionism were mainly a phenome-non of exile. Post-Zionism, by contrast, is “blue and white”—a product of Israel, produced by people who were born and/or edu-cated in Israel.25

The post-Zionists’ arguments against Jewish nationality, andagainst Zionism as its principal expression, echo the liberal andMarxist anti-Zionist polemics in the beginning of the twentiethcentury. These two sources of anti-Zionism rejected outright any

Jewish national identity and accused Zionism of making it up. Theliberals opposed any expression of Jewish difference except for reli-

gion (which they called the “Mosaic religion,” since “Jewish reli-gion” had a national and exclusivist connotation). The Marxistsconsidered the Jewish question a problem of civil equality, not a national issue. Marxist Jews did not negate only Zionism, but thefuture of Judaism generally. In their eyes, Jewish nationalism was a move backward, opposed to historical development and socialprogress.

Nonetheless, the dispute between the Zionists and the anti-Zionist Marxists in Eastern Europe took place within a commonframework that recognized the acuteness of the Jewish problem.The Marxists argued that Zionism did not provide a true and prac-tical answer. Subsequently, they added that the insistence on settling




land’s King William the Third after the revolution of 1688, among other factual errors.30

The denial of Jewish nationality and its replacement with Israelinationality are not original contributions of Pappé.They come froma seemingly authoritative source—Eric Hobsbawm.31 However,Hobsbawm is not an authority on Jewish or Middle Eastern history.His expertise is in the history of Europe and Latin America. He is ananti-Zionist Marxist who, long before Pappé, denied the existenceof Jewish nationality and Zionism as its expression. Hobsbawmcoined the phrase “Israeli nationality,” but deliberately refrainedfrom stating to whom it referred.

Hobsbawm held that identifying the historical-religious yearn-ing of the Jews for the Land of Israel, their pilgrimages to the coun-try, and hopes to return to it after the coming of the Messiah withthe aspiration to concentrate all Jews in a modern territorial state inthe Holy Land was illegitimate. Like the British historian-philoso-pher Arnold Toynbee, who preceded him with a peculiar thesis on

Judaism being a fossilized relic of “Syriac civilization,” Hobsbawmtakes a position that is nothing but an odd personal view, notderived from evidence or erudition.32

According to Hobsbawm, religion becomes a significant forcein nationalism only when the national movement matures and turnsinto a mass movement, not in its infancy, when it is still a minority

movement. He bases his opinion on a “Zionist” example: “Zionistmilitants in the heroic days of the Palestine Yishuv were more likely to eat ham sandwiches demonstratively than to wear ritual caps, asIsraeli zealots are apt to do today.”33

This statement is biased and ill-informed. Most Zionists camefrom traditional homes in the Diaspora. The vast majority of theYishuv treated tradition with respect. Though the majority did notobserve all the commandments, Jews in Palestine were married inreligious ceremonies, circumcised their sons, observed the sanctity of Yom Kippur, even if they did not fast, and were buried in a Jew-ish traditional ceremony. This was true also for most pioneers of theSecond Aliyah (1904-14).34

the “israeli nationality” 15

To deny Zionism being a national movement, the post-Zionistsportray it as a colonialist phenomenon. A nation that does not exist(i.e., the Jewish nation) cannot have a national movement and doesnot need a nation-state. At most, they would define it as “nationalcolonialism”—but Israeli, not Jewish. Thus, they prepare the groundfor a new Jewish religious millet that would exist in a future Palestin-ian state, as it did in the Ottoman Empire. Nonreligious Israeli Jews

would then assimilate with Palestinian Arabs, just as they assimilated with the surrounding peoples in Europe and America. Dedicating his recent book on the history of modern Palestine to his sons,Pappé, in this spirit, wished them a peaceful life in the modernPalestinian state that would replace the Jewish nation state.29

The “Israeli Nationality”

Since they reject Zionism as an authentic articulation of Jewishnationalism, the post-Zionists have made up an “Israeli” national-ism. Pappé has put together a theory of his own to explain itsessence. In peculiar ways, he mobilizes the reputation of Benedict

Anderson, Hobsbawm, and other historians to support his claim.His principal argument asserts that “Israeli nationalism” is a MiddleEastern phenomenon that should be studied in the framework of national movements in the Third World. His ulterior motive istransparent: denying Zionism’s origins in the Jewish question in

Europe and its endeavor to offer a solution to that question, by turning it from a movement that emerged from the Jewish plight inEurope into a territorial-colonialist local phenomenon in the Mid-dle East, in the manner of South Africa.

Pappé’s theory is based on a bizarre reading of Anderson’s Imag-

ined Communities (see above, p. 13) and a selective choice of exam-ples from that book. Checking the references to Anderson hardly reveals any support for his arguments. When he brings his ownexamples, Pappé demonstrates embarrassing ignorance. Thus, forexample, he confuses the Norman Duke William the Conqueror,

who became England’s King William the First in the eleventh cen-tury, with the Dutch Prince Willem of Orange who became Eng-




This is a misleading representation of McNeill, who wrote thatNazi-German racial nationalism had contradictory impacts after theSecond World War. On the one hand, it damaged the idea of ethnicunity within the framework of the state, because this notion smelledof Nazi doctrines. On the other hand, Jews in particular, and alsoother ethnic minorities, abandoned in the wake of the war the idealof assimilation into the dominant national group. After a shortdescription of the enthusiastic and successful incorporation of Jewsinto German society during the era of emancipation, McNeill con-tinues:

If assimilation provoked such a brutal response in the heart of European civilization, what is the use of continuing it else-

where? Wouldn’t it be better to comply with the dif ferences andeven to stress them? And, perhaps, immigration to Israel waspreferable? However, ironically, the new Jewish homeland that

was founded in 1947, instead of solving ethno-religious ten-sions between Jews and others, as the founders of Zionismhoped, precisely aggravated them and turned them internation-al by creating a population of Palestinian refugees that refusedto comply with its removal from lands that were seized by the

Jews.39

“Ethno-religious tensions between Jews and others” have beeninternational concerns since the end of the nineteenth century, long before the Palestinian refugees. McNeill writes about the lack of hope for assimilation, and laments the irony of fate that the Jewishstate, instead of solving the problem, escalated the friction between

Jews and Arabs because of the Palestinian refugee problem. There isa considerable distance between what McNeill wrote and its distor-tion by Pappé.

Purporting to draw on “the view of many scholars of national-ism, including Anderson” (though I have not found any reference in

Anderson’s book to this claim), Pappé declares that “Zionism doesnot differ essentially from other national phenomena in the Third

World.” Yet, in Pappé’s view, Zionism also does not correspondcompletely to Anderson’s model of imagined nationalism, because itis a mixture of nationalism and colonialism—“a national movement


Even at present, Jewish nationalism is far from confined tothose who wear kipot ( yarmulkes ), and its ranks are full of people

who freely enjoy ham and nonkosher varieties of seafood. Hobs-bawm and his imitators, however, will not let the facts confusethem. They totally ignore the immanent linkage in Judaismbetween nationality (“ethnos,” as they prefer to call it) and religion.This connection differs from any other nation and religion, wherereligion can be common to several nations, a nation can consist of believers in various creeds, and religious conversion does not meansevering the ties to one’s nation and community.

In its attempt to skip two millennia of history and return to itspre-exilic past in the Land of Israel, Hobsbawm argues, Zionismignored and negated real Jewish history. For him, the Jews’ languagehas been Yiddish, and he scornfully compares the revival of Hebrew to attempts to revive interest in the Druids in Wales. This strangecomparison only testifies to his ignorance of modern Hebrew cul-ture.35

Hobsbawm’s statements about Zionism in his books on nation-alism, like his articles and papers that relate to Israel, have not reliedon any erudition. If one ceases to be impressed by his worldwidehorizons, one finds that the statements of Pappé’s opinionated guruderive from nothing but his own hard feelings toward Zionism andIsrael.36 There is more than a trace of deception in Pappé’s attempt

to depict Hobsbawm’s ideological and political stance as authorita-tive for a theoretical and apparently scientific claim.37

Similarly, Pappé abuses another prominent historian, the Amer-ican William H. McNeill, telling his readers:

In McNeill’s eyes, Zionism is ... a partial lesson to the Holo-caust’s lesson [!]. The lesson is that human assimilation has beenbound to fail.... Therefore, nationalism, which is the belief inexclusivity and the antithesis of assimilation, won.... In the caseof Zionism, he thinks that the Jews, who were the victims of theassimilation’s failure, caused another conflict between Jews andnon-Jews ... the victim of nationalism made others the victimsof its own nationalism.38




time surfaced in the form of messianic movements. Zionism trans-lated these qualities into modern concepts—not as “politics of iden-tity,” but as a response to the constraints and pressures that Ramand his comrades blatantly ignore. True, Zionism was not a thou-sand-year-old phenomenon as its pious advocates maintain andsworn enemies deny. It was a historic movement that emerged inEastern and Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century inresponse to contemporary needs and desires of the Jews who lived inthose countries, but it derived its legitimacy and convictions frommuch older origins.44

The post-Zionists and their favorite theoreticians of nationality take no notice of the external impacts on the shaping of Jewishnationalism. In addition to self-definition and internal awakening,Zionism was a product of outside definition and attitudes. The

Jews’ patterns of response to European nationalism and moderniza-tion were not “strategies of identity,” as post-Zionists hold. They

were not texts, but real-life experiences. Zionism responded to thedistress of the Jews, particularly where they lived in dense concen-tration. Its principal purpose was solving the plight of the Jews, andonly secondarily, that of Judaism. The condition of Judaism in theface of modernity preoccupied Zionist thinkers like Ahad Ha’am,but it hardly bothered the field activists who built the Zionist move-ment and the masses who joined it.

The plight of Judaism gave birth to various suggestions as tohow to construct a modern Jewish identity, such as the idea that the

Jews’ special mission on earth was to disseminate monotheism (orpure morality). None of these suggestions provided an answer to theexistential distress of the Jewish masses, and none acquired any pop-ularity. Only two real answers were suggested to the Jewish misery: a national solution in the Land of Israel, and a pluralist solutionthrough emigration overseas. The American immigration laws of the 1920s put an end to mass emigration and indirectly had a cru-cial impact on the scope of the Holocaust and the founding of Israel.45

A common argument often used to deny the historical existence


that has used and is still using colonialist tools for achieving itsgoals.” He also makes Britain the “imperialist motherland” of those

Jews from Eastern and Central Europe who wished to practice theirnationalism in Palestine.40 He leaves for the reader to wonder why Britain undertook responsibility for Jews from the continent and

whether there has been any parallel situation in the history of impe-rialism and colonialism.

Pappé’s take on Jewish nationalism is not unique, and otherpost-Zionists share it to various degrees. Tel Aviv historian ShlomoZand—who is not exactly post-Zionist because he was never a Zionist but rather grew up in a Communist family and youth move-ment—deems Zionists “a community of immigrant-settlers” thatlegitimized its claim for Palestine by transforming the Bible from a holy religious canon to a national history textbook.41 Ram main-tains that, contrary to the conviction of the graduates of the Israelischool system that a Jewish nation has always existed, the Zionistmovement invented a tradition for a nation that had not existedbefore and would not have been created without the Zionist inven-tion. Ram further claims that modernity:

... did not relieve from its chains a Jewish nationalism that wait-ed for two thousand years to be liberated, but ... tore to piecesthe prenational Jewish identity. Jewish nationalism did notburst out from Jewish identity, but was thrown to it as a life-

saver when it was about to drown in the whirlpool of moderntimes.42

Ram asserts the self-evident: Until the eighteenth century, nonationalism in the modern sense of the word existed in Europe. Likethe identities of the European aristocracy, clergy, burghers according to their branches of commerce and artisanship, and peasants accord-ing to their level of serfdom, Jewish identity was also corporate.43

Compared to its environs, the medieval and early modern Jew-ish corporation featured a high degree of solidarity, a highly devel-oped autonomous and communal organization, a religiousaffiliation with the Land of Israel, and an expectation for theredemption of all Jews and their return to Zion, which from time to




ern Europe, tattered by postcolonialist guilt feelings. Inspired by Edward Said (an American professor of literature, of Egyptian-Palestinian origin, the author of Orientalism), Palestinian intellectu-als have embarked on demonstrating to the West the colonialistnature of Zionism.47 The accusation of “colonialism” that they hurlagainst Zionism rests on dubious historical evidence (that usually points to the opposite conclusions). It derives mainly from tenden-tious interpretations that mix up past and present and serve toadvance Palestinian viewpoints on the persisting Israeli-Arab con-flict.

Denying the existence of Jewish nationality, Israeli post-Zion-ists have joined Palestinian scholars in their attempts to prove Zion-ism’s colonialist nature.48 However, portraying Zionism as a colonialist movement did not begin with post-Zionism. It’s as old asthe Arab-Jewish conflict, beginning with the first Palestinian Con-gress that convened in Jerusalem in January 1919—if not earlier.Rashid Khalidi, an American scholar of Palestinian origin, describeda 1911-13 incident of Jewish settlers arriving in Fula (Merchavia) asan early example of the insurrection of Arab tenants against Zionistdispossessors.49

What was the extent of Arab opposition to the Zionist enter-prise at the beginning of immigration and settlement? Kimmerling found four examples—spread over twenty-two years—of press arti-

cles and petitions against the purchase of land by Jews. He claimedthat these prove the Arabs’ political and national objections to landpurchases by Jews in Palestine. This is scant evidence for the exis-tence of genuine national opposition. He did not specify the scopeof land transactions between Jews and Arabs concluded during those twenty-two years, which might have shown that opposition

was the exception rather than the rule.50

An American Jewish scholar, Lawrence Silberstein of LehighUniversity, who shares some of the post-Zionists’ stances, praisedKimmerling and Joel Migdal’s Palestinians as “a first effort by anIsraeli scholar to present a balanced and comprehensive descriptionof the social and political development of the Palestinian nation.”

the colonialist paradigm of zionism 21

of an ancient Jewish people who created a modern national move-ment claimed that, prior to the emergence of Zionism, there was inEastern Europe a “Yiddish people.” This argument was made by

Jewish Communists, Bundists, and liberals alike. Zand continuesthe tradition of the Bund and Simon Dubnow’s doctrine of nation-al autonomy that seemed to have vanished in the Holocaust, anddescribes the Yiddish language as the center of Jewish identity andlife in Europe: In describing the “Yiddish people,” he writes about

Yiddish culture, the Yiddish middle class, and the anomaly of “Yid-dishist life” in Europe.46 The anomaly, however, was not in the lan-guage, but in the socioeconomic reality. Yiddish culture prosperedas a national culture no less or more because it was socialist orautonomist. It prevailed not only in the Bund, but also in the Zion-ist parties that wished to communicate with the masses and so pub-lished newspapers, journals, and brochures in Yiddish.

The Colonialist Paradigm of Zionism

Since the shaping of the new order in the Middle East after the First World War, the Palestinians (then known as the Arab inhabitants of Palestine) have portrayed themselves as a national liberation move-ment struggling against a foreign colonial power (the Zionist move-ment) supported by the military might of British imperialism,

which tried to usurp land that belonged to others. The Palestinians

rest their case on the resolutions of the Palestinian congresses fromthe beginning of the 1920s, in their appeals to the British govern-ment and the League of Nations, and in their official and unofficialdeliberations with the various commissions that sought a solution tothe Palestine problem in the 1930s and 1940s. At that time colo-nialism was considered legitimate, and their arguments did notattract much attention. World public opinion did not considerthem more convincing than the Jewish plight in Europe before, andcertainly after, the Holocaust.

Circumstances changed for the Palestinians after the comple-tion of the decolonization of the Third World. Since the late 1970s,their arguments have fallen on receptive ears, particularly in West-




borders. Some of these authors were academics from such diversedisciplines as mathematics, chemistry, linguistics, and psychology,including Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, Moshe Machover, andBenjamin Beit-Hallahmi. Others were well-known journalists suchas Simha Flapan.55

The post-Zionists follow in the footsteps of these earlier Israeldetractors and have elaborated on their arguments. Under the dis-guise of “comparative history,” they have cultivated the stereotype of the colonialist Zionist immigrant by comparing the farmer settling in the old colony of Rosh Pina or the pioneer in Kibbutz Degania tothe Dutch officials in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) or theFrench colons in Algeria. One of their favorite comparisons matchesup the Jewish settlers in the Land of Israel to the Boers in South

Africa. They also have correlated the acquisition by the UnitedStates of Louisiana from France in 1803 and Alaska from Russia in1867 to the piecemeal purchase of tracts of land from the Arabs inPalestine by the Jewish National Fund. Similarly, they equate theattitude of the Jews to the Arab tenants who tilled these tracts withthe Americans’ treatment of Hispanic settlers in Texas.56

“Political Zionism,” Kimmerling stated, “emerged and consoli-dated on the threshold of the colonial period in Europe, when theright of Europeans to settle in every non-European country wastaken for granted.”57 Presumably, this statement represents the

“comparative approach,” but it should not take an expert in colonialhistory to know that the colonial era in European history beganmuch earlier, in the sixteenth century. Zionism emerged toward theend of this long era and not on its threshold, and West Europeancolonialism had been preceded by other colonialisms—Arab, Turk-ish, German, and Russian. The comparison of the acquistion of Louisiana and Alaska to the land purchases of the JNF is not per-suasive. Many problems would have been solved had the ZionistMovement possessed sufficient funds and the opportunity to buy the Land of Israel in several fell swoops, as the United States did forlarge parts of its westward expansion in the nineteenth century, andhad Britain and the other powers supported Zionism in the manner

post-zionists and other detractors 23

Apart from the grave question marks that hang over many argu-ments of these authors, these remarks reveal that Silberstein seemsto think that Israeli historiography began with Kimmerling. Heignores the Jerusalem historian Yehoshua Porath’s two volumes onthe history of the Palestinian national movement that appeared inthe 1970s, to say nothing of earlier works by journalist Michael

Assaf and veteran diplomat Ya’acov Shimoni.51

Kimmerling, Migdal, and San Diego sociologist Gershon Shaf-fir (who wrote a book on Zionism and labor) also did not break new ground by blaming Zionism for the dispossession of Palestiniansand depriving them of their land and rights. They had been preced-ed by Jewish communists that already in the 1920s objected to theZionist enterprise because of its alleged colonialist nature. Their

Jewish comrades in Palestine backed Arab nationalism, accusedZionism of being a tool of imperialism, and regarded settlement onthe land as a capitalist extortion of the Arab tenants. 52 They did notmask their stances as the fruits of academic research and preachedthem openly as an ideology and politics. In the wake of the Jewishcommunists came Matzpen, a small radical anti-Zionist group that

was active in the 1960s and 1970s and blamed Zionism for all thesins of old and new capitalism.53

Post-Zionists and Other Detractors

Several critical publicists outside Israeli academe have publishedbooks that criticized the Zionist past and the Israeli present. Promi-nent among them were the military historian and convicted spy (forthe USSR) Israel Ber, journalist and former MK Uri Avnery, and

Aharon Cohen, an autodidact scholar who founded and headed the Arab department of Hashomer Hatza’ir and Mapam.54 Since thelate 1970s, the center of this genre has moved from Israel to the

West. Several books by former Israelis as well as by American andFrench Jewish activists of the New Left presented an anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist version of the history of Zionism and Israel. Par-ticularly, they have stressed the injustice that the West inflicted onthe Palestinians by the very foundation of Israel, regardless of its




Latin America, not the Near East, as a haven for the Jews. The whole construction built on this reference by the Palestinians isflawed.60

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, a post-Zionist historian at Ben-Guri-on University, offered other grounds for equating Zionism withcolonialism. He criticized two facets of the Zionist attitude towardthe nexus between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel: theemphasis on the continuity of Jewish presence in the land, and theromantic views of young immigrants of an earlier era who consid-ered the Arabs descendants of the ancient Jews and, therefore, a model for imitation. Both approaches, he maintained, “did notleave room for the Arabs and their consciousness.” The Zionist per-ception conditioned their appraisal. In his view, this was the begin-ning of total denial of the Arabs’ claim for national rights in thecountry.61

It was this emphasis on a continuous Jewish presence and anunremitting affiliation to the Land of Israel, according to Raz-Krakotzkin, that served the Jewish claim for rights to the country.He maintained that Zionist historiography was clearly linked to theZionist Organization’s diplomatic activity. The historical claims, heargued, were the foundation of the Zionist demands on Britain toadopt an exceptional policy in Palestine that would disregard thenational aspirations of the indigenous population and deny their

right for a state or other political entity of their own.There is no evidence to prove that the British read, were sup-

posed to read, or were affected by Zionist historiography. It is high-ly doubtful that any British statesman or official ever read the

writings to which Raz-Krakotzkin refers. Certainly they did notsway Lord Balfour when he wrote to Prime Minister David LloydGeorge after the opening of the Versailles Peace Conference thatBritain considered Palestine an exception to the principle of self-determination and rightly so, because the Jewish question outsidePalestine had worldwide significance that outweighed the wishes of the local population.62 British statesmen might have been influ-enced by Hebraist Christian scholarship (as Raz-Krakotzkin sug-

post-zionists and other detractors 25

that Kimmerling and his comrades claim. Precisely the slow pace of the Zionist enterprise’s growth, due to the need to purchase the landand the scarcity of resources to do so, testifies to its noncolonialcharacter.

In the name of “comparative history,” Pappé compared Zionismto missionary activity in West Africa and to previous attempts by Christians to settle in Palestine and expel the Arabs from the coun-try (i.e., the Crusades). He found an “astonishing similarity”between the secret hopes of Henri Gerren, the French traveler andexplorer of nineteenth-century Palestine, and those of Zionist leaderMenachem Ussishkin, the chairman of the Jewish National Fund:Gerren strove to revive the Crusaders’ kingdom of Jerusalem, whileUssishkin aspired to revive the kingdom of David and Solomon.

Drawing on bizarre and unverifiable sources, Pappé determinedthat from the beginning, Zionist settlers in the Land of Israel aimedto dispossess the Arabs. He brings an untrustworthy quotation froma rabbi of Memel who never set foot in Palestine, a “well-knownZionist leader” by the name of Itzhak Rielf, who, according toPappé, called in 1883 (fourteen years before the establishment of the Zionist organization!) for expelling the Arabs from the country.The most “convincing” is Pappé’s reference to the Palestinian histo-rian-propagandist Nur Masalha, who chose a random assortment of citations taken out of their original contexts to prove, in his mind,

Zionist intentions to dispossess and expel the Palestinian Arabs.58

Masalha, Edward Said, and even Benny Morris have quoted a single entry from Theodor Herzl’s diary that spoke of spiriting “thepenniless population across the borders by procuring employmentfor it in the transit countries while denying it any employment inour own country.”59 All three missed or ignored the continuation of Herzl’s words later in the entry: “Discreet, delicate investigationsshould first be carried on regarding the financial needs, the internalpolitical situation, and currents in these South American republics.”Herzl did not write this diary entry with reference to Palestine and

Arabs. In 1895, before the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896and the First Zionist Congress in 1897, he was still oriented toward




Unlike the conquistadors and their like, Jewish immigrants tothe Land of Israel did not come armed to the teeth, and made noattempt to take the country by force from the native population.The pioneer immigrants conceived of the normalization of the Jew in terms of a return to manual labor, not to exerting military power.Until the First World War, the idea of creating a Jewish military force for achieving political aims was confined to a few visionaries,and even at the end of that war, volunteering in the Jewish battal-ions of the British Army was controversial among young pioneers inPalestine.

If we take a semiotic approach, until 1948 the Hebrew wordkibbush (meaning occupation, conquest) referred to taming the

wilderness and mastering the skills of manual labor and the arts of grazing; in its most militant form, it referred to guarding Jewish set-tlements. Terms such as gedud (battalion) or plugah (company)referred not to military but to labor formations. The armed Jewishforce emerged late, in response to attacks and threats on the part of the Arabs, and the key word in the process of its building was“defense.” The ethos of using force was, as Anita Shapira showed inher book Land and Power , defensive—at least until the Palestinianrebellion of 1936-39.

After that rebellion, “defense” was not perceived necessarily intactical terms. Tactically, the Yishuv ’s youth became aggressive. Yet

the use of the word “defense” symbolized a broader perception of the Zionist enterprise as constantly threatened by its Arab sur-roundings and, sometimes, also by other powers. The word impliedthat the Yishuv was the responder, not the initiator of the threats,even if and when tactically it took the initiative by unleashing thefirst blow or firing the first shot.

Unlike the white settlers in the British colonies, Zionism volun-tarily undertook restrictions compatible with democratic principlesof self-determination. It strove to arrive at a demographic majority in the Land of Israel before taking political control of the country.The Zionists considered Jewish majority a precondition for Jewishsovereignty. They believed that this condition was attainable

why zionism is not colonialist 27

gests in another context), but not by Zionist historiography.63

Looking everywhere for colonialist conspiracies, Raz-Krakotzkin regarded the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a sym-bol of Zionist colonialism. Since its foundation, he argued, it was a colonialist university, established not for the indigenous populationbut for immigrants, and thus hindering the establishment of univer-sities for the natives. Hence, he accused the university of being “a political weapon that prevented education from the majority of thepopulace.”64

By indigenous population, he did not mean the graduates of Jewish high schools in Palestine, who until the Second World Warusually went abroad for higher education, but rather the local Arabs.However, what education did Palestine’s Arabs need? In 1925, theyear of the Hebrew University’s establishment, Palestine had forty-nine Arab elementary and high schools in towns (twenty-nine forboys and twenty for girls) and 265 rural schools (all elementary, of

which eleven were for girls). They were attended by 16,146 boysand 3,591 girls. Most pupils attended school for four or five years.Twenty years later, in 1945, the total number of Arab pupils hadrisen to 71,468, but only 232 studied in the eleventh and twelfthgrade classes and so constituted a potential pool for Arab highereducation.65 The Arab population needed elementary schools, not a university, and the British Mandate did develop Arab education

considerably. The argument that the establishment of the Hebrew University prevented the development of Arab education is simply ridiculous.

Why Zionism Is Not Colonialist

Indeed, Zionism required immigration and colonization—just asthe Spanish conquistadors in South America and the Pilgrims inNorth America did. For a while, Zionism was assisted by an imperi-alist power, Britain, though the reasons for British backing weremore complex than simply imperialism. Here the similarity ends,and the comparison with colonialism fails to explain adequately the

Jewish national revival.




prominent clans of the Palestinian land-owning elite. Palestinianand some post-Zionist Israeli scholars put the blame for the landsales and eviction of the Arab tenants on foreign landowners andconceal the role of indigenous elite families, who led the Palestiniannational movement, in such transactions.67

The complaint about the dispossession of tenants is only par-tially justified. This was the case in the early land deals of the latenineteenth century, e.g., the founding nuclei of Rehovot andHadera, where Arab tenants who lived on the land but did not ownit were removed through the exigency of the Ottoman police. AhadHa’am and some of his contemporaries commented on the bad feel-ings this practice generated among the Arabs. Therefore, from thesecond decade of the twentieth century, the JNF and other publiccompanies that purchased land tracts allocated sums for compensat-ing the evacuated tenants and helping them to resettle. No sucharrangements were in force in transactions among Arab buyers andsellers.

Upon statehood, circumstances changed. State land was requisi-tioned, and private lands were expropriated. But the state compen-sated private owners, either with money or alternative tracts, andindividual Arabs continued to sell off their holdings. Land trade hasalways been full of deceit and unsavory transactions on all sides, butthat cannot obfuscate the Palestinians’ fiasco in checking the sale of

land, despite the violent steps they took and the numerous assassina-tions of land-sellers and dealers throughout the twentieth century.

By contrast to the pattern in other countries of immigrationand colonialist settlement, the Jewish immigrants did not wish tointegrate into the existing, mainly Arab, economy, and also did nottry to take it over. With some exception for the colonists of the First

Aliyah, they laid foundations for a new and separate economy, with-out the relations of mastery and dependence that had characterizedcolonial societies.68 During the Mandate period and in the early years of statehood, Jewish immigrants competed with indigenous

Arabs and Arab immigrants from the adjacent countries in theurban and rural, public and private manual labor markets—as agri-

why zionism is not colonialist 29

through immigration, not by expulsion or annihilation in the man-ner accomplished by the whites vis-à-vis Native Americans or Abo-rigines.

Economic theories of colonialism and sociological theories of migration movements are equally inadequate when applied to theZionist experience. Palestine differed from typical countries of colo-nialist emigration primarily because it was an underdeveloped andpoor country. Usually, Europeans had immigrated to countries richin natural resources and poor in manpower in order to exploit their

wealth; by contrast, Palestine was too poor even to support itsindigenous population. At the end of the Ottoman period, nativesof Palestine—Jews and Arabs alike—emigrated to seek their futurein America and Australia.

Zionist ideology and the import of Jewish private and nationalcapital compensated for the lack of natural resources and acceleratedmodernization. These two factors—ideology (except for missionary zeal) and import of capital—were totally absent in other colonialmovements. Imperialist powers generally exploited colonies for thebenefit of the mother country and did not invest beyond what wasnecessary for that exploitation. By contrast, the flow of Jewish capi-tal to Palestine went one way only. Neither Britain nor the Jewishpeople derived any economic gains from the Zionist enterprise.

A central argument made by those who claim that Zionism was

a colonialist movement concerns the taking over of land and the dis-possession of Arab tenants. The argument barely stands up to criti-cal test. Until 1948 the Zionists did not conquer or expropriate,but—unparalleled among colonialist movements—bought land inPalestine. Kimmerling wrote that between 1910 and 1944 the priceof land in Palestine rose by a factor of 52.5. According to his data, in1910 the price of agricultural land in Palestine was twice its averageprice in the United States, while in 1944 the proportion was 23:1.Between 1936 and 1944 the land prices rose three times more thanthe cost of living index.66

Under these circumstances, the Palestinians could not resist thetemptation to sell land to Jews. The sellers represented all the




its attitude toward the Arabs, toward the Holocaust and the surviv-ing remnant, and toward Jews from Muslim countries. This selec-tion was not accidental: Apart from undermining Zionism as theexpression of authentic Jewish nationalism, the post-Zionists assaultthe justification for Zionism and Jewish statehood with regard tothree sets of relationships: between Israel and its surroundings; Israeland its people; and Israel and its purportedly discriminated-against

Jewish citizens.71

A New History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The first issue, the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has been themost charged and complex. The Arab-Israeli conflict is an ongoing encounter whose end is not yet visible. The persistence of the con-flict attracts attention to its current aspects and represses its histori-cal roots. The origins of the conflict appear to lose their relevance.Ignorance is widespread, memory is short, public opinion as well aspoliticians are impatient, and under these conditions, propaganda competes successfully with historiography.72

Like their Palestinian colleagues, post-Zionists describe the con-flict as taking place between one side that is all bad and another thatis all good. In their eyes, being a victim is tantamount to being righteous, making the suffering party “good” and “just,” regardlessof the reasons for his victimized situation. Triumph, by contrast, is

indiscriminately “bad” and wrong. Hence Zionism, the victoriousside, is nothing but colonialism of the worst kind, disguised as a national liberation movement and social revolution. By the end of the twentieth century, the post-Zionists maintain, the mask hasbeen removed. Israel has been exposed as an imperialist strongholdin the Middle East, and Israeli society, despite the seemingly social-ist labor Zionism that shaped it, appears as a sick capitalist society.

During the 1950s and 1960s, early Israeli historiography andfiction exalted the War of Independence as a miracle. Reminiscentof ancient models such as David and Goliath, it was portrayed asthe triumph of the few over the many, the weak successfully chal-lenging the strong, the righteous cause winning out against the

a new history of the arab-israeli conflict 31

cultural laborers, in the building industry, as stonecutters, roadbuilders, porters, and stevedores.69 Kibbush ha’avoda (the conquestof labor) had ideological, economic, social, and political motiva-tions, but such competition between white settlers and natives wasinconceivable in colonial countries.

A cultural appraisal, too, excludes Zionism from the colonialistparadigm. Contrary to the colonialist stereotype, Jews who immi-grated to the Land of Israel severed their ties to their countries of origin and their cultural past. Instead, they revived an ancient lan-guage and, on the basis of Hebrew, created a new canonic and pop-ular culture. The revival of Hebrew began in Eastern Europe andpreceded Zionism, but the Zionist Movement and the Yishuv

implemented it fully. In the Land of Israel, Hebrew became thenational language spoken by all—from the kindergarten to theacademy.70

Furthermore, all over the world colonialist emigrants eitherquested for a lucrative future or sought to escape a dreary present.

Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel shared these motives, buttheir primary, unique impulse, which distinguished them fromcolonialist movements, was to revive an ancient heritage. This aspi-ration was not typical of colonialist movements, but of nationalrevivals.

The above arguments should suffice to refute the identification

of Zionism with colonialism. This seemingly historical issue, how-ever, impinges significantly on the present. Long after most othernational liberation movements have achieved their goals and thrownoff colonialism, the Palestinians are still in the same place, if not

worse. This fact alone should have led Palestinian intellectuals andtheir Western and Israeli sympathizers to reexamine their traditionalparadigm. By cultivating the Zionist-colonialist prototype, Israelihistorians and social scientists continue to provide the Palestinians

with an excuse to avoid such reexamination, and to encourage themto proceed along a road that has apparently led nowhere.

With the colonialist paradigm as their point of departure, thepost-Zionists focus on three central issues in the history of Zionism:




the focus of their research from Israel’s accomplishments in 1948 tothe Palestinian ordeal. Their books portray the Palestinians as vic-tims of violence and oppression (Israeli), collusion (Israeli-Jordan-ian), and treacherous diplomacy (British and Arab). The appearanceof these books in the West, as well as some in Hebrew, generated anintensive public debate on their findings and interpretations andcontributed to the growing interest in Zionist history and historiog-raphy. The debate expanded beyond the academy into the publicdiscourse in Israel and abroad.76

The self-chosen designation as “new historians” implies anobjectivity and open-mindedness, as opposed to the allegedly parti-san “old historians.” Nonetheless, the new historians’ varying methodological approaches, standards of professional performance,and patterns of historical analysis have been subject to criticism noless than those of their predecessors and “old” contemporaries. 77

Nor is there cause to assume that the revisionists have been impar-tial and free of ideological bias more than any other historians. They have rendered an invaluable service to the Palestinian charge thatIsrael was conceived and born in sin, by sketching the Palestiniansof 1948 and after as innocent victims of conspiracies and atrocities.The Palestinians have indeed been victims—in 1948 and since—but the picture is complex and they have been far from “innocent.”First and foremost, they have been the victims of their own pugnac-

ity, intransigence, and lack of realism.Morris linked the emergence of the new historians and their

revision of the picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the change of generations and the opening of archives. Kimmerling argued thatthe more significant development was the growing openness of Israeli society.78 Initially, Pappé shared Morris’s approach and main-tained that the new history emanated from archival findings, and“not necessarily from awareness of the change in historians’ self per-ception and even not out of awareness of the passage of time.”79 A few years later, Pappé modified his stance, adopting a seemingly moralistic position that asserted, “It is not the historical materialsthat open for us interesting and troubling questions in regard to our

a new history of the arab-israeli conflict 33

unjust one. This naïve approach gradually changed with theprogress of academic research on the war and its outcomes.73

Early effects of the changing attitude in the Western academic world and media appeared in Israel in the mid-1980s. In 1984, TomSegev published his book 1949: The First Israelis , in which he criti-cized the prevailing interpretation of Israel’s history and attemptedto show that the growing polarization of Israeli society in the 1980shad been endemic to the Jewish state since its foundation.74

Segev continued this line in his later books, The Seventh Million,One Palestine Complete and, more recently, 1967 .75 Written with skilland much talent, these books do not propagate post-Zionist argu-ments openly. In a more sophisticated way, Segev seemingly focuseson empirical research, but he is highly selective in his choice of sources (especially in One Palestine Complete ), in his preferences(especially in The Seventh Million), and his transparency. In 1967 hebrings references that cover a broad variety of issues, but fails tomention which source refers to a particular issue, thus rendering a critical reading almost impossible. His last two books do not pre-tend to present comprehensive pictures, but rather are collages of life during the Mandate and in the year of the Six-Day War—andcollages are selective (and, hence, tendentious) by their very nature.

Segev uses a broad array of sources—official, semi-official, andprivate—to portray a complex vision of the Six-Day War as a turn-

ing point in Israeli history. His book merges political and military history with a grassroots portrait of the common people. Yet, headmits that even this broad collection of sources is partial and doesnot reveal the full picture, which must await a future opening of additional archives and sources. The book is highly critical, some-times annoyingly so, and not without errors and disputableemphases; but the bottom line is that 1967 is an interesting, chal-lenging work that falls somewhere between the traditional and therevisionist Israeli historiographies. Despite its length and plethora of details, it is nevertheless far from “definitive.”

In the late 1980s, Morris, Avi Shlaim (an Israeli-British histori-an of Iraqi Jewish origin, who teaches at Oxford), and Pappé shifted




of such evidence, he argues that “only the Egyptian army invadedthe Jewish State in 1948.” Thus, by a stroke of the pen (or key-board), he has changed the UN Partition Resolution and excludedfrom the Jewish state the Jordan Valley, the Bisan Valley, and theSharon, which were invaded and attacked by the Syrian and Iraqiarmies.84

Such events are insignificant trifles in Pappé’s eyes. He declaresopenly that historical research and writing have a political goal.Everything—truth, honesty, integrity, and methodology included—is subordinate to this end.85 His demand for legitimizing an ideo-logical approach to history covers over ignorance andmethodological negligence. Morris found in one of Pappé’s recentbooks dozens of elementary errors of fact and chronology thatshould shame a high school student.86

Dodging the need to explain the violent Palestinian oppositionto Zionism and the massacres of non-Zionist Jews in Hebron andSafed in 1929, Pappé completely ignores the pre-1948 phase of the

Arab-Jewish conflict. He argues that in 1948 the Palestinians andthe Arab League did not wage a war to frustrate the UN resolutionon partition and the establishment of a Jewish state, but that theIsraelis launched an “ethnic cleansing,” thus preceding the Balkan

wars of the 1990s, where the concept originated.87

The Holocaust and Jewish StatehoodThe chronological proximity between the Holocaust and the found-ing of Israel has tempted many to regard Jewish statehood as a directoutcome of the Holocaust, an epilogue to it, or a compensation thatthe world, through the United Nations, granted the Jews for theirsuffering, at the expense of the Palestinians. Palestinian sympathiz-ers in Israel have amplified this paradigm, implying that it is timefor the world to compensate the Palestinians for its error in Novem-ber 1947. First and foremost among them is, again, Pappé whoasserts that the Zionists used the Holocaust experience as a moral

weapon to obtain American support for gaining control of Palestineand expelling its Arab inhabitants.

the holocaust and jewish statehood 35

past, but a new moral consciousness does it.”80

Whatever the reasons for their emergence, the new historianshave never been a unified “school” transmitting a common message.They held varied stances and independent approaches and used var-ious methodologies to revise the accepted version of the conflict.Morris, an empiricist, has remained faithful to the documentary evi-dence, though his interpretations and conclusions may occasionally be disputed. He refuted both accounts of the birth of the refugeeproblem, the Israeli and the Arab. However, he refuted the Israeliversion very loudly and the Arab version in a whisper. His critics andadvocates both ignored what he wrote about the Palestinian narra-tive and quarreled over his critique of the Israeli narrative. Recently,Morris has been blamed by his former buddies for returning to “theold narrative” because he refused to join their propaganda campaignthat accused Israel of a deliberate “ethnic cleansing” in 1948.81

Shlaim uncovered the bond between the Jews and King Abdul-lah and the contacts between Israel and the Syrian dictator Husni al-Za’im. These stories had been disseminated earlier through thegrapevine, and Israel Ber (a military historian and advisor to theMinistry of Defense, who was arrested for spying for the USSR in1961) mentioned the alleged collusion of the Jewish Agency and

Abdullah in a book that he wrote in prison.82 Shlaim adopted thegist of Ber’s thesis and endeavored to give it documentary basis and

historical explanation.During the 1990s, Pappé presented himself as a relativist histo-

rian who claimed the right of the Palestinian narrative to be equally heard. At the turn of the millennium, however, he apparently had a revelation and turned into a positivist, discovering the existence of “objective and definitive truth.” This “objective” truth is the new Palestinian narrative that claims there was no war in Palestine in1948, only an ethnic cleansing, initiated and planned by the Jews.Pappé insists that everyone who does not accept this “ultimatetruth” is a “Nakba denier.” He holds that the events of 1948 “shouldbe reconstructed on the basis of its victims’ testimonies rather thanon that of their victimizers’ documents.”83 Apparently on the basis




arrive in Palestine—the only place in the world where another war was surely awaiting the immigrants. True, they were influenced,even indoctrinated, by a host of emissaries from Palestine—thou-sands of Jewish soldiers in the British army and later hundreds of civilian agents. This indoctrination, however, fell on receptive ears.

Zertal, Segev, and their comrades consider this instruction oneof the awful sins of the Zionist Movement in that it did not show empathy with the survivors’ suffering and cynically manipulatedthem to promote its political goals by exposing them to furtherordeals. In their view, the natural response should have been toempathize with the survivors, feel sorry for their torment, and letthem disperse across the world and try to rebuild their lives. Hadthe Zionist leadership taken this course, probably no Jewish state

would have been founded and the post-Zionist historians wouldhave been satisfied. David Ben-Gurion and his associates thoughtotherwise. They realized that this was the last chance to connect theplight of European Jewry with a Zionist solution to the Palestinequestion. Before the war, they had failed to persuade the Jewish andgeneral publics on both sides of the Atlantic, to say nothing of theirgovernments, that Palestine could solve the aggravating Jewishproblem, economically and politically. Their success in linking thetwo issues after the war derived primarily from the drastic reductionin the scope of the Jewish problem which made Palestine a feasible

solution. In the second place, it derived from the readiness of themajority of survivors to follow the Zionists’ lead.

One might cynically say that the Holocaust thus facilitated Jew-ish statehood, but this is not the post-Zionists’ argument. They claim that before the war a Jewish state was inconceivable. As a result of the Holocaust, the Americans and Russians changed theirattitude and backed its creation because they wanted to compensatethe Jewish people, and particularly the survivors, for their agony during the war. This theory has no grounds in historical evidenceand requires a highly distorted interpretation.

the holocaust and jewish statehood 37

The Shoah per se did not play a role in the founding of Israel,though it has increasingly replaced Israeli society’s pioneering ethosas the core of its collective identity. The notion of a nexus betweenthe Holocaust and Jewish statehood has spread to various circles inIsrael and abroad, among academics and laymen, far beyond Pappéand his ilk. “The link between the two events remains indissoluble,”

wrote Idith Zertal, meaning not a causal connection between them,but the role of the Shoah in shaping Israeli identity.88

In his book on the controversy among German historians in the1980s, Charles Maier, a Harvard professor of international history,asked, Who benefited from the Holocaust? He promptly replied:Israel, the Zionists, and Jews generally, since after the Second World

War, their identity depends on the Holocaust. He added that theHolocaust has helped establish the legitimacy of the Jewish state,even if it has not legitimized particular policies or borders.89 Maier’sview has advocates in the United States and Europe, as well as inIsrael, but it is no more than a slogan that testifies to a short memo-ry. The contingency of Jewish statehood had been on the agenda before World War II, and its legitimacy derived not from the Holo-caust but from earlier Jewish history.

Appealing as it may appear, a causal linkage between the Shoahand Jewish statehood is false. The Holocaust did not bring aboutthe founding of Israel. Moreover, it almost ended the prospects of

Jewish statehood, since the human reserve of the future Jewish stateperished in Europe during the war. The surviving remnant in theDP camps did play a central role during the three years from theend of the Second World War to Israel’s establishment by insisting on going to Palestine, but this was part of a concerted effort afterthe war by the Yishuv , American Jewry, and the survivors, partly as a reaction to the Holocaust, but not as its outcome.90

Unlike illegal immigration before the Second World War, which was part of a general mass flight of Jews from the Third Reich andhardly Zionist, the illegal immigration of survivors after the war wasthe epitome of Zionism. It was mainly motivated by the will to




different was the motivation behind it—the intent to wipe out anentire people based on a theory of race—and it is precisely thisincrement that post-Zionists in Israel and elsewhere deny by liken-ing the Holocaust to other atrocities, using the trendy slogans of comparative and interdisciplinary studies.93

As a basic component of post-World War II Jewish identity, theHolocaust has fed impassioned arguments among Israelis and Jewsoutside Israel as to whether its essence and lessons are universal oruniquely Jewish, humanist or nationalist. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the axiom that the Shoah was the ultimate

justification for the Zionist solution to the modern Jewish questioncan no longer be taken for granted. Zionism’s prewar ideologicalopponents, who seemingly vanished after the Holocaust, havereemerged under the current guise of post-Zionism.

Since the end of the Second World War, the Shoah has beenmobilized to various ends by Israeli leaders and politicians. As early as 1947, Ben-Gurion compared the mufti with Hitler. On the eveof the Six-Day War, Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abdul Nasser was theHitler of the day. Menachem Begin used to make analogies between

Yasir Arafat and Hitler. During the Gulf War, it was Saddam Hus-sein’s turn to be likened to Hitler, and now it appears that HassanNasrallah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have succeeded him. Onone extreme of the Israeli political spectrum, Shulamit Aloni com-

pares Israel’s rule of Judea and Samaria to the Nazi occupation inthe Second World War, while on the other end, equally extremeright-wingers compared the Disengagement from the Gaza Stripand later evacuations of settlers to the deportations of Jews to theEast during the Holocaust.

The opponents of Jewish nationalism in the West were the firstto denounce the “appropriation” of the Holocaust by the Zionists.Eric Hobsbawm accused Zionism, and particularly the Likud gov-ernments of Israel since 1977, of utilizing the Holocaust as a mythto grant Israel legitimacy, and of silencing and repressing studiesthat do not accept the Zionist view of the Shoah, such as RaulHilberg’s monumental work (by not translating his writings into

the alleged “zionist appropriation” 39

The Alleged “Zionist Appropriation”of the Holocaust

Two issues that have attracted post-Zionist historians are the Zion-ists’ alleged appropriation of the Holocaust and their claim of itsuniqueness. The Israeli philosopher Adi Ofir of Tel Aviv University,one of the leading post-Zionists and the founding editor of their

journal Teoria U’bikoret (Theory and Criticism), calls the demand forthe uniqueness of the Holocaust a “dangerous myth,” because it

establishes “an endless distance between one atrocity and all otherhorrors.” His examples of “other horrors” include the wars in Biafra,Cambodia, and Kurdistan. Ofir also claims that the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which he calls its mythologizing, is equal to its vul-garization.

Another Israeli philosopher, Ilan Gur-Zeev, of the University of Haifa’s School of Education, defined the demand for exclusivity “immoral.” In his unexplained view, it denies the genocides of otherpeoples—mainly the Palestinians.91 Portraying the Palestinians as“victims of genocide” is immensely cheapening—not only of theHolocaust, but of the term genocide and the peoples who have suf-fered genocide, such as those mentioned by Ofir.

These two philosophers ignore the bilateral nature of the warsto which they compare the Shoah—a unilateral campaign against

the Jews. Truly, when reduced to a personal level, all wars have oneshared element, the agony of individuals, but a view that ignores orblurs the contexts of the individual cases is not historical and hardly philosophical.

At the same time, the extreme opposite view that goes so far asto exclude the Holocaust from history is also inappropriate. TheHolocaust was part of history and not a meta- or ahistorical phe-nomenon. It took place on earth and not on another planet, andprecisely its historical context make it unique in comparison withother, apparently similar, events.

The Holocaust was genocide, but as Yehuda Bauer, one of theleading scholars of the Holocaust in the world, and others haveshown, it was much more than just mass killing.92 What made it




compensation to the days of insurance policies and blocked Swissbank accounts, and the trivialization of terms originating in theHolocaust, such as Judenrat or Auschwitz, in political polemics orpropagandist campaigns. Like the Israeli messianist right’s abuse of the Shoah in its campaign against the Disengagement, the radicalleft’s attempts to use it to promote the Palestinian cause have noconnection to the justified criticism of the Holocaust’s too-centralplace in Israeli public life.

From “Melting Pot” to Multicultural Society

Historical study of the third key issue in Israeli history—the absorp-tion and integration of the masses of immigrants who arrived in the1950s and shaped post-Yishuv Israeli society—began late. In the1960s and 1970s, sociologists of the Hebrew University were thefirst to study the absorption and integration of immigrants. They criticized various aspects of this process, but agreed upon the neces-sity of modernization or what was called, at the time, bringing theimmigrants into the “melting pot.” In recent years, post-Zionistsocial scientists and historians have reproached their predecessorsfor concealing alleged ulterior motives behind this absorption andignoring the immigrants’ cultural repression. They have gone so faras to suggest extending the colonialist paradigm described above toZionism’s attitude to Jews from Islamic countries.97

An original and peculiar view of the Zionist attitude to Jews of the Arab countries is offered by Tel Aviv sociologist Yehuda Shen-hav, one of the founders of Hakeshet Hamizrachi , a membershiporganization promoting the rights of “Oriental” Jews, and editor of Teoria U’bikoret . He describes the work of a team of Jewish engi-neers and craftsmen in Abadan, Iran, during the Second World Waras “Zionist colonialist settlement” that served British interests—i.e.,taking over Iranian oil—but also the national interests of the “Zion-ist project” through the establishment of contacts with Iraqi Jewry.98

Shenhav portrayed the team as symbolic of the alliance betweenZionism and Britain. He wrote about Abadan, but implied theentire Middle East, Zionism, and Israel’s role in the area:

from “melting pot” to multicultural society 41

Hebrew).94 It is true that, in the past Yad Vashem’s scientific com-mittee had reservations about translating Hilberg’s book, mainly because of the passive role he assigned to the Jews. However, Hobs-bawm’s identification of the committee, then led by Israel Gutmanand Yehuda Bauer (both prominent members of the left-wing Mapam Party), with the “right-wing government” demonstrates anawkward ignorance.

Criticizing the monopoly that Zionism allegedly usurped, thepost-Zionists have accused Israel of using the Holocaust cynically to

justify its attitude to the Palestinians, the “occupation,” the strong-arm tactics, and other evils it has allegedly caused. In Israel andabroad, the detractors introduced this linkage as early as the 1970s,beginning with Israeli scientist and philosopher Prof. YeshayahuLeibowitz’s catchphrase “Judeo-Nazis” and similar slogans. Theanalogies between Zionism and Nazism drawn by Leibowitz andothers were not original. As far back as 1942, disappointed Germanimmigrants in Palestine used terms like “Yishuvnazim,” “Nazionis-mus ” or the “spirit of Der Stürmer that has taken over the Yishuv .”Ha’aretz publicist Robert Weltsch resorted to similarly blunt lan-guage during the anti-British struggle of 1945-47.95

Jerusalem historian of Germany Moshe Zimmerman attackedthe Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) by calling their youth Hitlerjugend , and compared the Bible with Mein Kampf —

two new landmarks in analogizing Israel’s policies toward the Pales-tinians to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Zimmerman extendedthe analogy from the territories to Israel within the pre-1967 lines by likening his personal condition in 1995—a tenured professor at theHebrew University who received public appointments, appearedoften in the media, and embraced odd stances—to the situation of his father in Germany in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht .96

Disapproval of the Holocaust’s excessive role in Israeli publiclife has come from many circles of Israeli society, not necessarily only post-Zionist. Its targets have included the organized youthtrips to Poland, the shifting of emphasis from the victims to the sur-vivors, the materialist struggles from the days of reparations and




the 1950s mass immigration as a conspiracy of the Ashkenazi estab-lishment to exploit and repress the immigrants. Together with Kim-merling, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Pappé, they argue that theapproaches and findings of the mainstream scholars are affected by their being part of the “elites,” by their high place on the social lad-der, or by their being Ashkenazi males, and for all these reasons,they have adhered to the Zionist narrative.100 Of course, many of the critics belong to the same white, male, Ashkenazi “elites.”

Methodologically, sociologists are not committed to theresearch methods of historians, and are entitled to their own profes-sional views and conclusions. Although many of them have writtenon the past, their findings are not historical studies nor should theirallegations about the absorption of immigrants be taken as such.The few historical studies that have coped with these issues categor-ically refute all suggestion of a deliberate conspiracy against immi-grants, whether Holocaust survivors or Jews from Islamic lands.They do, indeed, describe many mistakes made at the time, albeitinnocently and under dire conditions, which the post-Zionists pur-posefully ignore.101

Several post-Zionist historians and social scientists have accusedZionist historians of haughty, patronizing, and “Orientalist” writing about the Jews from Muslim countries. Historian Gabriel Piter-berg—who left Ben-Gurion University for UCLA—applied Said’s

theory to how “Zionist discourse” related to the Oriental mentality,showing how this discourse influenced the exclusion and marginal-ization of Oriental Jews. He repeats the gist of Ram’s and Raz-Krakotzkin’s criticisms of Ben-Zion Dinur and Itzhak (Fritz) Baer,the founders of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University in 1935, in whom, apparently, Zionist historiography begins and ends, and Piterberg’s main contribution was accusing them of Orientalism.102

Henriette Dahan-Kalev, a political scientist at Ben-Gurion Uni-versity, attacked the Israeli melting-pot concept of the 1950s and1960s from a different angle—autobiographical, feminist, and Ori-ental. In a bitter paper articulating a profound feeling of discrimina-


The Abadan project took place in a hybrid territory, partly British, partly Zionist. It was like a Zionist bubble that movedin the colonial space under the protection of Great Britain, cutthe territorial, cultural and ethnic continuity in the area andreorganized it.... The Abadan project is an act of deterritorializa-tion that appropriates a continuity that was apparently unifiedand homogeneous, and redefines it.99

Anyone who observed the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, the twoGulf Wars, and what has taken place in Iraq since 2003 can only

wonder where Shenhav found (or made up) the homogeneity andunity that he ascribed to this region—torn and split among variousnational, tribal, ethnic, religious, and other conflicting identities—and how the Abadan project appropriated them.

In point of fact, the team arrived in Abadan in the service of the Allies’ war effort to build a new refinery and maintain it. The com-pany undertook a similar project in the Bahrain Islands, where there

were hardly any Jews. The members’ parleys with Iraqi and Iranian Jews were limited to the small neighboring communities of Abadanand Basra, and their role in establishing the links between the Yishuv

and Iraqi Jewry was secondary. The main effort to that end wasdone in Baghdad by the emissaries of the Jewish Agency and thePioneer movement, assisted by Jewish soldiers in the British Army serving in Iraq and by local Zionist activists. Contrary to Shenhav’s

assertion, the Abadan project did not play any significant part inpreparing the ground for what he calls “Jewish migration toFilastin.”

Sociologist Yagil Levy and political scientist Yoav Peled of Tel Aviv University have asserted that mainstream sociologists who wrote about “Israeli society” meant Jewish Israeli society, disregard-ing the Arabs. Sami Samocha, a sociologist from Haifa, added thatIsraeli democracy was not consensual but ethnic—for Jews only.

And Ben-Gurion University’s Oren Yiftachel, the geographeramong the post-Zionists, developed the concept of an “ethnocracy.”

Shlomo Svirski, a freelance sociologist who left the University of Haifa and established the Adva Institute for the Study of Social andEducational Gaps, and Shenhav have portrayed the absorption of




taming the wilderness, reviving the Hebrew language, and shaping the new Hebrew culture. Since the Arab rebellion of 1936-39,enlistment in the defense of the Yishuv was perceived as equal to thepioneering mission.106

Contrary to the impression that the post-Zionists have endeav-ored to create, the melting pot approach—intended to remove thedisabilities of the Diaspora and build the basis for a new, healthy society in the Land of Israel—was not invented to assimilate Orien-tal Jews or suppress their culture. Originally and primarily, its target

was the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe. The youngster from theshtetl who arrived in hachshara (training camp for pioneers) atKlosova or Gorochov in Poland voluntarily underwent a Spartanprocess of “reeducation” that overwhelmed even visitors from Pales-tine, such as Labor leader Berl Katzenelson.107

All immigrants during the Mandate period, as well as the Ori-ental Jews of the old Yishuv and immigrants who arrived just afterstatehood, struggled with the pioneering ethos that represented themelting pot and absorbed them. Most immigrants merged into it.Some remained alienated, and all influenced the image of the per-son of the Yishuv in the melting pot and distanced that typologicalfigure from the original and desired vision of the “new Jew.”108

German Jews who arrived during the 1930s found in the coun-try a core of veterans who expected them to merge and conform. To

a large extent, the immigrants from Eastern Europe fulfilled thisexpectation, as they did in the 1950s. The German-speaking immi-grants from Central Europe, however, disappointed those whoexpected them to accept Yishuv society, whose roots were in EasternEurope. They tried either to change it or to adhere to their Germanlanguage and culture.109

The model of the “new Jew” that guided the melting pot con-cept was apt for the Zionist social experiment of the 1920s. Even inthose years, most immigrants did not meet the declared stringentcriteria of the Zionist organization. The gap between the preferredand the given widened during the next decade. Against the back-ground of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent


tion, she characterized herself as a multiply opressed woman, a vic-tim of European, colonialist, Western, and Zionist discrimination,

who had struggled for her right to be recognized as “other.”103

Unrelated to the anti-Zionist propaganda of Shenhav and hisilk, the organized Yishuv ’s attitude toward Jews from the MiddleEast was indeed haughty and alienated. Many, particularly in theZionist Labor Movement, identified them with the “East” and rele-gated to them what they had known or imagined as Eastern or Ori-ental: the Sephardi old Yishuv in Jerusalem and the fallahin of thevillages near their kibbutz. This issue had been discussed long beforethe post-Zionists mobilized it to dismantle Israeli identity.104 Apartfrom the postmodern jargon and references to theories of Foucaultand others whose relevance is doubtful (such as the theory that the

Abadan project was “a laboratory for crossbreeding ethnic identi-ties”), Shenhav and his comrades’ innovation with regard to the atti-tude of the Zionist Labor Movement or the Yishuv to the Jews fromthe Arab countries is infinitesimal.

Contrary to the hegemonic image that post-Zionists ascribe toit, the melting pot was simply the social revolution that Zionismattempted to generate and partially succeeded in implementing.The image of the “new Jew” stood at the center of this revolution.This vision articulated romantic and anti-intellectual notions, suchas Herzl’s colleague Max Nordau’s aspiration to replace the scholar

of the yeshiva with the muscular Jew. It also conveyed elements of rebelliousness that were visible in Be’Ir Hahareiga (In the City of Slaughter), national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik’s protest againstthe cowardice, passivity, and compliance of the young men of Kishinev during the pogrom of 1903.105

The model of the new Jew emerged from a combination of negation of life in the Diaspora, particularly in the Russian Pale,socialist ideology, and vanguard elitism. These combined with a realistic appreciation for the hardship of life in the Land of Israel,

which was the lesson of the pioneers’ experiences during the Second Aliyah. The result was the ideal type of the pioneer: mobilized forthe sake of his people, the country, and society; working manually,




of historians and sociologists. Today, they all belong to the academ-ic community in Israel or abroad, with university positions andtenure. Their polemics have extended from research and writing toteaching and supervising. They produce students in their ownimage, and these students, in their turn, get university positions inIsrael or abroad. Numerically, they are still a minority, but they aremore committed to their views than some of their colleagues and sotheir voices sound much louder than their actual weight.

Excluding Morris and perhaps Segev, the influence of the new historians in Israel is limited. Pappé, for example, has been ignoredby most of his peers for several years. A few new historians havemoved to the UK or U.S., where their presence draws more atten-tion. The main reason for their prominence abroad is that as Israelis

who conform to the views of the local new left, they can use theiracademic credentials to criticize Israel. They are accepted as author-itative by their local comrades, and often also by naïve colleagues

who have little firsthand knowledge of the issues and are impressedby their striking presence in the media and in public debates. Inconferences and panels about the Arab-Israeli conflict, they areoften invited ostensibly to “represent” the Israeli side.

However, few colleagues who do not belong to their circle would rely on them or take part in their panels and conferences. A sympathetic observer like Shlomo Zand has remarked that the intel-

lectual originality and the fruits of the research of post-Zionist his-torians are poor. He praised his colleagues for skillfully storming themedia front, but at the same time criticized them for neglecting aca-demic work and for meager scholarly achievement.111

The new historians and their sociologist colleagues are only thetip of the iceberg. They should not be viewed in isolation from thegeneral post-Zionist trend that tries to undermine the Jewish stateand replace it with a “state of all its citizens.” So far, the impact of this trend has been limited mainly to former communists and theiroffspring, some of the younger generation of the once-Zionist left,and a few others of diverse background, including some second-generation Likud leaders. The vast majority of Israeli society—and

influence of the new historians 47

deterioration of the situation of European Jewry, circumstanceschanged and the pioneering nucleus had to absorb large masses:Between 1931 and 1936, the Yishuv ’s population more than dou-bled, and in the years 1948-52, once again it swelled by a similarmagnitude.

The two periods of mass growth and the years between them were also the era of the Arab rebellion, the Second World War, theanti-British struggle, the War of Independence, and the hardships of recovery from that war—days of austerity and rationing. During those years, the nucleus of the veteran Yishuv society successfully stood the test of absorbing the masses, despite the hardshipsencountered by veterans and immigrants alike, and in spite of themany mistakes that the absorbers made and the bitterness of theabsorbed. The post-Zionists’ criticism—based on the wisdom of hindsight and shifting the focus from the center to the margins—disregards this essence and focuses on lesser matters.

“Israeliness,” Kimmerling asserted a few years ago, is a vanish-ing invention.110 The melting pot concept may appear to have beena fiasco, now that the winning catchword is multiculturalism. Thepresent quandaries of Israeli society, however, shed very little lighton the past. The rise of a multicultural society is due, not to the fail-ure of absorption in the 1950s and 1960s, but to a variety of processes that have affected Israeli society over the past two or three

decades: decreasing external pressures, new waves of Russian andEthiopian immigration, an influx of foreign laborers, a growing minority consciousness, widening economic gaps, and, mainly, thechanging societal ethos from collectivist to individualistic. On thenegative side, multiculturalism and the politics of identity andmemory can also encourage the abandonment of social solidarity and pave the road to the domination of global capitalism, accompa-nied by individualism and hedonism—in Israel as everywhere else.

Influence of the New Historians

When the new historians and critical sociologists first came to thefore, most of them were outsiders attacking an alleged establishment




Notes

1. Baruch Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Crossfire:The Case of Israeli-Jewish Historiography,” History and Memory 7:1 (June1995), p. 41ff.

2. Uri Ram, “Zikaron Vezehut: Soziologia Shel Vikuach Hahistorionim

BeYisrael” (Memory and Identity: Sociology of the Historians’ Dispute in

Israel), Teoria U’bikoret (Theory and Criticism) 8 (Summer 1996), p. 14.3. ___, “From Nation-State to Nation—State,” in Ephraim Nimni, ed.,

The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics

(London and New York: Zed Books, 2003) pp. 21-22, 36.4. The American Council for Judaism was founded in the 1940s by dis-

senting Reform rabbis who believed that Judaism was strictly a matter of faith or confession and did not have a national element. For decades they fought strenuously against the idea of a Jewish state. The council still exists,but with a much diminished presence.

5. Avishai Ehrlich, “Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Post-Zionism,” in Nimni,ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism, p. 64.

6. Eyal Naveh and Esther Yogev, Historiot: Likrat Dialog ‘Im Ha’etmol

(Histories: Toward a Dialogue with Yesterday) (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2002), pp.118-20.

7. A.B. Yehoshua, Bizchut Hanormaliyut: Chamesh Masot Bishelot

Hazionut (In Favor of Normality: Five Essays on Issues of Zionism)

(Jerusalem: Schocken, 1980); Menachem Brinker, “Achrei Hazionut” (“AfterZionism”), Siman Kriah 19 (1986), pp. 21-29; Motti Golani, Milchamot Lo

Korot Me’atzman (Wars Do Not Just Happen) (Tel Aviv: Modan, 2000).

8. Mordechai Bar-On, “Post-Zionut Veanti-Zionut: Havchanot, Hagdarot,

Miyun Hasugiot Vekama Hachra’ot Ishiyot” (Post-Zionism and Anti-Zionism:Observations, Definitions, Classification, and a Few Personal Decisions), in

Pinchas Genosar and Avi Bareli, eds., Zionut: Pulmos Ben Zmanenu (Zion-ism: A Contemporary Polemic) (Sde Boker: 1996), pp. 475-508.

9. Benny Morris, “Revising Zionist History,” Tikkun 3:6, Nov.-Dec.1988.

10. Anita Shapira, “Politika Vezikaron Kolektivi” (Politics and Collective

Memory), in Yechi’am Weitz, ed., Bein Hazon Lerevizia (From Vision toRevision) (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1997), p. 370.

11. Uri Ram, “Zionut U’post-Zionut: Haheksher Hasoziologi Shel Vikuach

Hahistorionim” (Zionism and Post-Zionism: The Sociological Context of theHistorians’ Controversy), in Ram, ed., Hachevra Haisraelit: Heibetim Bikor-

notes 49

even of Israeli academics—have rejected post-Zionist ideology.However, post-Zionist practices are far more widespread than theirideological convictions. The debates persist, and against the back-ground of growing ignorance of Jewish history, can lead in many directions. Post-Zionism will either win new partisans or lose someof its current supporters, as has happened since the beginning of thenew decade, because of the intifada. Like all of Jewish history, thisphenomenon, too, reflects an interplay of domestic developmentsand outside influences.




Antishemiut (Nationalism, Zionism, Anti-Semitism) (Jerusalem: ZionistLibrary, 1992), pp. 25-26.

23. ___, “Al Am Ve’aretz Baleumiut Hayehudit Hamodernit” (On People-hood and Land in Modern Jewish Nationalism), in ibid., pp. 61-75.

24. ___, pp. 34-35; Shlomo Avineri, “Hazionut Vehamasoret Hadatit

Hayehudit: Hadialectica Shel Geula Vechilun” (Zionism and the Jewish Reli-gious Tradition: The Dialectics of Redemption and Secularization), in Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, eds., Zionut Vedat (Zionism

and Religion) ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1994), pp. 13-16.25. Ya’acov Shavit, “Leumiut, Historiografia Verevizia Historit” (National-

ism, Historiography, and Historical Revision), in Genosar and Bareli, eds., Zionut: Pulmos Ben Zmanenu, pp. 264-76.

26. Shmuel Dotan, Adumim: Hamiflaga Hacomunistit Beeretz Israel (Reds:

The Communist Party in Palestine) (Kfar Saba, 1991).27. Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1986); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York:Verso, 1991) (First ed., 1983). On the validity of these and other theories to

the case of Zionism, see Hedva Ben-Israel, “Teoriot Al Haleumiut U’midat

Chalutan ‘Al Hazionut’” (Theories of Nationalism and their Validity in theCase of Zionism), in Genosar and Bareli, eds., Zionut: Pulmos Ben Zmanenu,pp. 203-22.

28. Gideon Shim’oni, “Haleumiut Hayehudit Keleumiut Etnit” (Jewish

Nationalism as an Ethnic Nationalism), in Shim’oni, Jehuda Reinharz, and

Yosef Salmon, eds., Leumiut Yehudit U’politica Yehudit: Perspectivot Chadashot (Jewish Nationalism and Jewish Politics: New Perspectives) (Jerusalem:Merkaz Shazar, 1997), pp. 81-92, and especially, pp. 83-86.

29. Pappé, History of Modern Palestine .30. ___, “Hazionut Bemivchan Hateoriot Shel Haleumiut,” in Genosar and

Bareli, eds., Zionut: Pulmos Ben Zmanenu, pp. 223-63, especially p. 262, note41. See also Benny Morris’s review of Pappé’s History of Modern Palestine , inThe New Republic , March 22, 2004, where he enumerates dozens of similarcases of ignorance and negligence.

31. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobs-

bawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 13-14; Pappé, “Seder Yom Chadash,”

p. 128.

notes 51

tiyim (Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives) (Tel Aviv: B’rerot, 1993), pp.275-89.

12. Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Crossfire”; idem.“Haim Lihiot Chelek Min Haumah Hu Tnai Hechrechi Le’ivut Hahistoria?” (IsBeing a Part of the Nation a Necessary Condition for Distorting History?),Ha’aretz , Dec. 23, 1994.

13. ___, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London andNew York: Verso, 2003).

14. Benny Morris, “The Eel and History: A Reply to Shabtai Teveth,”Tikkun 5:1 (1990), pp.19-22 and 79-86.

15. Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Idit Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and

the Politics of Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

16. Derek J. Penslar, “Narratives of Nation Building: Major Themes inZionist Historiography,” in David Myers and David Ruderman, eds., The

Jewish Past Revisited (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 105.17. Ram, Zikaron Vezehut , p. 20.18. Yosef Dan, “Post-Modernism Neged Medinat Israel” (Postmodernism

against the State of Israel), Ha’aretz , June 24, 1994; Eliezer Schweid,“Hazionut Bitkufa Post-Zionit” (Zionism in a Post-Zionist Era), Davar , June24, 1994; idem, “Lemahuta Uleriq’ah shel Hapost-Zionut” (On the Back-ground and Essence of Post-Zionism), Gesher 131 (Summer 1995), pp. 18-26.

19. Ilan Pappé, “Seder Yom Chadash Lahistoria Hachadasha” (A New Agen-

da for the New History), Teoria U’bikoret 8 (Summer 1996), p. 124.

20. Pappé, “Seder Yom Chadash,” p. 135; idem, “Israeli Attitudes to theRefugee Question,” in Naseer Hasan Aruri, ed., Palestinian Refugees: The

Right of Return (London: Pluto, 2001), pp. 71-76; idem, “Demons of theNakba,” Al-Aharam Weekly , May 16, 2002; his articles on the Tantura Affairand his various interviews with radical left media around the world can be

found disseminated on the Web.21. Gabriel Piterberg, “Domestic Orientalism: The Representation of

‘Oriental’ Jews in Zionist/Israeli Historiography,” British Journal of Middle

Eastern Studies 23:2 (November 1996), pp. 129-32; Tom Segev, “Hahistori-

onim Hachadashim: Lama Hem Margizim Kol Kach? ” (The New Historians:

Why Are They So Annoying?), Ha’aretz , Sept. 16, 1994.22. Shmuel Almog, “Hamemad Hahistori Shel Haleumiut Hayehudit” (The

Historical Dimension of Jewish Nationalism), in idem, Leumiut, Zionut,






Zikaron Besefer: Reshita Shel Hahistoriografia Haisraelit Shel Milchemet Ha’atz-

maut 1948-1958 (Memory in a Book: The Beginning of the Israeli Histori-ography of the War of Independence) (Tel Aviv: MoD Publications, 2001).

74. Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986;Hebrew edition, 1984).

75. ___, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York:Hill & Wang, 1993); idem, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the

British Mandate (London: Little, Brown, 2000); idem, 1967: Israel, the War,

and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (New York: MetropolitanBooks, 2007).

76. Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist

Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1988), idem, The Politics of Partition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestin-

ian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); IlanPappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: Tauris,1992); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Pen-

guin, 2000). For a collection of press clippings of the debate in the years1993-96, see Dan Michman, ed., Post-Zionut Veshoah (Post-Zionism and theHolocaust) (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1997). See also Derek Penslar’s review of the new historians in his article, “Themes in Zionist His-toriography” in David Myers and David Ruderman, eds., The Jewish Past

Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven: Yale Universi-ty Press, 1998), pp. 111-17.

77. Shabtai Teveth, “The Palestinian Refugee Problem and Its Origin,” Middle Eastern Studies 26:2 (1990), pp. 214-49; and Efraim Karsh, Fabricat-

ing Israeli History (London: Frank Cass, 1997).78. Kimmerling, “Is Being Part of the Nation a Necessary Condition?”

79. Ilan Pappé, “Hahistoria Hachadasha Shel Milchemet 1948” (The New History of the War of 1948), Teoria U’bikoret 3 (Winter 1993), p. 99.

80. ___, “Seder Yom Chadash Lahistoria Hachadasha ,” p. 136.81. Avi Shlaim, “A Betrayal of History,” Guardian, February 22, 2002;

see item on Morris in Le Monde , May 30, 2002; Ilan Pappé, “Parashot Katz

VeTantura: Historia, Historiografia, Akademia Umishpat” (The Katz and Tan-tura Affairs: History, Historiography, Academy and Court) Teoria U’bikoret

20 (2002), p. 214; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).82. Ber, Bitchon Israel . See also Yoav Gelber, Israeli-Jordanian Dialogue,

notes 55

57. Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Crossfire,” p. 41.58. Ilan Pappé, “Hazionut Kecolonialism” (Zionism as Colonialism), in

Yechi’am Weitz, ed., Bein Hazon Lerevizia (From Vision to Revision)(Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1997), pp. 345-65.

59. Raphael Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl , Vol. I.(New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), see entry for June 12,1895, p. 88.

60. Ibid., p. 92.

61. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Nationalist Representation of theDiaspora: Zionist Historiography and Medieval Jewry,” Ph.D. dissertationsubmitted to the University of Tel Aviv, 1995, p. 305.

62. Lord Arthur Balfour to David Lloyd George, February 19, 1919,PRO, FO 371/4179.

63. Raz-Krakotzkin, Ph.D. dissertation, pp. 322-23.64. Ibid., pp. xii and 324-326.65. The data is from A.L. Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine

(London: Luzac and Company, 1956), pp. 45 and 49.66. Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory , p. 11.67. An undated list (probably from 1944 or 1945) of more than fifty

Palestinian notables of all clans who sold land to Jews, including the officesthe sellers held, and the location of the parcels sold, Central Zionist Archives, S 25/3472.

68. Anita Shapira, “Hazionut Vehakoach-Ethos U’metziut” (Zionism andForce-Ethos and Reality) in idem, Hahalichah ‘Al Kav Ha’ofek (Walking on

the Horizon Line) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988), p. 37.

69. ___, Hamaavak Hanichzav—Avoda Ivrit, 1929-1939 (The Unrequit-ed Struggle—Hebrew Labor) (Tel Aviv: 1977). For an opposing approach tothe idea of “occupying the labor and its significance,” see Baruch Kimmer-ling, Zionism and Economy (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing, 1983),pp. 47-56.

70. Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study

(New York: Hawthorne, 2001).71. Shapira, “Politica Vezikaron Colectivi,” pp. 367-91, and particularly

pp. 368-69; Zand, “Hapost-Zioni Kesochen Zikaron,” p. 218.72. See, for example, Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod, eds., Nakba:

Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford:Oneworld, 2006).

73. On the early historiography of the war, see Mordechai Bar On,




ning of the twentieth century. See also Yehuda Shenhav, “Hashod Hamush-

lam” (The Perfect Robbery), Ha’aretz magazine, April 10, 1998 (and Shlomo

Hillel’s response, “Hasiluf Hamushlam” (The Perfect Distortion), ibid., April29, 1998); Shenhav, “Yehudim Yotzei Artzot Arav Beisrael: Hazehut Hame-

futzelet Shel Mizrachim Bimchozot Hazikaron Haleumi” (Jews from ArabCountries in Israel: The Split Identity of Mizrachim in the Regions of National Memory), in Hanan Hever, Yehuda Shenhav, Lea Mutzafi, eds., Mizrachim Beisrael (Oriental Jews in Israel) (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute,

2002); Shenhav, “The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology, and the Property of thePalestinian Refugees of 1948,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies

XXX1 (1999), pp. 605-30.98. Yehuda Shenhav, Hayehudim Ha’arvim: Leumiut, Dat Veetniyut (The

Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003),

pp. 25-72.99. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

100. Moshe Lissak, “Soziologim ‘Bikortiyim’ Vesoziologim ‘Mimsadiyim’”

(Critical and Established Sociologists), p. 67; Baruch Kimmerling, “Sociolo-gy, Ideology, and Nation-Building: The Palestinians and Their Meaning inIsraeli Sociology,” American Sociological Review 57 (August 1992), pp. 1-10.

101. See Dvora Hacohen, Olim Be-se’arah: Ha-aliyah Ha-hamonit U-kli-

tatah Be-yisrael, 1948-1953 (Immigrants in a Storm: The Mass Immigrationand its Absorption in Israel, 1948-1953) (Jerusalem, 1994; Syracuse: Syra-cuse University Press, 2003); Zvi Zameret, Idan kur Ha-hitukh (The Era of the Melting Pot) (Sde Boker, 1993) and Al Gesher Tzar: Itzuv Ma’arekhet Ha-

hinukh Bi-yemei Ha-aliyah Ha-hamonit (On a Narrow Bridge: Shaping the

Education System during the Days of the Mass Immigration) (Sde Boker,1997); Hanna Yablonka, Ahim Zarim: Nitzolei Ha-sho’ah Be-yisrael, 1948-

1952 (Estranged Brothers: The Holocaust Survivors in Israel, 1948-1952)(Jerusalem, 1994).

102. Gabriel Piterberg, “Haumah U’mesapreiha: Historiografia Leumit Veori-

entalism” (The Nation and its Narrators: National Historiography and Ori-entalism), Teoria U’bikoret 6 (1995), pp. 81-103.

103. Henriette Dahan-Kalev, “You’re So Pretty—You Don’t Look Moroc-can,” in Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism, pp. 168-81 (especially, p.179).

104. Yoav Gelber, “Hitgabshut Hayishuv Hayehudi BeEretz Israel, 1936-

1947” (The Consolidation of the Jewish Yishuv in the Land of Israel), inMoshe Lissak, Anita Shapira, and Gabriel Cohen, eds., Toldot HaYishuv

Hayehudi BeEretz Israel Meaz Haaliyah Harishona, T’kufat Hamandat Habriti

notes 57

1948-1953: Cooperation, Conspiracy or Collusion? (Brighton: Sussex AcademicPress, 2004), pp. 1-3, 286-87.

83. Pappé, “Parashot Katz VeTantura,” pp. 204 and 214-15.84. ___, “Hahistoria Hachadasha Shel Milchemet 1948,” p. 111.85. ___, “Parashot Katz VeTantura,” pp. 199-202. See also Pappé’s repons-

es on the Tantura affair at http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~censor/katz-directory.86. Benny Morris, “Politics by Other Means,” The New Republic , March

21, 2004.

87. Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict , pp. 12-13, and hisinterview with Yona Hadari in Yediot Aharonot , August 27, 1993 (also inDan Michman, Post-Tzionut VeShoah (Post-Zionism and the Holocaust),(Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1997), pp. 45-46.

88. Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust , pp. 3-4.

89. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and Ger-

man National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988),pp. 164-66.

90. Basically, this is also Yehuda Bauer’s view in Rethinking the Holocaust

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 242-60, and particularly pp.258-60.

91. Adi Ofir, “Al Hidush Hashem” (On Renewing His Name), Politica 8(June-July 1986), pp. 2-5; see also Ilan Gur-Zeev, “The Morality of Acknowledging/Not-Acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide,” Journal of Moral Education 27:2 (1998), pp. 161-77; and idem, Filosofia,

Politica Vechinuch Beisrael (Philosophy, Politics and Education in Israel)

(Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 1999), pp. 79-98.

92. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust , pp. 39-67.93. Yair Oron, Habanaliyut Shel Haadishut (The Banality of Indifference)(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1995); Ruvik Rosenthal, “HaShoah Hi Rak Shelanu” (“TheHolocaust Is Exclusively Ours), Ha’aretz , Dec. 23, 1994.

94. Hobsbawm, On History , p. 10; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the

European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1961).95. Yoav Gelber, Moledet Chadasha (A New Homeland) (Jerusalem: Yad

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1990), pp. 565 and 583-97.96. See Zimmerman’s interview in Yediot Aharonot and its network of

newspapers, April 28, 1995, and Gideon Alon’s report in Ha’aretz , May 1,

1995.97. Piterberg, “Domestic Orientalism: The Representation of ‘Oriental’

Jews in Zionist/Israeli Historiography,” pp. 125-45. Piterberg focuses on theexpulsion of the Yemenite Jews from Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in the begin-




(History of the Jewish Yishuv in the Land of Israel since the First Aliyah, thePeriod of the British Mandate), Vol. II, (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1995),

pp. 309, 335-36, 343-47, 354-57, 364-67; Gelber, Toldot Hahitnadvut (His-tory of Volunteering), Vol. III, Nosei Hadegel: Shlichutam Shel Hamitnadvim

La’am Hayehudi (The Standard-Bearers: The Mission of the Volunteers tothe Jewish People) (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1983), pp. 20-72.

105. Anita Shapira, “Hazionut Vehakoach—Ethos Umetziut” (Zionism andPower—Ethos and Reality), in Hahalicha Al Kav Haofek (Tel Aviv: Am

Oved, 1988), pp. 28-31.106. Yoav Gelber, “The Shaping of the ‘New Jew’ in Eretz Israel,” in I.

Gutman, ed., Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holo-

caust (Proceedings of Yad Vashem’s Ninth International Historical Confer-ence), Jerusalem 1996, pp. 443-62.

107. See Anita Shapira, Berl , Vol. II, (Am Oved, Tel Aviv 1980), p. 536 ff.108. Moshe Lissak, “Aliyah, Klita U’binyan Chevra Be’Eretz Israel Bishnot

Haesrim” (1918-30) (Immigration, Absorption and the Building of Society in the 1920s), in Anita Shapira and Gabriel Cohen, Toldot Hayishuv, Man-

date, Vol. I, pp. 173-302.109. Gelber, “Hitgabshut Hayishuv Hayehudi Be’eretz Israel, 1936-1947,” in

ibid., Vol. II, pp. 303-463.110. Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001).111. Zand, “The Post-Zionist as ‘Unauthorized’ Agent of Memory,” p.

222.


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The New Post-Zionist Historians