The Idea of Israel Read Free Page A

chart what was challenged: the Zionist narrative and discourse. The first chapter opens with the representation of the idea of Israel in mainstream Zionist scholarship as the ultimate and most successful project of modernity and enlightenment. Thus a challenge to such a representation does not merely contest a national narrative but also, and perhaps more significantly, a paradigmatic narrative of excellence and uniqueness. To examine this will help us appreciate the distance the challengers had to travel within their own society. Paradoxically, this representation was accompanied by a strong belief in the importance of objective, empirical, scientific research. In confronting the idea, therefore, one either could claim that the facts on the ground did not match the self-congratulatory representation, or could arrive at a better understanding of how the same facts can be manipulated so as to produce differing narratives such as those formulated by the Zionists on the one hand and the Palestinians on the other.
    Zionism in this book appears as a discourse. I use ‘discourse’ in the same way as did Edward Said when discussing the representation of the Orient in the West. In many ways, the Zionist discourse on the Palestinians is both Orientalist and colonialist – at least, this is how the challengers chose to depict it. 10 In order to set the stage for the challenge of the 1990s, I devote the second chapter of the book to the place of the Palestinians in the Zionist discourse. The challengers proposed a total reversal in the common depiction of the Palestinians and Palestine in Israeli Jewish discourse. They suggested transforming the Palestinians from villains into victims and, in some films, even into heroes. In this way, the Zionists became both victimisers and culprits. No wonder some of those who responded angrily to this challenge, whose ideas are covered later in the book, deemed such reversals as evidence of self-hate and mental derangement.
    The initial two chapters’ general description of the Zionist narrative is followed by a focused analysis of mainstream Zionism’srepresentation of the year 1948, the genesis of the state, in both scholarly and cinematic form. I focus on this year for two reasons. First, the history – and even more so the historiography – of 1948 became a core issue in the post-Zionist challenge. Second, 1948 is the fulcrum for all the debates described in this book: the year represents either the culmination of preceding historical processes or the explanation for everything that happened subsequently. The discussion of what took place in 1948 feeds the historiographical debate about the essence of the Zionist project up to 1948, as well as informing the conversation about the desired solution for the Israel/Palestine question.
    The fourth chapter is a tribute to Israel’s early Jewish critics of Zionism, who both directly and indirectly influenced the post-Zionist challenge in the 1990s. Although for the most part they were isolated and marginalised in their society, in hindsight one can more fully appreciate their impact on the 1990s, when the challenge matured into a wide-ranging intellectual and cultural phenomenon. The post-Zionist challenge of that decade was the continuation of the brave work and action of certain admirable individuals, some of whom were academics and others journalists of a sort, who in light of their own universalist, humanist approach to life strove single-handedly to critique the truisms of Zionism.
    Those early voices were one of three factors that contributed to the emergence of the debate. The second was, as mentioned, the new global, and in particular Western, ideas about power and knowledge. Third, and perhaps most important, were the dramatic socio-economic and political developments on the ground after 1967 and in particular after 1973. A relative calm on Israel’s borders exposed the fault lines within the society. Social and economic disparities,