The Idea of Israel Read Free Page B

ethnic divisions, ideological debates and a deep divide between secular and religious Jews permitted dissent to surface, after its having been silenced for many years.
    These developments are described in the fifth chapter, which presents the findings of the Israeli historians – known as the ‘new historians’ – who set out to challenge the Zionist narrative concerning 1948. They were inspired neither by new theories of historiography nor concepts of knowledge production. Rather, owingto the surrounding social and political upheaval, they read with fresh eyes the newly declassified documents in the archives, even as most of the historians who read the very same documents saw in them no evidence that would force a rewrite of the Zionist version of events.
    Global influences were of greater relevance to the developments of the 1990s. Chapter 6 exposes the more profound theoretical discussion that inspired those individuals, consisting mainly of sociologists, who expanded this research chronologically back to the early days of Zionism and forward into the 1950s and thematically to the predicament of Mizrachi Jews, to the Palestinians in Israel, to issues concerning gender, and to the manipulation of Holocaust memory within Israel. Like colleagues of theirs around the world at the end of the twentieth century, these sociologists were interested in the question of how power – be it defined as ideology, political position or identity – affects the production of purportedly scientific and objective knowledge. And, as was the case elsewhere in the world, they answered this query in new and exciting ways.
    I then focus more narrowly on this challenge by looking at the role played by the Holocaust in the construction and marketing of the idea of Israel. The book’s seventh chapter examines the challenge to the manipulation of the Holocaust memory in the Jewish state – a challenge that touched raw nerves in the society. It exposed not only a Jewish leadership reluctant to do its utmost to save Europe’s Jews from impeding genocide but also the alliances upheld by certain Zionist leaders with Nazism until the Nazis’ true plan for the extermination of the Jews was revealed. By describing the maltreatment of Holocaust survivors, the challengers demonstrated that in the name of their tragedy, the idea of Israel was sold as the ultimate answer to the catastrophe that befell the European Jews in the Second World War. In addition, they showed that much of what Israel had done since its creation, including its less savoury actions against the Palestinians, was justified by invoking the memory of the Holocaust. Some of the challengers regarded with horror the possibility that the manipulation of the memory had created a society that failed to understand the universal lesson suggested by the horrific event andhad instead turned itself into a nationalist, expansionist entity bent on intimidation of the region as a whole.
    The most significant challenge to the idea of Israel came from the Mizrachi scholars, many of whom were sociologists, as well as political activists. These Jews had come from Arab and Muslim countries during the 1950s and continually felt discriminated against by the European Jews. This perception of discrimination fuelled their journey into the past and played a role in their rise to power. In their eyes, the idea of Israel was European, Westernised and colonial; absent a transformation into European Jews themselves, it was an Israel in which they could play only a marginal role. Chapter 8 of this book is devoted to the scholarly challenge by and for Mizrachi Jews.
    Issues that are mentioned only briefly in the sixth chapter of this book – the scholarly debate on 1948, the Mizrachi Jews, Holocaust memory, among others – did not remain the sole concern of academics. The media became an important venue for such debates, forcing both sides to articulate their respective positions in a more accessible, and at