Israel in History

The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective

Derek Penslar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415400367
• eBook ISBN: 9781134146680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as:

• modern Jewish society, politics and culture
• historical consciousness in the twentieth century
• colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.

With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.

Part I

Writing Israeli history

1 Israel’s ‘‘new history’’

From innovation to revisionism

In an essay of 1988, the Israeli historian Benny Morris made a distinction between the terms ‘‘revisionism’’ and ‘‘new history,’’ rejecting the first and adopting the second for the historiography of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War which he and several other scholars were producing. Morris claimed that the term ‘‘Revisionist’’ only applied when there was a ‘‘solid, credible – if wrongheaded – body of historiography’’ about a particular subject which ‘‘latest fashion is bent on overthrowing.’’¹ Previous Israeli treatments of the 1948 War, Morris contended, were not serious scholarship, but rather tendentious and apologetic works of official history, written by career officers, bureaucrats, and public figures. Thus, Morris claimed, he was part of the first generation of bona fide historians of the 1948 War and, by extension, of the birth and establishment of the state of Israel.

Unlike most of the criticism that has been published about the ‘‘new historians,’’ it is not my primary intent here to impugn their claims about Israeli behavior during the 1948 War. Rather, I wish to call into question their historiographical understanding, self-image, and theoretical frameworks. The new historians do Israeli historiography a disservice by depicting their relationship with previous scholarship solely in terms of an opposition to an official military history which they are the first to challenge. Morris poses a neat dichotomy between ‘‘a generation of nationbuilders’’ who lived through 1948 as ‘‘committed adult participants’’ and a new generation, born around 1948 and raised in a ‘‘more open, doubting, and selfcritical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973, and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the old historians.’’² This statement flattens the entire period from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s into a single point, thus conjuring away an entire generation of scholars who founded the study of Zionism and the Yishuv as a serious academic discipline. Israeli historiography is admittedly a young creature, but it was not born with the emergence of the new history in the mid-1980s. Rather, as this chapter will explain, the ‘‘new history’’ represents a continuation of and response to the generation of Yishuv scholars who came of age during the early 1970s. The new history is part of an ongoing process of innovation – innovation which began before the advent of this new cohort and which goes on outside of it.

The debates about the new history which have saturated the Israeli press tend to be ‘‘Israelicentric,’’ underplaying the parallels between the Israeli literature and contemporary historiographical controversies in other lands. In the new history, innovation assumes shapes which, Morris’s protests aside, resemble various forms of historical revisionism currently being produced in Europe and the United States. This chapter seeks, therefore, to contextualize the new history both vertically, within the framework of Israeli historical selfunderstanding, and horizontally, within contemporary historical discourse in the western world.

This chapter speaks of two generations of Israeli historians, one crystallizing in the first half of the 1970s and the other in the second half of the 1980s. By ‘‘generation’’ I mean a cohort of scholars not only of more or less the same chronological age, but also sharing similar concerns and values. To be sure, many historians of Israel do not fit neatly into one of these generations. Moreover, scholars whom I would place within a particular generation may and do differ over myriad issues, personal as well as professional. My quest here is for neither inclusiveness nor uniformity, but rather for identification of select groups of individuals who, through personal dynamism and scholarly accomplishment, have most strongly influenced the production of historical writing about Israel over the past twenty-five years.

In 1976, the Israeli historian Israel Kolatt contributed a thoughtful programmatic essay to the first issue of Cathedra, a journal devoted to the Jews in Palestine from antiquity to the recent past. In the mid-1960s, the article contends, academic study of the Yishuv was made possible by two factors: the general growth of the Israeli universities and a sense that the generation of the founders of the state was passing and that the current crop of graduate students, who had experienced the foundation of the state as children or at most adolescents, would be able to write the Yishuv’s history unburdened by private memory. Kolatt added that a deepening of the gap between older and current scholarship on Zionism and the Yishuv had occurred after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, which had occasioned historical rumination about the long-term political and social causes of Israel’s military failures. Kolatt appeared to place Israeli historiography somewhere between two paradigms: ‘‘western,’’ which was adversarial and devoted to the shattering of myths, and ‘‘Third World,’’ which served the interests of nation-building.³

All of the factors mentioned by Kolatt, working together over the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, made possible the formation of the first generation of academic Yishuv historians. Kolatt himself was the founder of this cohort, completing his dissertation in 1964. Other scholars of this generation include Dan Giladi, Elkana Margalit, Yosef Gorny, and Anita Shapira.⁴ Equally significant are the historically oriented social scientists of this generation: Yonathan Shapiro, Dan Horowitz, and Moshe Lissak.⁵ Most often, the Yishuv historians wrote their dissertations under the direction of the older generation of historians of European Jewry. (Kolatt’s dissertation was supervised by Jacob Katz and Jacob Talmon; Shapira’s by Daniel Carpi, a historian of Italian Jewry.) The production of Zionist and Yishuv historiography was aided by institutions such as Tel Aviv University’s Weizmann Institute (founded in 1963), which provided financial support for scholars such as Gorni and Shapira. Along with publishing monographs, research institutes founded journals emphasizing Yishuv history, such as the Weizmann Institute’s Ha-Tsiyonut (1970) and the Ben Zvi Institute’s Cathedra (1976).⁶

More than anything else, the political history of the Zionist Labor movement was the object of the first generation’s historiographical gaze. The historians had, for the most part, been raised in the Labor movement and were steeped in its ideology.⁷ As a gesture of emancipation from their past and recognition of Labor’s decline during the 1970s, the historians tended to be sympathetic critics of Labor Zionism, its institutions, and its heroes. For example, although Carpi, the first editor of HaTsiyonut, saw the journal as operating within the framework of such classic Zionist principles as kibbutz galuyot (‘‘ingathering of the exiles’’) and shinui arakhim (‘‘transformation of values’’), he also recognized a growing tendency to question beliefs held sacred by the founding generation of the state.⁸ As the historian Israel Bartal has noted, today’s established Israeli historians considered themselves rebels during the 1970s, criticizing and rejecting what they thought were the Bolshevik aspects of the heritage of Mapai, Israel’s longhegemonic Labor–Zionist political party.⁹ For Yonathan Shapiro, the term ‘‘Bolshevik’’ must be taken literally, for he traced the influence of Bolshevik political thinking and organizational tactics on the Ahdut ha-’Avodah apparatchiks of the Third Aliyah. Equally unflattering was Anita Shapira’s presentation, in her first monograph The Futile Struggle, of the Labor parties’ capacity for political violence during the 1930s.

To be sure, the members of this generation conflicted with each other over major interpretive and methodological issues. (Josef Heller has nicely laid out these differences in a review essay.)¹⁰ But it is nonetheless possible to construct an ideal-type of the first-generation academic Israeli historian: a political historian and specialist in the Labor movement, of which he was an in-house critic. This ideal-type to some extent replicated itself among a younger cohort of scholars. One encounters this type among the likes of Dina Porat and Yehiam Weitz, who have written important books on the response of the Yishuv leadership to the Holocaust.¹¹ But the decline of the Labor movement through the 1970s did more than encourage introspective histories of the Zionist Left; it also stimulated, from the mid-1970s onward, the production of history not written from a Labor perspective. This includes work on the Orthodox Yishuv,¹² the Zionist Right,¹³ Yishuv economic history,¹⁴ and historical geography.¹⁵ The latter two put the kibbutz, Histadrut (General Federation of Labor), and other creations of the Labor movement into perspective by demonstrating the centrality of private capital, capitalist initiative, and British expenditures in the construction of the Yishuv in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine.

The historiography referred to above redressed some of the imbalance in the work produced by the first generation of Yishuv scholarship, but until the turn of the twentieth century the literature continued to suffer from certain limitations. The historiography remained overwhelmingly political, diplomatic and institutional. Although economic history made some inroads, social history did not, and the study of gender relationships in the Yishuv was relegated mostly to sociologists.¹⁶ Even within the sphere of political history, the amount of material on some crucial subjects, such as the Zionist Right, remained scandalously small. Although there were sparkling exceptions, Yishuv historiography was often positivist and conceptually narrow.¹⁷ The best work in political history often took the form of biography, a worthy medium to be sure, but which does nothing to nudge the historiography into a more analytical paradigm.

Yishuv historiography bears the signs of being produced and consumed entirely within the Israeli cultural sphere. Much of this literature, including work deserving of an international audience, remains untranslated; and even those works which are rendered into English are often composed in so internalistic a style that the reader needs to know Hebrew and have a good knowledge of the subject matter in order to follow the narrative. On this point there is a notable distinction between Yishuv historiography and that of Zionism, that is, Jewish nationalist ideology, the international Zionist movement and Zionist diplomacy. These subjects have tended to attract a more cosmopolitan and polyglottal pool of authors than Yishuv studies. So, for example, at the time when the first generation of Israeli academic historians was producing Hebrew volumes on one aspect of the Labor movement or the other, the political scientist David Vital published The Origins of Zionism (1975), a work from which uninformed English readers derive great benefit.¹⁸

Whereas scholarship in the history of Zionism is written by individuals from many lands, virtually every work of Yishuv historiography written since 1970 has been the work of a permanent resident of the state of Israel or an Israeli expatriate. When I ask Israeli scholars why this is so, they reply that non-Israelis rarely know Hebrew well enough to work with the sources. But this is not the case. In the United States, within the field of Jewish studies there are hundreds of academics who can read Hebrew sources far more esoteric than the minutes of the meetings of the Mapai Central Committee. Moreover, there is an intriguing juxtaposition between the scarcity of foreign historians studying the history of the formation of the state of Israel and the number of non-Israeli political scientists who write on Israeli foreign affairs and the Arab–Israeli conflict. The issue is not one of linguistic competence, but one of individual motivation. Since most non-Israeli scholars of Jewish history are themselves Jewish, the study of the Jewish past is, for them, a highly personal affair; they prefer to think about issues meaningful to a diaspora Jew (e.g. antisemitism, acculturation, Jewish identity) rather than the political quarrels of the Yishuv or its socio-economic construction. The Arab–Israeli conflict is another matter altogether. Avariety of motivations, including heartfelt idealism, an appreciation of the global significance of the conflict, and fears for Israel’s future should the conflict remain unresolved, propel foreign scholars into a field of inquiry which is certainly no less complex or demanding than the domestic history of the Yishuv.

The cottage-industry quality of Yishuv historiography, combined with its methodological peculiarities, makes for interesting parallels with the historiography of small countries in general. Historically overshadowed and often dominated by larger nations, small countries feature a defensive, introspective historiography which asserts national distinctiveness and integrity. Small-country historians remain engaged in the mental process of nation-building long after historians of Great Powers slide into post-nationalist skepticism. Physical isolation and nationalist ideology reinforce each other, discouraging methodological innovation. A recent survey of Czech historiography has noted that, although the literature can be imaginative and far-reaching, there continues a general preference for political and macrostructural history.¹⁹ Bulgarian historiography, according to the Balkan historian Maria Todorova, tends to be dull; the Bulgarian scholars are so busy chronicling history ‘‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it really happened)’’ that they fail to note ‘‘was es eigentlich bedeutet (what it really means).’’²⁰ Finally, the history of small countries, like that of Israel, is written primarily by and for people from those lands. I have heard Israeli scholars express doubts whether foreigners, Jewish and gentile alike, can really understand Israeli history; many Estonian and Finnish historians harbor similar suspicions about foreigners, even if of Baltic background, who probe the Baltic past.²¹

As a result of these factors, Yishuv and Israeli historiography tends to be a cottage industry. Given the small size of the country and the tight interconnections between academia, government, and the military, members of the Israeli educated elite are far more likely to know each other and share common experiences than would be the case in a more spacious environment. In Israel, as in other young countries, the writing of national history often takes a polemical form, but, as is the case in other small countries, it has the quality of family history as well. In family history every individual is sacred and no detail can be left out. Synthesis is thus not a strong suit of Israeli historiography. Comprehensive histories of the Yishuv tend to be popular or pedagogic rather than works of analytical scholarship.

I am not suggesting that Israeli historiography lies immobile in a Ruritanian stupor. Far from it; the ‘‘new historians,’’ a cohort of Israeli historians which began to form in the mid-1980s, have in many ways overcome the limitations of their predecessors. First, the new historians are likely to be outsiders within the Israeli academic establishment and they have a cosmopolitan orientation which differentiates them from the earlier generation. One of the most widely read new historians, Tom Segev, holds a doctorate in history but has made his career is a journalist.²² Morris has spent much of his life abroad (although he now holds a tenured position in Beersheba) and the historian Avi Shlaim has made his career at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.²³ Morris and Shlaim write fluent English; more important, they conceptualize their work and present it in a fashion that makes it immediately accessible to the English-reader. (Unlike most books by Yishuv historians, these authors’ publications do not assume prior knowledge of Israeli history.) One encounters a similar style as well in another new historian, Ilan Pappé, who was educated at Oxford and holds a tenured position at the University of Haifa.²⁴

To be sure, the books of Morris, Shlaim, and Pappé find western publishers and readers in good measure because of their subject matter, which is of greater general interest than, say, the internal quarrels within the Yishuv’s Labor parties during the 1940s. Their generally critical evaluation of Israeli behavior also strikes a sympathetic chord in the hearts of many readers abroad. But these reasons alone are not sufficient to account for the authors’ popularity. The military historian Uri Milstein has written highly innovative and critical analyses of Israeli actions during the 1948 War, but because of his work’s bulk, overwhelming detail, and internalistic presentation, Milstein remains virtually unknown outside the Hebrew-reading public, this despite the fact that much of his work has been translated into English.²⁵ Unlike Milstein, the new historians under analysis here enjoy a wide international audience, and they do so because they intentionally write for one.

So much for style, but what about substance? Unlike the earlier literature, the newer history actively seeks to come to grips with Israel’s most traumatic past experiences. It offers a painstaking (and often painful) examination of Jewish–Arab conflict in Palestine, the 1948 War, and the institutionalization of the Arab–Israeli conflict by 1956. Although each historian has his particular interpretation, there is a general agreement that Israeli behavior toward the Arabs was more aggressive and less justified, from either a strategic or moral perspective, than most Israelis have previously thought. The new historians are indeed correct in claiming that they are the first to engage in sustained archival study of this conflict. Prior Israeli scholarship on the subject had palpable biases and employed inadequate documentation, whereas the first generation of academic Yishuv historians avoided the subject.

Coming to terms with the traumatic events of the 1940s is something that many nations have attempted only in the past decade or so. Moreover, outsiders to the national academic establishment are frequently the first to produce critical studies of a country’s tarnished past. We have seen these developments in both France and Germany, whose wartime misdeeds were, until recently, chronicled by foreign, mostly North American, scholars or homegrown investigative journalists. To be sure, there are good reasons to resist comparisons between Israel’s behavior, no matter how unsavory, during the 1948 War and the responsibility of the Germans and those who collaborated with them in the commission of acts of unparalleled evil during World War II. But although we do not fully understand them, the mechanisms of collective memory and collective denial appear to operate in similar fashions in disparate environments and are of greater importance to us than the radically opposed historical realities of Israel in 1948 and Europe in World War II.

Moreover, Israel shares an important structural similarity with both France and Germany: all are, to use the terminology of the political scientist Pierre Birnbaum, ‘‘strong states,’’ with a powerful public sector and close connections between academia and government.²⁶ Until thirty or so years ago, academic historians in all three of these ‘‘strong states’’ saw themselves as engaged in a state-supporting enterprise. On the other hand, ‘‘weak states’’ like the United States, with its decentralized educational structure, have a stronger tradition of critical, anti-statist scholarship.

It was an American scholar, Robert Paxton, who in 1972 offered the first thorough critique of Vichy France as a manifestation of an indigenous Gallic fascism and not, as French ‘‘official memory’’ claimed, a Germanic implant. In 1981 Paxton and the Canadian historian Michael Marrus went far beyond French scholarship in their book Vichy and the Jews...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Writing Israeli history
• Part II: Continuity and rupture
• Part III: Zionism as a technology
• Part IV: From Jewish to Israeli culture
• Notes
• Select Bibliography