Politics and Education in Israel

Comparisons with the United States

Shlomo Swirski, Mark B. Ginsburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780815316169
• eBook ISBN: 9781135582418
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Politics and Education in Israel focuses on the meeting of European Zionists, Non-Zionist Middle Eastern Jews, and Palestinian Arabs in the Israeli school system, the introduction of ability groupings into Israeli schools, the privatization of education and the expansion of elitist schools.

CHAPTER 1

The United States and Israel: Nations of Immigrants?

American readers might expect Israel to have an excellent school system and a high proportion of students who excel scholastically, due to the fact that in the United States, Jews are known for their educational achievements and stand out amongst the various groups of immigrants who arrived in the country after 1880 (Tobin, 1989; Lieberson, 1980).

This is not the case. While elementary education is universal, and the vast majority of Israeli youth complete high school, for most of them— more than 60 percent in 1998—college is not an option because they fail to achieve the matriculation diploma that is a prerequisite for higher education. In fact, though Israel is the only state where Jews are sovereign, their scholastic achievement in Israel is, on the average, lower than that of Jews in the United States, where they are a non-sovereign minority.

Moreover, there is a high degree of inequality amongst the major component groups of Israeli society. The group whose achievements most closely resemble those of Jews in the United States and in most major Jewish communities around the world is the Ashkenazi Jews— defined by the census as Jews whose origins are in Europe or America. Historically, Ashkenazi Jews are those who resided in Europe, mainly Eastern Europe, until the 1880s. Their collective appellation comes from Ashkenaz—the medieval Hebrew term for Germany, where European Jews were concentrated prior to their migration to Poland. Two other major collective components of Israeli society are characterized by lower scholastic achievement: Mizrahi Jews and Israeli Palestinians. Mizrahim are defined by the census as Jews whose origins are in Asia or Africa, historically referring to Jews who lived in Arab countries prior to 1948; presently, they comprise about half of the Jewish population of Israel. Israeli Palestinians encompass those Palestinians who remained in Israel after the war of 1948, which resulted in the flight and expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people; Palestinians comprise about 18 percent of the population of Israel.

Inequalities have proved to be persistent. Though the educational achievements of all three groups have improved in the 50 years since the establishment of the state of Israel when they first came under the same political-territorial roof, their relative positioning has not changed significantly. Moreover, the basic relational structure that emerged in the early 1950s between European Jews, Arab Jews, and Palestinians seems to have withstood the entry of new groups, which have moved into differential positions according to established national, ethnic, and class codes.

In terms of educational achievement, there is a major parallel between Israel and the United States, where, internal differences notwithstanding, Europeans who immigrated after 1880 caught up to veteran white Americans, by-passing African Americans, who had been in the country longer (Lieberson, 1980). In fact, this parallel can serve as an introduction to a wider complex of parallel problems. Both the United States and Israel were established, and ruled, by Europeans outside of Europe. Both incorporated, and continue to incorporate, large new groups of people from Europe and from other continents and cultures; and both have incorporated the newcomers under differential terms of inclusion and citizenship.

Mainstream sociologists have used the conception of “immigration” to refer to this common characteristic of Israel and the United States. S.N.Eisenstadt, the best-known and most influential Israeli sociologist, found two major commonalities between the two societies. First, both were established by colonizing movements that aimed to establish a new society—in the Israeli case, the Zionist movement, and in the American case, the Puritan movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Eisenstadt, 1967:5). Second, both are immigrant communities that were formed and reformed by successive waves of immigrants (ibid). The Zionist community in Palestine was, in Eisenstadt’s words, “a community created by immigrants who arrived in waves at comparatively short intervals. Its institutional structure was in a continuous process of formation and development. Throughout, the country was faced with the problems common to all immigrant countries” (ibid: 47).

United States sociologist S.M.Lipset shares this view. He begins an article comparing the educational systems and ideologies of the two countries with the following statement: “Both the United States and Israel are nations of immigrants attracted by the dream of a better life” (Lipset, 1974:56). He goes on to state that although they are different in many ways, both nations have a number of things in common; the first is that their immigrants are of a multi-national origin. The second is that each is characterized by “an emphasis in formal values on egalitarian beliefs” (ibid).

In addition to sharing the basic conception of “nations of immigrants,” Eisenstadt and Lipset also concur regarding the existence of a problem area: namely, the fact that some groups of immigrants have not done as well as others. Lipset points out that although the immigrants to the United States are of multi-national origins, the European groups are dominant (ibid). Eisenstadt makes a similar statement, pointing out that although Israel was faced with the problems common to all immigrant countries, one problem, that of the Jews from Arab lands, was specific to it; it was a problem that Israel “did not always fully succeed in solving” (Eisenstadt, 1967:47).

The juxtaposition of Lipset’s and Eisenstadt’s presentations, written within less than a decade of one another, places the questions that will guide the analysis in this book in sharp relief. In the passage quoted above, Eisenstadt did not go one step further and ask whether the “problem” of Mizrahi Jews is truly specific to Israel, or whether it is, in fact, a phenomenon found in other “immigrant societies” as well. Lipset did not deal with the obvious question that arises out of his own presentation: How does the emphasis on formal values of equality fit with the fact that European groups are dominant in America?

The nation of immigrants paradigm reigned supreme in both the United States and Israel for decades; it is arguably still dominant in both countries, even though it no longer enjoys exclusivity (for the United States, see the analysis of multiculturalism in Olneck, 1990, 1993). In Omi and Winant’s account, the paradigm gained theoretical dominance in the United States following the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944. Myrdal was influenced by the views of his American advisors, among them E.Franklin Frazier and Arnold Rose, who thought that the solution to the racial problem would follow the European immigrant model of assimilation. They assigned to blacks and other racial minority groups the roles that earlier generations of European immigrants had played in the great waves of the Atlantic migration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Omi and Winant, 1994:20). In Israel, the assimilation paradigm gained theoretical dominance with the publication in 1948 of Eisenstadt’s The Absorption of Immigrants, which set the direction for most Israeli studies of “immigrant absorption” up to the late 1970s (Ram, 1995a: ch. 3). In that work, Eisenstadt constructed the mode of absorption of the Eastern European Zionist Jews as the ideal type to be emulated by later and different Jewish immigrants; those who did not fit the model were theorized as deviant cases requiring variations in the mode of adaptation, but not a change in the basic model. Palestinians who became citizens of Israel were outside of the model.

The roots of the immigrant assimilation paradigm go further back in time: in the United States, the notion of the melting pot—namely, the idea that the contributions of many nationalities would result in the making of a “new American”—goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century (Oakes, 1985:26). In pre-1948 Israel, a rich folklore developed around the contributions of each of the consecutive waves of Zionist migrants from Europe, appropriately numbered from first to fifth, to the construction of the Zionist social, economic, and political edifice. Assimilation, as evinced most clearly in the expected transmutation of young arrivals into sabras— the appellation given to native-born children of Zionists—was assumed to be the universal end result.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of the “nation of immigrants” met political and theoretical challenges, first in the United States, and soon after in Israel. In the United States, racial minorities failed to play the roles assigned to them by the paradigm: structural barriers continued to render the immigrant analogy inappropriate, and the trajectory of incorporation did not develop according to the paradigm (Omi and Winant, 1994:20). The nationalist black movements of the 1960s challenged the assimilationist presuppositions of the Americanization paradigm. In Israel, Mizrahi Jews discovered that the Zionist promise did not apply to all Jews alike. The sabra was preferably blond, blue-eyed, and free of the diasporic “Jewish” inferiority complexes, such as over-intellectuality and lack of physical valor; and Israeli-born Mizrahim, dark-skinned and darkeyed, found it difficult to metamorphosize (Shohat, 1989:41–56). When the young Mizrahi protestors, who adopted the name Black Panthers after the US black movement, received an audience with Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969–1974), she was quick to dismiss them as “not nice” like the sabras. Still, they were an acknowledged part of the Zionist problematic—something that could not be said about Israeli Palestinians, who, as Seymour Martin Lipset has noted, did not at the time even merit a column of their own in statistical representations of social conditions in Israel (Lipset, 1974:65).

In both countries, political challenges to the nation of immigrants paradigm went hand in hand with theoretical ones. In Israel, the “absorption of immigrants” model was submitted to theoretical critique from various perspectives, such as structural pluralism (Smooha, 1978), class analysis (Bernstein, 1978), and internal colonialism and dependency theory (Swirski and Katzir, 1978). In the United States, the critique has similarly relied on class analysis—whether in Michael Reich’s (1981) segmentation theory or Edna Bonacich’s (1972) split labor market theory, and on various colonial models, like Blauner’s (1972) internal colonialism analysis (Omi and Winant, 1994: chs. 2, 3).

The critiques have pointed out that not all the immigrants were equal; moreover, and more importantly, many were not immigrants at all, having been incorporated involuntarily and under conditions involving violence, decimation of communal structures, and other adverse circumstances. As the circumstances of entry were different, so were the patterns of inclusion and the possibilities of assimilation. Native Americans’ formative experience in the process of construction of the American nation, that is, of the European overtaking of the land, has been one of eviction and extermination. Inclusion of the survivors was formally restricted to reservations. African Americans were brought to America by force, to serve as slaves. Though they had been an organic part of the construction of both “America” and “Americanism,” for a full century after the official end of slavery they had to struggle to attain the very status of citizenship. Mexican Americans first entered “America” by way of military conquest of Mexican territories by US armies.

Israel, too, has groups that hardly fit the category of immigrants. In fact, in Israel those groups are proportionately larger, vis-à-vis the “mainstream,” than the non-immigrant groups in the United States. Those Israelis whom most readers in the United States are familiar with—David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Benjamin Netanyahu—are all European Jews by birth or descent, and all have been actively identified with the Zionist movement. As we shall see in the following chapters, the European Zionists are the backbone of the Israeli national narrative, and they constitute the leading and commanding elite of the Israeli polity, economy, and culture.

One major group that is outside this mainstream is the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They are part of the Palestinian nation that fought Zionists for control of the land. After the war of 1948, which the Palestinians lost, most of them either fled or were expelled. Only a minority stayed on in the territory that had come under the jurisdiction of the state of Israel. That minority—today, about 18 percent of the Israeli population— did not become Israeli by immigration or choice, but rather by conquest. Though they received citizenship and voting rights, their inclusion was restricted and partial: for two decades, they were confined to areas under military control, and most of their lands were confiscated. Their access to various state organs, such as the armed forces, was and still is limited. Assimilation was hardly an option—for either side. The Palestinians are still clear outsiders to the Israeli national narrative, even though they have been an organic, even if conflictive and contestational, part of the construction of Israel and of Israeliness.

The other major group that has a problematic relationship with the Israeli “mainstream” is the Jews who up until 1948 lived in Arab lands. Unlike the Eastern European Jews who embraced Zionism, these Jews had embarked on a journey that did not lead to nationalist Jewish sovereignty. They were brought to Israel in mass evacuation efforts organized by the new state of Israel, after local conditions for intercommunal coexistence in the various Arab lands had deteriorated, in the wake of the 1948 confrontation between Palestinian and Zionist nationalists, and the military intervention on the part of the Arab states. They arrived not as immigrants but as suddenly destitute refugees totally dependent on the absorbing state. They encountered a veteran Jewish population heavily prejudiced against them; in fact, until the extermination of European Jewry in the Holocaust, Zionist recruiters had not even targeted them for immigration to Palestine. For these Jews, assimilation was an option—but it carried a heavy price: de-Arabization, or, in the terms of the Eisenstadtian model, desocialization and resocialization, the erasure of their “deviant” cultural features, and the adoption of the norms of the Eastern European Zionist Jews.

THE NATION OF ALL OR THE NATION OF SOME

We can now go back to examine critically the concept of a nation of immigrants. The idea, it turns out, is woven around particular waves of newcomers, not around all of them. It focuses attention on those waves that have shaped, or reshaped, the hegemonic construct of the nation. In the case of Israel, the mainstream periodization of the national narrative is built around the Zionist waves of immigration, called aliyot—the plural for aliyah, the term for going up to the podium to read from the Torah. The term evokes a biblical sense of the act of return to the ancient land of Israel. The first aliyah, which is considered the first block in the edifice that in 1948 would become Israel, and is thus the Zionist equivalent of the Mayflower, arrived in 1882, driven by the Zionist dream of reestablishing a sovereign Jewish state. That same year, a group of Jews of similar size arrived from Yemen, driven by non-nationalist dreams of return to the Holy Land. Those Jews are not counted as part of the first aliyah, nor is their story included in the “Israeli” narrative taught in schools. The mainstream presentation of the other four aliyot that arrived up to 1948 follows the same pattern: it focuses either on the Jews who migrated in the context of Zionism, or those who arrived from Europe as a consequence of European anti-Semitism—which served as the founding rationale for political Zionism. The official narrative marginalizes the fifty thousand Jews who arrived from Muslim countries during the period of the British mandate.

The five pre-1948 aliyot are numbered. The enumeration serves to place the various contributors in sequential order, but it also establishes a national pedigree that honors the main participants in the act of state foundation. The next wave of immigration, which was actually the largest of all, never entitled its participants to a share of the pedigree. It arrived after the declaration of independence, and it consisted of survivors of the European Holocaust and of Jews from the Arab lands. Instead of being labelled “the sixth aliyah” it is termed “the mass aliyah.” Ostensibly, “mass” refers to the sheer size of the wave; but it also serves to create a qualitative contrast between the founding aliyot, which are characterized by recognizable individuals whose heroic deeds shaped the epic of the historical reemergence of the nation, and the mass of undistinguished, deindividualized faces of the 1950s, whose main contribution lay not in epic acts but rather in their sheer numbers.

In the case of the United States, the concept of nation of immigrants is tied to the Atlantic migration, those waves of European immigrants who arrived in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. In the United States, the time that elapsed between the first, pioneering pilgrim migrations and the “mass migration” was not decades but centuries. Despite the longer time span, indicative of the fact that by the time the mass migration took place, the national narrative had already been constructed, it can nevertheless be argued that it is the great Atlantic migration, and not only the previous, mostly Anglo-Saxon migrations, that underlies the concept of nation of immigrants. This is due, in my opinion, to the fact that the Atlantic migration was not a mere quantitative addition to the American national narrative, but rather the organic component of a fundamental historical transformation; namely, the transformation of the United States into a European-style industrial society. In the wake of the abolition of slavery, the new, industrial direction, which both lured masses of European immigrants and was further fueled by their arrival, presented not only an alternative to the colonial plantation economy—it also meant an alternative to a racially mixed society, like that of Brazil, which would have developed if there had not been a massive infusion of Europeans into America. The European immigrants served as signifiers of the concept of “nation of immigrants” because they played a key role in the transformation of America into a world industrial, military, and technological power, as well as in the postponement—for a full century—of the confrontation of American society with the political, social, and cultural consequences of abolition. At the same time, it is clear that the nation of immigrants idea is woven from the specific experience of the European immigrants— to the exclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. The sheer multiplicity of European ethnic groups of immigrants serves to draw attention away from the fact that the melting pot was not a truly universal potpourri.

NATION, CLASS, AND STATE SCHOOLING

Once we problematize the concept of nation of immigrants, it becomes apparent that the basic political question dominating the encounters between the various groups is that of exclusion and inclusion; or, to be more exact, the terms of inclusion. This is true for both Israel and the United States. In both countries, the question of “who gets what,” more typical to societies with relatively stable demographics in periods of politicaleconomic transformation, is secondary to the question of “who is in, who is out.” Questions of nation and race, or questions of race disguised as questions of nation, have priority over questions of class.

Though the United States and Israel are routinely described as having very different ideological heritages—the United States is a country of private enterprise, Israel is an heir to socialist and collectivistic traditions—in both, given their common history of shifting demographics, the major lines of social and political negotiation have been those of inclusion in, or exclusion from, the European “core.” One major arena for such negotiations has been the state education system. As we will see in this book, the education systems of both countries are comparable due to the way they were shaped by policies of exclusion, inclusion, or differential inclusion of various groups of “immigrants.”

In contrast, the shaping of the classical European state education systems was influenced more by the politics of class. Andy Green has located the origins of universal, state-controlled and bureaucratically administered national education systems in the period of absolutism in Europe. Secular and national systems of formal schooling were established in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by absolutist states in search of expert administration based on technical knowledge (Green, 1990:111–114). In Prussia, education developed under rigid central control and with a hierarchical organizational structure, including a clear distinction between an open three-year volksschule and a more restricted, elitist post-elementary system. The latter was clearly divided into gymnasia based on classical and scientific studies, on the one hand, and technical institutes, designed to fill the needs of industry, on the other (ibid: 120–125). The Prussian state education system was based on existing class divisions, and it designated specific schools for specific classes, with the aim of fulfilling particular needs as defined by the state elite. German secondary education was highly segmented and hierarchical (ibid: 128). In France, the egalitarian plans made during the revolution notwithstanding, education was, as in Germany, highly centralized, state-initiated and state-controlled, and extremely hierarchical; as in Germany, secondary education was reserved for the bourgeoisie and was segmented into specific fields of professional and industrial training (ibid: 146). Education, writes Andy Green, “played a major role in the securing of bourgeois hegemony in France both in the way in which it constructed classes occupationally and in the mentality which it nurtured in each” (ibid: 161).

In other words, in both Germany and France, state schooling was openly differentiated along class lines, established and directed as it was by absolutist states in societies that were relatively ethnically and racially homogeneous and in which there was a legitimated differentiation by class. In the United States and Israel, however, state schooling did not begin as openly differentiated along class lines: in both countries, state schools sprang up contemporaneously with mass industrialization and mass immigration, at a time when new lines of social hierarchy were forming. Educational differentiation crept in once the lines became clear. As the original structuring of the school system had been universal, differentiation took the form not of different schools for different classes, but rather of different tracks for different groups defined by ethnicity, race, and class. Tracking, while it determines, of course, “who gets what,” is actually the outcome of the question of “who is in, who is out.” Though the operational results of both types of educational differentiation may be similar, the politics behind them are quite different. The politics of “who gets what” are anchored in the shared assumption of the legitimacy of the parties’ participation in one and the same collective project; in social democratic polities, there is in addition a shared assumption of the legitimacy of the capitalistic division of labor, out of which grows a recognition of the legitimacy of a basic set of measures of social protection. The Western European welfare state is a possible outcome of such...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Soup, Salad, or Cake: A Metaphor for Education/Politics in Multicultural Societies Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: The United States and Israel: Nations of Immigrants?
• CHAPTER 2: Three Communities on the Periphery of European Capitalism
• CHAPTER 3: The Encounter of 1948 and the Israeli State
• CHAPTER 4: Israelization: The Schools and the Israeli Defense Forces
• CHAPTER 5: Economic Development and Class Formation
• CHAPTER 6: The Labor Market and the Rise of a Three-Tracked Welfare State
• CHAPTER 7: From Separate Schools to Hierarchical Tracks: The Israeli School System, 1948–1968
• CHAPTER 8: Israel Becomes a Regional Military-Industrial Power
• CHAPTER 9: The Rise of an Educational New Right
• CHAPTER 10: Towards a Higher Integration
• References