The Idea of Israel

A History of Power and Knowledge

Ilan Pappe

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781781685457
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this groundbreaking work, Ilan Pappe looks at the continued role of Zionist ideology. The Idea of Israel considers the way Zionism operates outside of the government and military in areas such as the country's education system, media, and cinema. In particular, Pappe examines the way successive generations of historians have framed the 1948 conflict as a liberation campaign, creating a foundation myth that went unquestioned in Israeli society until the 1990s.
The Idea of Israel is a powerful and urgent intervention in the war of ideas concerning the past, and the future, of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

PART I

The Scholarly and Fictional Idea of Israel

ONE

The ‘Objective’ History of the Land and the People

The Objective Zionist Historian

There is a tale that is 66.5 per cent true about Ben-Zion Dinur (né Dinaburg), the doyen of early Zionist historiography in Palestine and one-time minister of education. In 1937, two weeks before the arrival of the Peel Commission, which was charged with finding a solution to the conflict in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community, approached Dinur to ask whether the respectable historian could produce some research proving that Jews had occupied the region continuously from 70 CE, the time of the Roman exile, to 1882, the arrival of the first Zionists. I could, said the historian, but this task involves many periods and requires a range of expertise, and will probably take a decade or so to complete. ‘You do not understand,’ replied Ben-Gurion. ‘The Peel Commission is coming in two weeks’ time. Reach your conclusion by then, and afterwards you can have a whole decade to prove it!’

From early on, the leaders of the Zionist movement prized scholarly and professional historiography. Whether we choose to define Zionism as a national movement or a colonialist project, it is obvious that establishing its history academically and publicly has always been essential to its survival. Zionism was driven by a wish to rewrite the history of Palestine, and that of the Jewish people, in a way that proved scientifically the Jewish claim to ‘the Land of Israel’. As the modern Israeli state came into being, historiography was needed to market the new country as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, to explain the dispossession of the indigenous people who had so recently occupied the land, and to condemn their long struggle to dispossess the Jews of a supposed birthright.

In the pre-1882 Zionist narrative, Palestine was an empty homeland waiting to be redeemed by the exiled Jews. It was a new Germany, Poland or Russia when those places became inhospitable. The early Zionists adapted a patriotic German song about a new Reich to show what ‘empty’ Palestine became for them:

There where the cedar kisses the sky,

And where the Jordan quickly flows by,

There where the ashes of my father lie,

In that exalted Reich, on sea and sand,

Is my beloved, true fatherland.¹

A youth encyclopaedia on the history of Eretz Israel, written by the best scholars in the land in the 1970s, depicted the pre-1882 territory as ‘The Empty Land’. The cover showed a lonely cedar yearning towards the sky on a barren hill, very much as in the poem above.² But the land would not be re-appropriated through enthusiastic poetry or inspirational paintings alone – scholarly clout was required, and for that an established academia would have to shape the country’s ancient and modern historiography.

Zionist historiography turned professional after Zionism had become a significant social and political force in Palestine; its successor, Israeli historiography, was formulated during the early years of statehood. It was, after all, Ben-Gurion who approached Dinur, not the other way around. As with other national movements that have established nation-states, this professionalisation of history coincided with officialdom’s making the political archives accessible to scholarly researchers.

As expected, this generosity was reciprocated by scholarly work that corroborated, rather than challenged, the political élite.³ Similarly, social scientists in a variety of disciplines determined that developments in the Jewish community during the period of the British Mandate (1918–48) as well as the early years of statehood presented a classic case study in successful modernisation. According to the findings of the academic community, all the preconditions stipulated by the theory of modernisation for a successful transition from tradition to modernity existed in the Zionisation of Palestine. In other words, if you were a Zionist you could confidently participate in the best modernisation project in existence; and if you were a student of modernisation, Zionism was your best case study.

Providing scientific proof for a set of ideological claims was a tricky business. From the outset, most participants in the Zionist movement and later in the State of Israel who did academic work on Zionist and Jewish history have been involved in it, and they were able to do so only by embracing the seemingly impossible combination of a positivist wish to reconstruct reality and an ideological commitment to prove the justness of their cause. The facts, found exclusively in political archives, were treated as the raw material for proving the validity of the Zionist narrative.

Some of these scholarly works were written at a time when theorists globally had begun to challenge the validity of narratives fashioned in the name of nationalism, especially in situations of conflict, and to offer methodologies for exposing the hidden hand of nationalism in such narratives. Nevertheless, the positivist Zionist scholars of the 1970s and the 1980s who were engaged in researching the country’s past ignored all methodological and theoretical innovations that might have undercut their confidence in the scientific truth of Zionism. One of the most effective ways to ensure their independence from innovation was their heavy reliance on the deeds of the élite. By taking this biased version of events as an objective, accurate description of fact, ideology and fact were fused and manipulated to produce the same story.

History was recruited to make the ideological and political project look good. Historians who declared themselves Zionists went in search of the roots of Jewish nationalism in the distant past and were satisfied only when they could establish that a national ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hebrew’ group existed in Palestine long before the foundation of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. Some were content to seek these early roots in the seventeenth century; others went as far back as biblical times.

The early historians did not see a contradiction between professionalism and ideology. Ben-Zion Dinur explained this abnormality by observing that Zionist historians, by definition, were researchers who fused scientific mastery of the material with a clear and correct understanding of Zionism.⁴ The conviction that professionalism demanded strong ideological loyalty became accepted by successive generations of Zionist historians. As the veteran Israeli historian Shmuel Almog remarked, such loyalty was essential for the success of the Jewish national movement: ‘Zionism needed history in order to prove to Jews wherever they were that they all constitute one entity and that there is historical continuity from Israel and Judea in ancient times until modern Judaism.’⁵

Almog’s colleague Israel Kolatt turned the argument around, claiming that only Zionist historians could provide a quality history of Zionism.⁶ These professional historians perceived themselves as taking part in a nation-building project of unique dimensions and proportions under exceptional, indeed extraordinary, circumstances. Even if in every other historical instance ideology and objectivity could not be reconciled, here, they maintained, it could be done.

As a result, fervently committed Zionist historians understood better than anyone else the potency of establishing continuity between ancient Israel and modern Zionism. Already in the 1930s this missionary zeal was embodied in an academic school of thought based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and aptly called the Jerusalem School. Among its most famous members were Ben-Zion Dinur, Shmuel Ettinger, S. D. Goitein, and Joseph Klausner.⁷ These historians wished to reconstruct the history of the ‘People of Israel’ with the Land of Israel as its epicentre. They searched for, and believed they found, scholarly proof for a recognition on the part of Jewish exiles that the Land of Israel constituted the focus of Judaism. Their evidence is at best unconvincing; in fact, it amounts to a claim that Jews in pre-Zionist history possessed an unconscious desire, unknown to the Jews themselves at the time, to return to the land of Palestine. The existence of this recognition was thus claimed in retrospect. In the Jerusalem School’s narrative, Jews were connected to the Land whether they were fully aware of it or not. As Benedict Anderson has so pithily commented, it is better for national movements to nationalise the dead than the living because the latter might question their newly imposed identity.

Very little has changed in Israel that might dislodge the primacy of the Zionist historians. Many articles in the two leading journals in Hebrew on Zionist history, Cathedra and Hatzionut (dominant until the 1990s) managed to tie the Gordian knot between ideology and archival research. In the 1960s and 1970s, the younger writers differed from their predecessors by shunning their proclivity for macrohistory. Rather than setting out to validate grand claims such as a persistent, age-old Jewish urge to settle in Palestine or the emptiness of Palestine prior to the arrival of the Zionists, they sliced up these claims by time frame or topic and provided limited empirical evidence for their validity. Thus they would look at Jewish urges for Palestine during a particular decade or discuss conditions in Palestine during a particular year or season. But whether they reconstructed the historical process as a whole, or focused on a single anecdotal chapter within it, they remained loyal both to Zionism and to scientific truth, as they saw it.

Older and younger Zionist historians alike were interested in political history, but Zionist loyalty restricted the ability of the younger scholars to produce novel ideas or groundbreaking research. Since the aim was to provide scholarly proof for a narrative already told and known, there was little room for revelations of any kind – only confirmations were wanted. Current Israeli historiography of the Mandatory period exemplifies this limitation. Everything one wanted to know, and much of what one did not, about the history of the Jewish community at that time has been covered; there is nothing new to say, because the story has already been told.

Moreover, because the narrative was to be based on sound, scientific evidence, it could withstand any challenges coming from Palestinian or non-Zionist Jewish narratives. In this respect, the Israeli historians’ admiration for the English historian E. H. Carr is quite understandable, especially their fascination with his observation that history is always written by the victors. Thus, ontologically, the historical narrative produced by the victorious is the truth.

This approach, to be sure, is not unique to Zionist historiography. Where it differs from other national historiographies that share this characteristic is that there has been almost no theoretical discussion about the apparent contradictions that such historiography produces. For this reason, until now the many (and there are many) academic historical works in Israel on Zionism and the state have been more descriptive than analytical, or indeed critical, in their overall approach. Analysis has been confined to the deeds of the political and ideological élites – leaving unexamined the nature of the ideology that underlay the behaviour of these élites, as well as the way the historians’ commitment to the very same ideology affected their research.

The historical narrative as constructed by the academic system became the principal tool for cultivating and preserving the national collective memory. Historians treated the political archives as shrines of Truth and saw themselves as the attendant priests and protectors. But because the shrine is secular, the truth must be not only protected but also proved. The proof arrives by way of repetition rather than scrutiny; as a result, researchers, teachers, the Israeli educational system, and the officials and administrators responsible for national ceremonies, emblems, and the canonical literature have rarely sought out new material or new angles in the archival material. They simply looked for, and found, the same archival material that had originally provided the ‘empirical proof’ that justified the Zionist claim to Palestine. How unsettling the 1980s must have been, when these very archives yielded up material that forced difficult questions about Zionism and Israel’s moral claims to the Land.

This well-known and efficiently proven narrative reconstructed Zionism as a national movement that brought modernisation and progress to a primitive Palestine. It ‘made the desert bloom’, rebuilt the Land’s ruined cities, and introduced modern agriculture and industry to the benefit of Arabs and Jews alike. The resistance to Zionism resulted from a combination of Islamic fanaticism and pro-Arab British colonialism, along with local traditions of political violence. Against all odds, and despite cruel resistance, Zionism remained loyal to humanist precepts and unrelentingly stretched its hand to its Arab neighbours, who kept rejecting it.

No less extraordinary in this narrative is the story of how the Zionists succeeded in the miraculous establishment of a state in the face of a hostile Arab world. It was a state that, notwithstanding an objective shortage of space and means, absorbed a million Jews who had been expelled from the Arab world and offered them progress and integration into the only democracy in the Middle East. It was a defensive state, which tried to contain the ever-increasing hostility of the Arabs and the apathy of the world. It was a generous state, which ingathered Jews from more than a hundred diasporas and made of them a single new Jewish people. It was a moral and just movement of redemption that, unfortunately, found other people residing in its homeland but nevertheless offered them a share in a better future, which they foolishly rejected. That last bit comes in a second version, in which the country was empty when Zionism arrived so that the reaction of the inhabitants diminishes as a factor.

This second claim was presented in the book From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, a CBS documentary producer who was initially part of Jimmy Carter’s team on the Middle East but then joined the new conservative camp. At first the book was a best seller in the United States and was promoted by the Israeli embassy, but its premise was so absurd that professional historians in Israel disavowed the book, demanding somewhat more sophistication in the construction of the Zionist claim that Palestine belongs to the Jewish people To them, Peters’s simplistic denial that there had barely been any Arabs in Palestine before the arrival of the Zionists was little more than a fable.⁸ On the other hand, the more sophisticated version – still being argued today, in Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh – is that there were indeed Palestinian...