Jewish-Israeli National Identity and Dissidence: The Contradictions of Zionism and Resistance PDF
Preview Jewish-Israeli National Identity and Dissidence: The Contradictions of Zionism and Resistance
Jewish-Israeli National Identity and Dissidence This page intentionally left blank Jewish-Israeli National Identity and Dissidence The Contradictions of Zionism and Resistance Katie Attwell Sir Walter Murdoch School of Public Policy and International Affairs, Murdoch University, Australia © Katie Attwell 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-42901-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-49165-0 ISBN 978-1-137-42902-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137429025 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Attwell, Katie, 1979– Jewish-Israeli national identity and dissidence : the contradictions of Zionism and resistance / Katie Attwell. pages cm. 1. National characteristics, Israeli. 2. Jews – Israel – Identity. 3. Group identity – Israel. 4. Zionism – Israel. 5. Arab-Israeli conflict. 6. Palestinian Arabs – Israel – Ethnic identity. I. Title. DS113.3.A88 2015 320.54095694—dc23 2014038025 Contents Preface v iii Acknowledgements x i Introduction 1 A tale of two Zionists 1 The dilemma 2 The problematic situation (the ‘Thing Without a Name’) 3 The ‘dissidents’ 8 Narrative analysis 10 Othering the Other 12 Book outline 12 Part I Context 1 Ressentiment and the State 17 Introduction 17 Ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourses 18 Ressentiment and ethnocratisation 25 Conclusion 29 2 Ressentiment Zionism 30 Introduction 30 In the beginning, there was Zionism 30 Getting outside of Zionism 32 Ressentiment and Zionism 36 Structural factors: European life, transformations and the rise of ressentiment 36 Ressentiment vignettes 39 The historical narrative as cultural factor 42 Ressentiment Zionism goes to Palestine; finds an Evil Other there ... 44 The Evil Other: from European to Arab 44 The tragic trajectory of Cultural Zionism 48 Conclusion 51 3 The Dissidents’ Context 52 Introduction 52 v vi Contents The Charter is laid: the Declaration of Independence and Law of Return 53 From Charter to commonsense 55 Education and ressentiment 56 The Holocaust and r essentiment 57 Five legal categories of Other ... and one symbolic one 6 0 The ‘Israeli Arab’ Other 61 The refugee Other 62 ‘Generic’ Arabs and collapsible Others 63 The occupied Other 64 The Other and the Us in the media 66 Ressentiment to the present day 68 Conclusion 70 Part II Dissent 4 Meet the Dissidents 73 Introduction 73 Academics 74 Oren Yiftachel 74 Neve Gordon 7 7 Uri Davis 80 Activists 8 4 Jeff Halper 84 Eitan Bronstein 87 Jeremy Milgrom 92 Yonatan Pollack 97 Writers/commentators 101 Gideon Levy 101 Gilad Atzmon 105 Dorit Rabinyan 111 Meron Benvenisti 113 Conclusion 115 5 Themes of Dissident Dissonance: Historicisation and Identification 117 Introduction 117 Attraction to Zionism 117 The past: ‘national’ history 120 The beginning 135 Conclusion 143 Contents vii 6 Themes of Dissident Dissonance: Zionism and the Self 1 44 Introduction 144 Fear for the Us 144 Self-interest 152 Reconciling with personal pasts 154 What does it mean to be clean? 160 7 Dissident Discourses 169 Introduction: limitations and discontinuities 1 69 The discourses 171 Hegemonic ressentiment Zionist discourse 171 The civic discourse 171 The binational discourse 172 The Kinder Zionist discourse 174 The post-Zionist discourse 175 The inverted ressentiment discourse 177 Dissidents using discourses 178 Civic discourse 178 Binational discourse 179 Kinder Zionist discourse 184 Post-Zionist discourse 1 87 Inverted r essentiment 189 Ressentiment discourse 190 Conclusion 191 8 Conclusion 192 Introduction 192 Ressentiment to the ‘hostile outsider’ 194 Ressentiment and new Others 196 Three stories of promise 198 Conclusion: the contributions of this book 2 02 Appendix: The Dissidents at a glance 206 Notes 208 Bibliography 212 Index 225 Preface Another book on Israel/Palestine. What could possibly be left to say about a situation that has been analysed from just about every perspec- tive? Moreover, why would a woman from the most isolated capital city in the world, far from the Middle East, who does not identify as Jewish, Muslim or Arab, want to say it? In these few pages, I will answer these questions. I hope that my academic readers will indulge me writing from the heart to explain my engagement with this subject matter, and what I hope to offer. When this book was conceived, I wasn’t an academic. I wasn’t even a graduate student. I was a failed Australian rock musician escaping my future with bad hospitality work and a British passport, living out my quarter-life crisis far from home. My vague hopes of one day being an academic seemed as distant as my dashed hopes of making a living from music. I was lost in my own life. Then my entire world opened up, because I read a book while on holiday in Prague. The Palestine–Israeli Conflict: A Beginner’s Guide was perfectly pitched to me: I was a beginner in this field despite having an undergraduate degree in Politics. This book started me on a course of questioning that has sustained my life and work ever since. As I read the book, I found myself asking an important question. Given the seemingly intractable nature of this conflict, why couldn’t I see more Israelis who were reflective; aware of their history and the impetus it placed on them to work towards justice and peace for the victims of Zionism? My hazy and rather obvious hypothesis at the time was that their nationalism was responsible, and the State of Israel was inextricably linked with this. I wondered how I could understand Israeli Jews better, so that I might grasp what those who had visions of justice and co-existence were doing. I was painfully aware then, as I am now, that despite the massive leaps forward from dysfunction that Palestinian society and politics must make, problems that began with agents of Zionism in Palestine must be resolved by those same agents – today’s Israeli Jews. I wanted to know who was taking up this challenge and to understand their constraints and limitations; not just the external constraints, but also the ones inside their very beings, products as we all are of our environments. I wanted to discover this by speaking to them, by analysing and unpacking their words. So began my fascination viii Preface ix with and research into this field, a return to formal study and, finally, an academic career. I started by considering my subjects as moral agents. Their identi- ties – both prescribed and self-ascribed – were less important to me than their ultimate humanity and convictions. Over time, my aversion to analysing or compartmentalising people based on ascriptive categories evolved into a more sophisticated approach that I now recognise as fundamental to my way of understanding the world. I consider my engagement with ‘identity’ to be my paramount consideration as I seek to understand the people in this book and the context that shapes and constrains them. Engaging with ‘iden- tity’ has transformed the way my own life has unfolded, giving me a particular way of seeing this political situation. There are many books about nationalism, Jewish nationalism, resistance and even dissent. Yet I never found a book quite like the one I had set out to write, that puzzled over ‘good’ people in a bad situation and considered how their resistance might only ever be partial because of these things we like to call identities. Such a book could only be written from a perspective that regards such people as both products of, and yet distinct from, the categories/‘identities’ which so many freely ascribe to themselves and others, or develop elaborate institutions to do so for them. Nobody had written such a book, perhaps because it would be very difficult to do so from within such identification. Moreover, people like me gener- ally avoid, and are sometimes expressly forbidden from engaging with, this subject matter. People I’ve met in the course of writing this book – inside and outside academia – have questioned the legitimacy of me writing on this subject. One of them tried to mobilise others to get me removed from my university. The individuals she targeted on the basis of their Jewish self-identification demonstrated integrity and support for academic freedom in resisting her efforts. Gilad Atzmon, featured in this book, suggests that looking, sounding and acting like an Israeli may be ‘necessary qualities needed to grasp the Israeli mind, politics, identity and culture’ (2011, p. 187); in other words, dissection can only be an inside job. Here, I suggest that being an outsider might be equally or more useful, even if, according to more than one Israeli, I do share the ‘national quality’ of directness. As an outsider, I lack that emotional investment in ‘identity’, an investment I will demonstrate that Atzmon retains. You, my readers, will judge whether this outsider has indeed brought something of value to the conversation.
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