Post-Post-Zionist Historiography

24 Pages·2010·0.238 MB·English

by  Assaf Likhovski

Post-Post-Zionist Historiography
Author(s): Assaf Likhovski
Source: Israel Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 1-23
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/isr.2010.15.2.1
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Assaf Likhovski
Post-Post-Zionist Historiography1
ABSTRACT
In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of historians and sociologists revolution-
ized the study of Israeli history. These scholars, often called collectively the
Post-Zionists, sought to undermine “the founding myths of Israel”. The
Post-Zionist paradigm has made important and lasting contributions to
the understanding of Israeli history, but no historiographical trend is per-
manent. In the last decade, a new generation of scholars, sometimes called
“the third wave in Israeli historiography”, or “the Post-Post-Zionists”, has
produced works that differ in many respects from those of the previous gen-
eration. This generation studies new subjects, utilizes new types of sources
and new writing styles, asks new questions about Israeli society, and its
attitude to Zionism is often more empathic than that of the previous gen-
eration. The article analyzes some aspects of the new paradigm, which can
be seen as a local, Israeli, manifestation of a more general approach—the
new cultural history—that appeared outside Israel in the 1970s.
INTRODUCTION
I
n 1989, a sociologist, Gershon Shafir, published Land, Labor and
the Origins of the Israeli—Palestinian Conflict.2 Inspired by economic histo-
ries of European colonialism, Shafir set out to reexamine the history of the
first waves of Zionist immigration to Palestine. A previous generation of
sociologists emphasized the role of ideology, both socialist and nationalist,
in shaping the unique collectivist nature of the new Zionist community
that sprang up in Palestine. Shafir contended that material interests, rather
than ideology, should be used to explain the history of Zionist settlement
and that the main force shaping the settlement process was the conflict
between settler Jews and native Arabs over territory and work. Institutions
1
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2 • israel studies, volume 15, number 2
and practices that supposedly epitomized Zionist pioneering idealism,
such as the kibbutz or the notion of redeeming manual labor (avoda ivrit),
should be seen, argued Shafir, as the expressions of exclusionary economic
interests of the type that is familiar from other colonial settings.
In 2003, another sociologist, Oz Almog, published an article entitled
“From Blorit to Ponytail: Israeli Culture Reflected in Popular Hairstyles”.3
Inspired by anthropological theory, Almog examined the history of Israeli
hairstyles. Using oral interviews, popular newspapers and teen magazines,
high school yearbooks and private photo albums, the article traced changes
in Israeli male and female hairdos, and explained these changes using tech-
nological, environmental, and economic factors (e.g., the appearance of
blow dryers in the 1950s), cultural factors (the rise of American influence
in the 1960s) and, in addition, ethnic (but also generational) conflict. The
article then linked changes in Israeli hairstyles to changes in Israeli identity
from the mandatory era and the present, arguing that changes in hairstyles
should be seen as one indicator of the decline of collectivist ideology and
the transition of Israel to a pluralistic liberal society beginning in the 1980s.
Shafir’s and Almog’s works epitomize two phases in the study of the
Israeli past. Shafir’s book was part of a wave of studies by critical sociolo-
gists and new historians that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. This wave
was often called the “Post-Zionist” phase in Israeli historiography. The term
“Post-Zionist” is problematic, because many of the people identified with
this wave were actually committed to some version of Zionist ideology, but
it has been widely used in the literature, and I will therefore also use it here.4
Almog’s work belongs to a new paradigm that has emerged in the
last decade, especially in the last few years.5 I call this paradigm, following
Michael Feige and David Myers, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography”,6 but
it may also be called, following Boaz Neumann, “the third wave in Israeli
historiography”, or “the post-revisionist phase”, or any other name that
would signify the shift involved.7 New subjects, new sources and styles,
new questions, and a new attitude—more complex and empathic—to
Zionism characterize this phase. Most importantly, I argue, this new phase
also represents a shift from an interest in political and economic history to
an interest in the history of culture, a shift which occurred outside Israeli
academia in the 1970s.8
Arguing that the scholarship on the Israeli past produced in the last
few years has been characterized by a shift to an interest in culture runs
contrary to some recent discussions that still divide the field based on politi-
cal categories. For example, in a recent book, Ilan Pappé characterized the
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Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 3
1990s as the “moment of grace” of Post-Zionism generally, including Post-
Zionist academic scholarship, and suggested that following the outbreak
of the second Intifada, there will be a “period of darkness . . . in which
neo-Zionism, a fundamentalist, uncompromising version of Zionism will
reign in place of Post-Zionism.”9 A similar tripartite political framework
(Zionism, Post-Zionism, Neo-Zionism) can be found in one of Uri Ram’s
recent surveys of the current state of scholarship on Israeli society.10 How-
ever, many of the new works that have appeared recently cannot be easily
placed in any of the three categories mentioned by Pappé and Ram. Instead,
they seem to belong to a fourth category, one which moved the debate
sideways from interest in politics and economics to an interest in culture.
In this article, I examine the new paradigm. First, I briefly describe
some of the major characteristics of the previous, Post-Zionist phase, and
some attributes of cultural history generally. I then discuss the impact of the
cultural turn on Israeli historiography, analyzing the topics, sources, writ-
ing style, questions, and views of Zionism that characterize the Post-Post-
Zionist paradigm. Finally, I suggest some possible reasons for the decline
of the Post-Zionist paradigm, and the emergence of the more recent, Post-
Post-Zionist paradigm.
Two caveats are in order. First, a number of scholars—Michael Feige,
Boaz Neumann, Derek Penslar, and David Myers—have already mentioned
the appearance of a new phase in Israeli historiography.11 While these
scholars mention the appearance of this new phase, they do not analyze it
in detail.12 This article attempts to provide a more detailed (although not
comprehensive) analysis of many of the new works published in the last
few years, trying to point to commonalities between at least some of these
works.
Second, trying to describe an emerging historiographical paradigm, or
indeed any historiographical paradigm, is a risky enterprise. “Paradigms”
are constructs. The borders between them may be blurred and amorphous
(especially in history, where the appearance of one paradigm does not mean
the demise of another). In our specific case, the two “paradigms” that I
compare are defined broadly. They include historians, but also sociologists.
They are politically and methodologically diverse.13 It can be argued that
the binary opposition that I am proposing has, in fact, many grades, and
that Israeli historiography is better conceived as a single continuum rather
than being composed of binary opposites. Still, despite their inherent
inaccuracy, dichotomies are sometimes useful props for perceiving general
trends, and such trends are what I am interested in this article.
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4 • israel studies, volume 15, number 2
THE POST-ZIONIST PARADIGM
Beginning in the 1980s two groups, the “new historians” and the “critical
sociologists”, revolutionized the study of Israeli history and society, seeking
to undermine the “founding myths of Israel”.14 These two groups produced
a very impressive and influential body of works. Given the space constraints
of this article, it is impossible to discuss these works in any detail. It would
suffice to say that the new historians focused mainly on the military and
diplomatic history of the War of 1948, attempting to undermine the con-
ventional Zionist view of the war. However, arguments about 1948 were
merely part of a wider series of debates about the Israeli past, many of which
were dominated by sociologists rather than historians. These debates ana-
lyzed topics such as the relationship of Zionism to European colonialism,
and the attitudes of Israelis to Mizrahi Jews, to Holocaust survivors, to the
Diaspora, and to women.15 The arguments made by the new historians
and critical sociologists produced heated debate in Israel. Questions were
raised about the factual accuracy, theoretical underpinnings, and claims
of novelty of the Post-Zionist paradigm.16 However, it seems reasonable
to say that now, more than twenty years after the debate has begun, many
of the arguments of the Post-Zionist paradigm have been accepted and
assimilated by the Israeli academia and, to a certain extent, even by Israeli
popular culture.17
Why did the Post-Zionist paradigm appear? Some attributed the
appearance of a critical, Post-Zionist, stance to generational change, or
to the use of archival sources that were not accessible to historians before
the 1980s.18 Others linked the Post-Zionist paradigm to political changes
within Israeli society in the 1980s as the secular and socialist Labor Zion-
ist establishment lost power to the Likud party, or to changes in academic
fashions outside Israel as the consensus-based approaches of the 1950s gave
way in the 1960s to conflict-based and victim-focused approaches to the
study of society.19 However, whether the appearance of the Post-Zionist
paradigm was the result of micro or macro, internal or external factors, it
seems that in the last few years an additional paradigm, created by a new
generation of scholars, has appeared in Israeli historiography. One of main
sources of inspiration for many of the new works has been the “cultural
turn” that appeared in western historiography in the 1970s; I briefly discuss
this source of inspiration.
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Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 5
THE CULTURAL TURN
There are many ways to distinguish different historiographical approaches.
One is to differentiate between two modes of viewing the past, which I will
call, following Carl Schorske, the “cultural” and the “political” modes.20
These two modes are ideal types that are in opposition to one another
theoretically, although they often blend in the work of specific historians
or specific historical schools (for example, one might think of social or
economic history as an intermediate synthesis of the two ideal types).21
What is “culture”, and in what ways is the “cultural” mode of describ-
ing history different from the “political” mode? Culture “is one of the two
or three most complicated words in the English language.”22 I use the
term “culture” to designate a set of ideas, beliefs, symbols, values, customs,
and practices that are often unconscious and are shared by most of the
members of a given social group.23 This definition identifies culture with
widely shared ideas in contrast with another, very common, use of the word
“culture”, which equates it only with the conscious, canonical products of
elite artists, architects, musicians, and writers.24
Here, some of the differences between the cultural and political modes
of writing history are delineated.25 Culture, like language, is seen as cre-
ated by society, not by specific individuals. Therefore, its history is told in
a way that tends to minimize the role of individual agents. While cultural
historians may be interested in individual biographies, they often view
these biographies as a prism through which they can obtain a glimpse of
the wider culture. History in the political mode, on the other hand, is more
interested in the role of individual agents, often notable figures such as
kings or generals; cultural history traces the history of unconscious ideas.
Political history is interested in conscious and explicit acts; both cultural
and political history are interested in change, but cultural history may be
more prone to erecting a firmer boundary between the past and present
(in a similar way to the boundary that anthropology used to erect between
the primitive and modern). Cultural history seeks to describe past societies
focusing on “the recurrent, the constant, and the typical”.26 Political history
explains causes of specific past events; cultural history is interested both in
“public” and “private” topics. Political history is narrower, focusing mostly
on more public events; cultural history is interested in socially-constructed
limits and boundaries of human understanding that prevented the people
of the past from viewing the world the way we do. It therefore assumes a
difference between us and the people of the past that tends to prevent moral
judgment. Political history is more interested in intentions and motivations
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6 • israel studies, volume 15, number 2
(and also tends to be more judgmental); the sources of cultural history can
be texts produced by elite actors but also texts and other artifacts produced
by mass culture. The sources of political history are narrower, confined
mostly to official government documents, newspaper reports, and the like;
cultural histories see history as related to literature. Political histories tend
to view history in a more “scientific” way. Of course, cultural historians
can be interested in the political realm, but when they study it, they often
study less conventional aspects of this realm. For example, they will examine
political rituals or “political culture”, rather than relations of power between
individuals, political parties, or interest groups.27
The roots of both modes of writing history can be traced back to the
Greek world, but they are also found in the history of modern historiog-
raphy. The latest phase in the story of culture history is the appearance of
the “New Cultural History” in the 1970s.28 This approach was inspired by
developments in anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory as well as the
emerging discipline of cultural studies; its appearance was part of a wider
trend in the humanities and the social sciences that is often called “the cul-
tural turn” or “the linguistic turn”. Within this approach one can find many
varieties: histoire des mentalités, micro-history, history of the everyday, New
Historicism, and approaches inspired by cultural Marxism and the work
of Michel Foucault.29 One difference between the new culture history and
previous phases is that contemporary views of culture often define it in a
more fragmented and contested way, and the border between culture and
other fields such as politics is often seen as blurry. However, while contem-
porary views of culture are more complex, they still view culture as at least
partly autonomous and thus distinct from power.30
What are the topics of the new cultural history? As historian Peter
Burke noted, cultural historians are interested in topics such as “longev-
ity, the penis, barbed wire and masturbation”.31 “Natural” aspects of life,
which were previously seen as having no history, for example, the body, are
now viewed as being socially-constructed in specific times and places. Cul-
tural historians therefore study the daily, automatic, unconscious aspects
of human existence, analyzing meanings, values, practices, manners, and
representations that individuals in a given social group share with other
members of their group—distinctions between public and private, child-
hood and adulthood, proper male and female behavior, attitudes to health
and illness, madness and death, emotions and sensations, imagination,
dreams, and views of the past (collective memory).32
The new type of cultural history that appeared in the 1970s is arguably
still the dominant mode of writing history today. In recent years, there
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Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 7
has been growing interest in transnational, comparative, and global his-
tory. One can study these topics using a cultural approach (analyzing, for
example, cultural encounters). However, the growing interest in these topics
may also signify a pendulum swing away from cultural history and back to
a more “political” and scientific approach to historiography.33
THE POST-POST-ZIONIST PARADIGM:
THE CULTURAL TURN IN ISRAELI HISTORIOGRAPHY
New SubjectS
The rise of cultural history has had a (belated) impact on Israeli histori-
ography too. The new historians of the 1980s were mostly interested in
traditional military and diplomatic events or, in cases when they ventured
outside these fields, in social history.34 Critical sociologists often focused
on economic factors. Culture did appear in some critical works inspired
by the Saidian notion of Orientalism, and, more generally, by postcolonial
theory.35 However, the main interest in culture in these works was its link
to power. Culture was not explored in an anthropologically empathic way,
but was often discussed as a tool to further the interests of an identifiable
social group against other social groups. The narrative structure associated
with such a study was one of heroes and villains.36
While the role of culture in Post-Zionist literature was, in this sense,
limited, culture (more broadly defined) is a major concern of much of the
work produced by the younger generation of Israeli historians. Here are
three examples, each taken from one of the three major periods studied by
Israeli historiography—late Ottoman Palestine, Mandatory Palestine, and
post-1948 Israel.
In Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish Culture in Ottoman Pal-
estine (2008), Arieh Saposnik traces the ways in which the Hebrew cultural
revolution transformed the Zionist Jews of late Ottoman Palestine into
modern Hebrews.37 Part of the book deals with the explicit ideas of elite
thinkers, but Saposnik also devotes a portion of his discussion to describ-
ing the way these ideas filtered down to daily acts, rituals, and mannerisms
out of which modern Hebrew culture was born, discussing topics such as
kindergarten gymnastic lessons or Sephardi accents side by side with the
more traditional analysis of elite nationalist ideology. This focus on daily
practices allows Saposnik to provide a complex picture of Zionist identity,
a picture that challenges previous, critical, arguments about the Orientalist
nature of Zionism.38
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8 • israel studies, volume 15, number 2
In Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel-Aviv (2007), Anat Helman
analyzes some traditional topics of urban and social history such as the
architectural styles of Tel-Aviv buildings or the structure of its civil society.
However, she also discusses perceptions of cleanliness and dirt, sensations of
smells and sounds, and attitudes to pets, holidays, shopping, and consump-
tion.39 Helman’s Tel-Aviv is a place that is influenced by the Arab-Jewish
conflict and by Orientalist notions, but this conflict is merely one of many
factors shaping the history of this town.
Another example of a work that combines social and cultural history
(as well as gender, legal, and more traditional political history) is Duty and
Love: Individualism and Collectivism in 1950s Israel (2008) by Orit Rozin.40
Rozin studies the social and cultural history of Israel of the 1950s focusing
on the austerity regime that regulated consumption in the first years of the
state. This topic had been previously analyzed by critical historian Tom
Segev in his important book 1949: The First Israelis.41 While Segev devotes
some attention to the ideas of ordinary people, the main focus of his discus-
sion of the austerity regime is the acts of politicians and government officials
that created this regime. The major protagonists of Rozin’s book, on the
other hand, are not politicians or even administrators. They are ordinary
Israeli housewives and their attitudes to food rationing.
Another important topic of Rozin’s book is the attitudes of veteran
Israelis to the new immigrants from post-holocaust Europe and the Middle
East that flooded Israel after 1948. In discussing this topic, Rozin seems to
be following critical works that, beginning in the 1980s, already analyzed the
attitudes of veteran Israelis to the mass immigration of the 1950s. However,
the critical scholars analyzed these attitudes using arguments about material
exploitation or employing the Saidian notion of Orientalism, understood
as an ideological system.42 Rozin’s analysis discusses emotions rather than
ideologies.43 Using anthropologically-inspired theories to explain the sense
of disgust that some veteran Israelis felt toward the hygienic condition in
the absorption camps of the 1950s, Rozin argues that while official Zionist
ideology saw the absorption of the new immigrants as a vital interest of
Zionism, and urged Israelis to sacrifice personal comforts for the sake of the
immigrants, many ordinary Israelis rejected the official ideology, rebelling
against the austerity regime, and ultimately leading to its collapse.
Hygiene, health and illness, psychology and psychiatry, genetics and
eugenics, and more generally the Zionist and Israeli body and soul are
important topics of many of the new works on the Israeli past produced
in the last decade. As historian Rakefet Zalashik noted recently in her
book on the history of psychiatry in Palestine and Israel, the last few years
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Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 9
have witnessed the emergence of a set of studies on the history of scien-
tific knowledge in Palestine and Israel. Zalashik’s brief survey is confined
to works dealing with health and medicine, but I would argue that these
works are just part of a larger set of studies of professional knowledge that
also explores issues such as Zionist statistics, social work, law, and rural and
urban planning.44
Some of these studies can be classified as belonging to the older Post-
Zionist paradigm, merely expanding this paradigm to new fields, because
they are based on critical notions of the relationship between culture (and
knowledge) and power, they use a narrative of clear heroes and villains, and
they view Zionism in ways that are at least as critical of it as those found in
the older works of the 1980s and 1990s.45
However, at least some of the new works on scientific and profes-
sional knowledge also fit within the new Post-Post-Zionist paradigm.
First, because of their focus primarily on “private” matters such as atti-
tudes to the individual body (or the “soul”). Second, because unlike
much of the older work, which sees power as concentrated in the hand
of identifiable institutions and individuals, some of the new works are
based on Foucauldian notions of power: they see power as dispersed in
society rather than concentrated in the hand of a limited number of
agents, embodied in everyday practices, and producing outcomes that
are sometimes productive and benign.46 Once power is dispersed in
such a way it becomes more difficult to tell a simple story of victims and
victimizers, oppressors and oppressed. The new works therefore often tell
a complex story in which the professional discourses analyzed enjoy rela-
tive autonomy from the state and from official ideology. These discourses
are often seen as contradictory and fragmented, and the relationships of
the professionals discussed with the state and with Zionist ideology are
sometimes described as symbiotic, but sometimes as antagonistic. The
overall result is a more complex story.
For example, Zalashik’s work on psychiatry is informed by a critical
approach that seeks to expose the ideological background of psychiatry,
but she also declares that her history attempts to “avoid a one-sided nar-
rative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, victims and aggressors . . .” Thus, her discussion
of the attitudes of Israeli psychiatrists to Mizrahi immigrants in the 1950s
acknowledges the existence of Orientalist and racist stereotypes in psychi-
atric discourse, but she also argues that some aspects of Zionist ideology,
such as the melting-pot and nation-building ideals, prevalent in the 1950s,
mitigated some of the racial categorization schemes prevalent in European
psychiatry.47
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