After the rupture provoked by the second Intifada, the various currents of the Israeli left are renewing their dialogue. But deep disagreements persist, less over the Palestinian question than over the place of Zionism and the memory of the Shoah.
The Israeli left has never truly recovered from the upheavals of the second Intifada. Its different sensibilities had stood together against the Lebanon war (1982–2000), then against the suppression of the first Palestinian revolt (1987–1993), and had taken part in the creation of protest movements, of human-rights organizations in the occupied territories (such as “The 21st Year”, “Stop the Occupation” or “B’Tselem”) and even of a political party (Meretz). Yet over the course of the 1990s the left tore itself into two opposing tendencies, sharpening their differences to the point of becoming “enemy brothers”: the post-Zionists of the radical left, on one side, and the Zionists of the reformist left, on the other.
A fractured left
This fracture was especially visible within the university, from which “new historians” and “new sociologists” emerged with a clatter—those intellectuals critical of their elders’ Zionism, whom they accused of having produced an official history of the Israeli-Arab conflict and, more broadly, of having erased anything liable to harm Israel’s prestige. While the reformists sought a normalization of relations with the Palestinians while remaining faithful to the broad outlines of Zionism—the State’s character as both Jewish and democratic, the law of return—these radical intellectuals laid the groundwork for a new vision, said to be post-Zionist, of the Hebrew State. In their eyes, the failure of the peace process and of the Camp David summit in 2000 demonstrated the incapacity of “classical” Zionism, associated with the Labor Party and the country’s traditional elites, to rid itself of its “colonial” nature. It was even for them the occasion to substitute a binational, or even post-national, political project for the historic demand of “two States for two peoples,” a demand that now seemed to them to grant national particularisms too generous a share.
Between the two lefts, dialogue still seemed possible in the early 1990s, the Zionists displaying a certain open-mindedness and a willingness to revise those aspects of the “national novel” judged mythical and apologetic, notably those bearing on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the structure of Israeli society. With the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, however, the reception of post-Zionist ideas within public opinion was brutally interrupted. The hour was no longer for revising history textbooks, still less for taking the Palestinian point of view into consideration, but for internal consensus, national withdrawal and tension. Admissible and tolerable in a context of reconciliation, the self-critical rereading of the Israeli party’s role in the conflict appeared, in a situation of violence, out of place, mistaken and in any case premature. The post-Zionists were reproached with having helped to weaken Israeli morale and, through their theses, with spreading a guilt complex that ended in calling into question Israel’s legitimacy.
Finally, the critique of the Zionist, secular and Western hegemony that had imposed itself to the detriment of Mizrahi and religious social groups also reached its limits: the Intifada relativized and provisionally suspended the reality of these social and cultural hierarchies, since the riders of public transport and the well-heeled customers of trendy cafés alike found themselves equal before the bombs.
The disarray was sharper still among the Zionist intellectuals close to Meretz, the Labor Party and the peace movement Shalom Akhshav: had they not, for more than thirty years, staked everything on the idea that the occupation was, if not the root of the evil, at least an outgrowth that one had only to excise in order to resolve the conflict? Now they realized that ending the occupation through the return of the territories, however justified, did not exhaust the entire dispute, as was shown by the problem of the 1948 refugees, whose return to Israel Arafat persisted in demanding. The intellectuals who claimed the Zionist left were thrown back upon their naïveté about the implicit intentions of the Palestinians and of the Arab world, indeed upon the quasi-mystical and messianic nature of their belief in peace—the very antithesis of the rational judgment they nonetheless liked to claim for themselves.
The resumption of dialogue
After years of rupture, dialogue today seems to be reviving, but in another form. This time it is not by way of petitions, pamphlets and “open letters,” but through more sustained publications. Books appear, one after another, from researchers determined to get to the heart of the matter and to challenge public opinion in addressing the questions of the day. A good part of the questions these books strive to answer of course overlaps with those debated in Europe and the United States (for example, national identity in an age of pluralism), but they take on a particular acuity, for in Israel’s case they bear on its ever-disputed legitimacy, whether to challenge it or, on the contrary, to consolidate it.
One thus observes a thematic shift relative to the debates of the years preceding the second Intifada: it is no longer really the solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict that is at stake today. For everyone knows its broad outlines: apart from the right-wing intellectuals, who favor the status quo so as to perpetuate the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria, there is a very broad consensus that, sooner or later, Israel will have to permit the creation of an independent Palestinian State. Current polemics bear rather on the means and the conditions for getting there. Finally, the intellectuals involved in the debate now favor another angle of approach, setting the ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity of society against the Zionist definition of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” State.
In this regard, the appearance of Post-sionisme, Post-Shoah (Post-Zionism, Post-Shoah) by Elhanan Yakira—a specialist in the philosophy of science and head of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—is an event. Apart from the collective volume directed by Tuvia Frilling, Réponse à un collègue post-sioniste (An Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague), the left seemed intimidated by the post-Zionist assault, any riposte being instantly catalogued as “reactionary.” To be sure, since the outbreak of the second Intifada two responses had been given, but they belonged to other registers.
On the political plane, the Geneva declaration demonstrated that the Zionist left was still capable of regaining the initiative. From the standpoint of the Israeli signatories, this declaration signified a firm and definitive condemnation of the Israeli military and civilian occupation. It also implied that no act committed in the name of the State of Israel since its creation—from the expulsion of Palestinians during the war of independence to the Israeli domination and repression exercised since 1967—could provide grounds for calling into question its right to exist and to endure as the State of the Jewish nation.
On the literary plane, the defense of Zionism was taken up by one of the most talented writers of the Hebrew world, Amos Oz, in Une histoire d’amour et de ténèbres (A Tale of Love and Darkness). The success of this autobiographical novel cannot be explained by its literary qualities alone: beyond the childhood narrative, the writing of this book was, by the author’s own admission, his answer to the caricatural representation of Zionism as a form of colonialism. By placing at the heart of the narrative not fictional characters but his own parents, Amos Oz wished to restore the destiny of those emigrants vomited out of the Europe where they were born, in search of a haven in that Palestine which was not familiar to them.
Disagreements over the memory of the Shoah
Three years later, Elhanan Yakira takes up the torch to carry it onto the terrain where the contestation of Israel had long remained unanswered: moral and political reflection. He does so by taking on one of the leading intellectuals of the post-Zionist current: the philosopher Adi Ophir, a specialist in postmodernism and founder of the journal Theoria Ou-bikoret (Theory and Criticism). If Yakira mounted the ramparts, it was to protest against the way Ophir establishes the link between the memory of the Shoah and the State of Israel.
His book resembles a pamphlet in tone, except that Yakira preferred to dissect, argument by argument, the post-Zionist philosopher’s thesis, which he equates with a denial of the Shoah. Not that he suspects Ophir of denying the reality of the genocide. Simply, having read the French Holocaust deniers in the original—from Pierre Guillaume to Serge Thion, from Paul Rassinier to Robert Faurisson—he came to perceive the close link between denialism and anti-Zionism: for these deniers the negation of Israel is something primary, and it is from it that the necessity of denying the reality of the Shoah subsequently follows. And he finds the same approach in Adi Ophir, for whom it is “the religion of the Shoah” that renders Israelis deaf to the rights of the Palestinian people. It is the memory of the Shoah, as it is sustained in the schools, through commemorations or in political discourse—it is this omnipresence in the “Israeli doxa”—that would confirm Israel in its self-representation as a victim and would render it blind to reality.
In Yakira’s eyes, this is an ideology and not a historical inquiry that produces evidence. It suffices that the hypothesis be seductive and plausible, that it justify preconceived ideas, that it distribute the roles in Manichaean fashion between victims and executioners, for it to be at once raised to the rank of truth. This ideology works no better, he continues, in explaining the attitude of the international community toward Israel from its creation up to the present day: a stubborn examination of the facts belies the idea that it is still and always the Shoah that paralyzes and intimidates the nations of the world in the face of Israel’s actions. The attitude toward Israel is most often dictated by State interests, in no way by considerations linked to the Shoah.
In both cases, Ophir arrives at the conclusion that the memory of the Shoah is an obstacle, a corpse that ought to be disposed of. Yakira, for his part, does not think it useful to denounce the instrumentalization made of it: it was almost inevitable. For it is vain to think that commemoration could be reserved for the victims alone and their kin. Moreover, Ophir seems to forget that the condemnation of the occupation can also be grounded in the memory of the Shoah.
What Yakira finds intolerable is that the Shoah is never envisaged as such, in its historical density, but solely at the level of its indirect consequences, at the level of its repercussions in Palestine and of its instrumentalized representations. Before examining its effects in the present, is it not imperative to recognize it for what it was: the extermination of the Jews? Likewise, the faults and crimes committed by Israel cannot, in his eyes, be compared to Nazism, which does not mean that they should be tolerated. “Israel is not perfect, obviously, but neither is it the monster it is made out to be.” Now, if Ophir persists in maintaining so abusive and excessive a comparison, it is not in order to shake the ambient torpor, but precisely because, for him, the legitimacy of Israel is debatable. Associated with Nazism, this legitimacy—already fragile and contested by the Palestinians—tips over into illegitimacy.
The polemic over the Shoah offers us a vantage point from which to follow the lines of cleavage that set the left-wing Zionists against the post-Zionists: for both alike, the occupation of the territories must cease as soon as possible, given the moral damage and the injustices it engenders. Yet, whereas for the post-Zionists the occupation is the principal front, the primordial struggle that commands all the others, for the Zionist left the occupation of the territories remains an “accident”: it could have been avoided had King Hussein not dragged his army into the war. It could already have belonged to the past had the negotiations succeeded at Camp David. The maintenance of Israeli domination, if it owes much, to be sure, to the political forces favorable to “Greater Israel,” cannot be dissociated either from the historic rejection of Israel by the Arab countries, from the ambiguity sustained regarding the Jewish people’s right to a nation-state of its own.
Disagreements over the character of the State
In the current conjuncture, the post-Zionists do not cry victory, even if the tendency of Israeli public opinion is on the whole favorable to the withdrawal they advocate: whether unilateral or the fruit of negotiation, the withdrawal has still not advanced beyond the level of declarations, and even should it finally become reality, it would have only the outer appearances of one: a pullback of the army, the dismantling of most—but not all—of the settlements, the maintenance of the “apartheid wall.” On the contrary, it would still, in their view, amount to—if not the continuation of war by other means—at least the maintenance of Israeli control and domination. In short, an occupation less visible, more insidious, but no less effective and just as constraining for the Palestinians.
For the post-Zionists, then, the true stake is neither territorial withdrawal nor even the creation of a Palestinian State, but the very character of the State of Israel. This line of analysis has recently been enriched by two works. The first is collective and is soberly entitled In/égalité (In/equality). Composed of brief chapters written by more than forty “new sociologists,” it lays out all the facets and all the aspects of inequalities, recent or old, of a society that proves a thousand leagues from the socialist ideals that had animated it and that even then, in their day, were a mystification: inequality in citizenship, inequality between center and periphery, inequality of income, in access to health, education, housing, the media, and so on. Some authors observe that the growth of inequalities is not specific to Israel but stems from a worldwide phenomenon; here, however, it is not so much capitalism or globalization as Zionism that is the cause of it. Their judgment of it is merciless: it is regarded sometimes as a factor that has maintained and legitimized structural inequality (between Jews and Arabs in particular), sometimes as an egalitarian ideology whose role is to conceal relations of force (between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews) so as to ensure the reproduction of the elites. It is the pessimistic tendency of post-Zionism that dominates here: little is staked on the regrouping of social forces with a view to forming a common front of opposition to the economic system, so divided are these forces by ethnic and religious cleavages that exclude any lasting alliance.
In contrast to this black book of inequalities, the work of Uri Ram, Le Temps du « post » (The Time of the “Post”), shines by its tenacious optimism. Quite resolved to refute the ill-omened prophecies that had decreed the end of post-Zionism with the failure of Oslo, the author observes not the disappearance of post-Zionism but its deep integration into Israeli political culture. It is therefore in no way a funeral oration that he delivers, but on the contrary an interim assessment, broadly positive, of the work accomplished by this current of thought. Le Temps du « post » above all gives an account of the achievements of the post-Zionist school in the historical and sociological disciplines. The author, who in 1993 had coordinated the first collective volume to cast a critical gaze on the mutations of Israeli society, displays an obvious sympathy for a handful of critical researchers, whose rise was resounding and who dethroned the mandarins who reigned in most departments of sociology and history.
Uri Ram sins, however, by a reductive vision of the intellectual field: one is Zionist or post-Zionist, or else nothing. He envisages no intermediate category, so fixed do his eyes remain on a binary vision—paradoxical when it emanates from a postmodern thinker supposedly open to the hybrid: “Contrary to a sociology of the project,” he says, “the time of the post is the time of the sociology of the everyday. It is not a sociology of charisma, but a sociology of routine. Not a sociology of ideas, but a sociology of practices; not a sociology of values, but a sociology of strategies.”
Without neglecting the importance of the scientific contribution that he himself and his peers may claim, Uri Ram rejoices above all in the public debate aroused by the post-Zionists and their ambition to transform the State of Israel. For him this is the decisive struggle, whose stake is the very notion of a “Jewish and democratic State.” Ram is convinced that time will take it upon itself to burst the contradiction that, in his view, inhabits this notion. But this bursting will not result in the triumph of one over the other, but in the emergence of a new form, as yet unknown.
There is here something like an unprecedented temperance among the “new sociologists.” Uri Ram is perhaps the one who best deserves the name of post-Zionist, where many of his colleagues, by their rancor, should rather be ranged on the side of the anti-Zionists. Despite the temptation to Manichaeism that prompts one to extol some and to despise others, one is struck to discover, here and there, calls for complementarity: conceiving of post-Zionist democracy as a “two-story building,” with “common areas” on the ground floor and “communal rooms” upstairs, Ram explains that this conception takes account of the Israeli territorial reality produced by Zionism, providing a response of a pragmatic and not an ideological order. It is this constructive, pacified tone that most distinguishes him from the vituperations of Adi Ophir.
Justifying the law of return
It is this permanent examination of the limits to be established and not to be crossed that makes for the density and the depth of the book by Haïm Gans, professor of philosophy of law and of moral philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In De Richard Wagner au droit au retour (From Richard Wagner to the Right of Return), Gans pursues the approach inaugurated by the writer Avraham B. Yehoshua, who had set himself the task of formulating a universal justification of Zionism and had grounded the right to a Jewish State in Palestine on “distress.” In a more academic than literary mode, Gans likewise examines the means of grounding the law of return democratically. The question he raises is pertinent, since this law applies, throughout the world, to Jews wishing to settle in Israel, eligible to obtain citizenship on simple request, and not to the Arabs who might wish to do so. Can one be content to affirm that the Palestinian State will in turn vote one of its own so as to close the examination of ours? Does a Jewish and democratic State have the right to take care to guarantee a Jewish majority? Is this an absolute right? A right grounded in the history of persecutions? In the Israeli-Arab conflict? And if so, what are the bounds beyond which these demographic preoccupations would become contrary to law?
His answers, Gans submits to reflection more than he prescribes them. The essential thing, he says, is to pursue the reasoning, to keep questioning the rights and the limits one must set against them when they collide with other rights, no less respectable. Questions of this kind are not foreign to democracy; they are even its very heart. Just as one must question the limits beyond which liberty hampers equality (and vice versa), just as one must determine the limits of multiculturalism so as not to hamper feminism (and reciprocally), so too one must, in identical terms, envisage the debate over Israel as a State at once Jewish and democratic. Jews currently constitute 80% of the country’s population. In a situation of historic conflict, still unresolved, this hegemony too must be debated so that numerical advantage does not become the tyranny of the majority.
This debate has begun. It is hardly surprising that it arouses many reservations and disappointments. A courageous attempt was made during 2006 by the Israel Democracy Institute, bringing together Jewish and Arab figures, among them political scientists, sociologists, jurists, a rabbi, a sheikh and a member of the Knesset. The stake was not slight: to draft a new Judeo-Arab social contract. To whom does this land belong? recounts the stages of this long march: the hopes and the crises, the expectations—and finally the failure. The interest of the undertaking lies in the very disposition to evade no question. At a moment when Zionism is so contested, one may find it risky and rash to lend oneself to such an exercise. The role of intellectuals, when politicians create deadlock, is to pursue the confrontation of ideas. One may regret that these debates remain very ethnocentric: it is only ever a matter of Zionism and Israel, of Jews and Arabs, of the secular and the orthodox. This clarification is nonetheless necessary, precisely because it is carried out without taboos. The dialogue is not without invective; at times one is on the verge of setting two monologues against each other in a closed vessel. But one must not ask too much: in a context of endemic violence, it is salutary that dialogue, however sharp-edged, continue.