understand this development, you have to take a clear-eyed look at Israel and forgo any bias for or against. I live in a rather strange society. As the closing chapter of the book shows—to the annoyance of many book reviewers—Israel cannot be described as a democratic state while it sees itself as the state of the “Jewish people,” rather than as a body representing all the citizens within its recognized boundaries (not including the occupied territories). The spirit of Israel’s laws indicates that, at the start of the twenty-first century, the state’s objective is to serve Jews rather than Israelis, and to provide the best conditions for the supposed descendants of this ethnos rather than for all the citizens who live in it and speak its language. In fact, anyone born to a Jewish mother may have the best of both worlds—being free to live in London or in New York, confident that the State of Israel is theirs, even if they do not wish to live under its sovereignty. Yet anyone who did not emerge from Jewish loins and who lives in Jaffa or in Nazareth will feel that the state in which they were born will never be theirs.
Yet there is a rare kind of liberal pluralism in Israel, which weakens in times of war but functions quite well in peacetime. So far it has been possible in Israel to express a range of political opinions at literary events, to have Arab parties take part in parliamentary elections (provided they do not question the Jewish nature of the state), and to criticize the elected authorities. Certain liberal freedoms—such as freedom of the press, of expression and of association—have been protected, and the public arena is both variegated and secure. That is why it was possible to publish this book, and why its reception in 2008 was lively and aroused genuine debate.
Furthermore, the tight grip of the national myths has long been loosened. A younger generation of journalists and critics no longer echoes its parents’ collectivist ethos, and searches for the social models cultivated in London and New York. Globalization has sunk its aggressive talons into the cultural arenas even of Israel and has, in the process, undermined the legends that nurtured the “builders’ generation.” An intellectual current known as post-Zionism is now found, though marginally, in various academic institutions, and has produced unfamiliar pictures of the past. Sociologists, archaeologists, geographers, political scientists, philologists, and even filmmakers have been challenging the fundamental terms of the dominant nationalism.
But this stream of information and insights has not reached the plateau on which resides a certain discipline, called “The History of the Israelite People” in Hebrew academies. These institutions have no departments of history as such, but rather departments of general history—such as the one I belong to—and separate departments of Jewish (Israelite) history. It goes without saying that my harshest critics come from the latter. Aside from noting minor errors, they chiefly complained that I had no business discussing Jewish historiography because my area of expertise is Western Europe. Such criticism was not leveled against other general historians who tackled Jewish history, provided they did not deviate from the dominant thinking. “The Jewish people,” “the ancestral land,” “exile,” “diaspora,” “aliyah,” “Eretz Israel,” “land of redemption” and so forth are key terms in all reconstructions within Israel of the national past, and the refusal to employ them is seen as heretical.
I was aware of all this before I began writing this book. I expected my attackers to claim that I lacked a proper knowledge of Jewish history, did not understand the historical uniqueness of the Jewish people, was blind to its biblical origin, and denied its eternal unity. But it seemed to me that to spend my life at Tel Aviv University amid its vast collection of volumes and documents about Jewish history without taking time to read and tackle them would have been a betrayal of my profession. Certainly it is pleasant, as a well-established professor, to travel to France and the United States to gather material about Western culture, enjoying the power and tranquility of academe. But as a historian taking part in shaping the collective memory of the society I live in, I felt it was my duty to contribute directly to the most sensitive aspects of this task.
Admittedly, the disparity between what my research suggested about the history of the Jewish people and the way that history is commonly understood—not only within Israel but in the larger world—shocked me as much as it shocked my readers. Generally speaking, educational systems teach you to begin writing after you have finished your thinking—meaning that you should know your conclusion before you start writing (that was how I obtained my doctoral degree). But now I found myself being shaken repeatedly as I worked on the composition. The moment I began to apply the methods of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and others, who instigated a conceptual revolution in the field of national history, the materials I encountered in my research were illuminated by insights that led me in unexpected directions. I should emphasize that I encountered scarcely any new findings—almost all such material had previously been uncovered by Zionist and Israeli historiographers. The difference is that some elements had not been given sufficient attention, others were immediately swept under the historiographers’ rug, and still others were “forgotten” because they did not fit the ideological needs of the evolving national identity. What is so amazing is that much of the information cited in this book has always been known inside the limited circles of professional research, but invariably got lost en route to the arena of public and educational memory. My task was to organize the historical information in a new way, to dust off the old documents and continually reexamine them. The conclusions to which they led me created a radically different narrative from the one I had been taught in my youth.
Unfortunately, few of my colleagues—the teachers of history in Israel—feel it their duty to undertake the dangerous pedagogical mission of exposing conventional lies about the past. I could not have gone on living in Israel without writing this book. I don’t think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books. I may be naive, but it is my hope that the present work will be one of them.
Tel Aviv, 2009
Introduction: Burdens of Memory
A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.
—Karl Deutsch, Nationality and Its Alternatives, 1969
I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs.
—Ernest Gellner, “Reply to Critics,” 1996
This book is a work of history. Nonetheless, it will open with a number of personal stories that, like all biographical writing, required a liberal amount of imagination to give them life. To begin like this is less strange than readers may at first imagine. It is no secret that scholarly research is often motivated by personal experiences. These experiences tend to be hidden beneath layers of theory; here some are proffered at the outset. They will serve the author as the launch pad in his passage toward historical truth, an ideal destination that, he is aware, no one ever truly reaches.
Personal memory is untrustworthy—we do not know the color of the ink with which it was written—and thus one should view the depiction of the following encounters as inexact and partly fictitious, though no more so than any other type of biographical writing. As for their possibly troublesome connection with the central thesis of this book, readers will discover it as they proceed. True, their tone is sometimes ironic, even melancholic. But irony and melancholy have their uses, and might jointly be suitable attire for a critical work that seeks to isolate the historical roots and changing nature of identity politics in Israel.
IDENTITY IN MOVEMENT
The First Story—Two Immigrant Grandfathers
His
