Post-Zionism and Israeli Universities: the Academic-Political Nexus
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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Post-Zionism and Israeli Universities: the Academic-Political Nexus Barnett, Dana Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 KING’S COLLEGE LONDON FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES Dissertation Post-Zionism and Israeli Universities: the Academic- Political Nexus By Dana Barnett Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 1 Abstract Since the 1990s post-Zionist academics have transformed the anti-Zionist ideology of the fringe political group Matzpen, rooted in pre-1948 ideology of Brit Shalom, the Canaanites, and the Communists, into a mainstream de-legitimizing critique of Israel. Utilizing the tools of the critical, neo-Marxist paradigm depicting Israel as an imperialist, colonialist movement, these scholars have produced a ferocious critique of all facets of Israeli history and society hand-tailored to undermine the Jewish state’s legitimacy. ‘New historians’ have argued that Israel, helped by Western imperialism, overwhelmed the Palestinians and ethnically cleansed them. ‘Critical sociologists’ have depicted Israeli society as controlled by an Ashkenazi, capitalist elite that has subjugated minorities, women, the working classes. ‘Critical political scientists’ have produced voluminous research casting Israel as a fascist-like, apartheid state. And revisionist scholars have argued that Israel has turned the Holocaust into a civil religion glorifying power; has used its lessons to oppress the Palestinians; and has fed a collective paranoia that has made Israelis impervious to rational resolution of the conflict. 2 Table of Contents Introduction 4 Chapter 1 Israel in the neo-Marxist, Critical Scholarship 17 Chapter 2 Squaring the Circle: A Non-Jewish State for the Jews? 44 Chapter 3 From Rewriting to Inventing History 90 Chapter 4 The ‘Critical Sociological’ Indictment 137 Chapter 5 Israel’s Political System in Critical Political Science 173 Chapter 6 The Holocaust in Post-Zionist Thinking 227 Chapter 7 Post-Zionist Scholarship in the Service of Political Activism 283 Conclusion 327 Bibliography 332 3 Introduction This work seeks to analyse the transformation of anti-Zionist tendencies espoused by fringe political groups in Mandate Palestine’s Jewish community (or the Yishuv) and Israel’s early years into a major academic force that has affected mainstream discourse in contemporary Israeli society and has significantly contributed to eroding Israel’s international legitimacy by casting it as a colonialist, apartheid entity. Excluding the ultra-orthodox opposition, three Jewish groups rejected the idea of creating a Jewish state: Brit Shalom, the Canaanites and the Communists. While each espoused a different ideology, all shared a common vision of creating a bi- national state where Jews and Arabs would coexist in harmony. These different strands of anti-Zionism were consolidated and nourished by the fringe Matzpen group after the creation of the State of Israel, only to morph into the more prominent post- Zionism of the 1990s and early 2000s. Extant studies of anti-Zionist ideology have primarily focused on the pre-1948 era. In spite of its miniscule size, Brit Shalom and its political offshoot, Ihud , has been the subject of a relatively large number of studies mostly focused on the ideology of bi-nationalism as developed by Hebrew University president Judah L. Magnes and his intellectual mentors Ahad Ha’am (aka Asher Ginsburg) and Martin Buber. While the studies differ in scope and interest, they all highlight the Brit-Ihud’s principled rejection of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in favour of a vaguely defined cultural-political entity. Ahad Ha’am’s much invoked ‘cultural centre’ tasked the Palestinian Jews with creating a cultural and education entity to serve the Diaspora Jews. Buber’s ‘dialogual community’ was derived from the contention that a spiritual 4 community - ruled by a consensus achieved through discourse - was morally superior to a state based on power. Apprehensive about the Zionist quest for sovereign power, Buber broke with David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders denouncing them as power-hungry politicians ‘who serve Hitler’s God after he was given a Hebrew name’. 1 Starting with the classic study by Susan Lee Hattis, the Bi-national Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times, this body of work suggests that Brit Shalom turned the ‘dialogue community’ into the more serviceable formula of a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews. 2 A number of biographies of Magnes added a personal dimension to Brit Shalom’s bi-national quest. A former congregation rabbi in the US, Magnes was an elitist, a pacifist, and non-conformist with a long history of radical views. Daniel Kotzin, one of his biographers, noted that, in spite of the failure to find Arab partners and hostility from fellow Jews, Magnes showed extreme perseverance. Indeed, even the self-acknowledged ‘disconnection’ and ‘estrangement’ from the community did not dissuade him from the bi-national mission. His sense of destiny also included the Hebrew University (founded in 1925), which he viewed not only as a cultural and secular-spiritual centre but also as a buffer against the alleged political abuses of 1 Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: the Struggle for Israel's Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 244 2 See, for example, Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-national Idea in Palestine During Mandatory Times , (Haifa: Shikmona, 1970); David Goldberg, To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought (London: Penguin, 1996); Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1994); Steven J. Zippertstein , Elusive Prophet. Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 29; Joseph Heller, From Brit Shalom to Ihud (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003; Hebrew); Shalom Ratsabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925-1933 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 5 Zionism. As he put it in an address to students, ‘only the Hebrew University can fight the power of totalitarianism’. 3 Writings on the American Council on Judaism (ACJ), Magnes’ foremost supporter, offer interesting insights into the financial influence of anti-Zionist American Jews. As the Hebrew University’s philanthropists, the AJC exercised an outsized influence on the intellectual discourse in the Yishuv. In a move that would have a huge importance for the continuation of anti-Zionism, Magnes added Buber and many of his academic acolytes from Germany to the small liberal arts faculty, where they came to exert considerable influence well beyond 1948 - even as the state took over financial support of higher education. 4 The cultural antecedents of the equally tiny Canaanite movement were documented in a number of studies. In addition to James Diamond’s definitive history of the movement, a number of thematic writings have dealt with the linguistic and anthropological underpinning of the group. Yonatan Ratosh, the group’s chief ideologue and proselytizer, was credited with securing a high profile for the Canaanite ideas. Moreover, unlike the foreign pacifist Magnes and the German professors, the ‘Young Hebrews’ - the original name of the Canaanites, were native sons well versed in the vernacular of Zionism. Still, like Brit Shalom , they found it hard to find a credible formula to replace the national sovereignty ethos of Zionism. Switching from a Hebrew nation to a pan-Semitic one they arrived at a bi-national design but 3 Daniel Kozin, Judah L. Magnes: An American Jewish Nonconformist (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), pp. 166, 273; Hazony, The Jewish State , pp. 244- 45. 4 Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 6 struggled to find a proper balance between the Jews and the Arabs for the proposed entity, not to mention the total lack of interest on the part of the Arabs.5 Compared to the volume and sophistication of the research on Brit Shalom and the Canaanites, the corpus of writings on the Communist Party of Mandate Palestine is relatively small and limited to historical accounts. These writings, however, are unanimous in the conclusion that the party had a hard time with developing a bi- national formula that would satisfy both its Jewish and Arab members. The reality of nationalism trumping Marxist universalism weakened the party and was compounded by the Soviet pressure to accept Jewish sovereignty in 1948. 6 The post-1948 history of anti-Zionism, as noted above, attracted only scanty scholarly attention, not least because this ideology virtually disappeared from the intellectual and political scene during the new state’s first decades.