What's Left of the Onion?

Israel Bartal What’s Left of the Onion? A ‘Post-Modernist’ Tract against ‘Post-Zionism’ “[ . ] we ought not to create new distinctions between people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old disappear”.¹ I , “Politics and Collective Memory,” published in the pro- ceedings of an academic conference held in November , Anita Shapira wrote as follows: Israeli historiography of the last thirty years has striven to free itself from ideological approaches to history and analysis: academic historiography fl ourished along with the process of liberating itself from political perspec- tives. It sought to relieve young Zionist historiography of the burden of hagiography that had marked political literature of the s–s. > ere was, of course, general awareness that all historians are products of their time and place, burdened with the preconceptions inculcated in them by their education, society and personal biography. Nevertheless, the aspiration was that the historian should make a conscious eff ort to transcend human limitations and allow the source material to speak for itself. [ . ] Some of the ‘revisionists’ have sought to give renewed legitimacy to the politiciza- tion of research, justifying this move by means of vulgarized version of postmodernism: there is no reality but in the eyes of the beholder. > us, one cannot speak of objective facts, and even less so of historical truth. [ . ] > is view is meant to serve as the basis for return of ideology to historiography: every historian has a political agenda, whether overt or covert. > us, the ideological approach is legitimate when analyzing historical material. His- tory, according to this version, is a ‘narrative’, that is, a story invented by historians out of their own ideological needs. > e conclusion to be drawn • , , is that no story is more authentic than any other, each is meant to further the political or social ends of its author or the interest group he or she represents.² > is acerbic criticism was written about the phenomenon known in Israel as “the new historians.” It was directed against the ahistorical character of the arguments advanced by the left wing of political writing about Zionism and history of the Yishuv. We have before us a political tract of a new sort, one that is precisely targeted by Shapira’s criticism, except that this time it is a political composition from the other political wing. Yoram Hazony’s e Jewish State: the Struggle for Israel’s Soul is evidently the fullest and most developed manifestation of post-Zionist historical revisionism on the right.³ Central fi gures from the past, including Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Gershom Sholem, Jacob Talmon and Joshua Prawer, as well as living intellectuals such as Eliezer Schweid, Asa Kasher, and Aharon Appelfeld are presented as supporters of “a post-Jewish state.”⁴ > ey are all indefatigable subversives, like secret Sabateans who present themselves as Zionists in public while committing their despicable deeds in the dark, uprooting Judaism from the State of Israel and working for the end of the state.⁵ I would not comment on e Jewish State were it not for the fact that I know that some may be ensnared by such ideas, all the more so because they are ostensibly the result of broad research, overfl owing with references and replete with quoted passages. Hazony’s book presents itself as the fi rst major composition to deal with the annals of post-Zionism. > e book comprises four parts. > e fi rst deals with uncovering the infl uence of post-Zionism on the institutions of the State of Israel and describing how this infl uence threatens Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. > e author also surveys, inter alia, the curriculum of the Israeli educational system as a refl ection of the noxious and destructive infl uence of post- Zionism.⁶ > e second part of the book returns to the beginning of the Zionist movement and focuses on the idea of the Jewish state as crystallized by > eodor Herzl. > e third part describes the titanic struggle that was waged during the Mandate between the champions of the idea of the Jewish state, led by David Ben-Gurion, and a group of German-born Hebrew University professors. > e fourth and last part deals with the intellectuals’ victory over Ben-Gurion and how the spirit of the Hebrew University clique came to dominate present-day Israeli politics. > e author’s conclusion is unambiguous: a direct line runs from Ahad Ha’am’s opposition to Herzl’s political Zionism to the opponents of “the What’s Left of the Onion? • idea of the Jewish state” in contemporary Israeli society. Buber and Judah Magnes, the University’s President, opposed it openly. > eir successors do so covertly, whether consciously or because they fail to understand where their harmful path is leading. Hazony makes this explicit: > us, although the explicit term ‘binationalism’ may have been driven underground in the years after the birth of Israel, all the vast arsenal of ideas that had led to this political conclusion remained intact. In fact, by examining some of the major themes emphasized by professors in the humanities and social sciences at the Hebrew University, it is possible to see the ideological substructure upon which the subsequent trend towards ‘post-Zionism’—and the delegitimization of the idea of the Jewish state- among the students of the professors was based.⁷ What we have, then, is a general and all-embracing revision of the history of the Zionist movement. In order to get a feel for the scholarly value of this revision, the mode of argumentation it employs, and the validity of its conclusions, I will focus on one issue, the assertion that Judaic Studies in the State of Israel is a weapon aimed against the state.⁸ For this we should examine the chapter in which the author of e Jewish State deals with the scholarly work of several of the greatest teachers in the annals of the Hebrew University, including Buber, Scholem, Prawer, and Talmon. For example, how did Scholem sin to the point that his scholarship threatens the integrity of the State? According to Hazony: Without entering into the question of whether this interpretation of Hasidim [the ‘neutralization’ of Messianism -I. B.] is correct—recent research suggests that that it is not—one can readily appreciate why such an interpretation of Hasidism would be attractive to German-Jewish thinkers. After all, it in eff ect attributes to the Jewish mystical tradition, which is hundreds (if not thousands) years old, the very same ideas that were the cornerstone of nineteenth-century emancipationist Judaism: ‘Zion’ is essentially a meta- phor; that redemption can be brought about equally by every man, wherever he may be; and that there is consequently no longer any need to hope for a particular leader or movement (‘the Messiah’) to bring about historical- political Jewish restoration in Palestine [sic!], since this aim within Judaism has been ‘liquidated’.⁹ To Hazony, the political danger is unmistakable: Scholem’s teachings are liable to lead students to the conclusion that: “the Hasmonean kings, • , , Masada, Bar-Kochba, ShabtaiTzvi, or even Herzl [ . ] were standing in the dark side of Jewish history.”¹⁰ > e presentation of the sins of Prawer, the historian of the Crusader Kingdom in Palestine, may trouble even those who accept our book’s interpretation of the dangers posed by Scholem’s work: [ . ] Prawer pioneered the academic discipline of trying to understand the history of Palestine [sic!] from the point of view of the Arabs. ‘I tried to see the Crusades not from the European point of view’, explained Prawer, ‘but from the other way around’. And, indeed, his scholarly writing did not shrink from referring to the Christian settlers as ‘the destroyers’ [ . ] > is affi nity for the Arab historical perspective—which, it will be recalled, had been one of Magnes’s central ideological goals in establishing the Hebrew University—had a direct impact on the manner in which Prawer’s students viewed Zionism. A good example is the historian Meron Benvenisti, today a well-known journalist. [ . ] Not surprisingly, Meron Benvenist’s ability to see contemporary politics from the Arab perspective has left its marks on his own politics, and today he is one of the leading exponents of reconstituting Israel as a binational Arab-Jewish state.¹¹ According to our Hazony, Prawer, even though he himself was not an opponent of the Jewish state, “devoted his academic career to evoking emotional sympathy for an anti-Zionist historical narrative adopted from Arab political propaganda—in so doing transmitting the binationalism of his own mentor, Koebner, to a new generation of students”.¹² In a similar fashion, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Jacob Talmon, and Natan Rotenstreich are assigned the role of passing on the anti-Zionist torch from the founding generation of the Hebrew University to the post- Zionist Israeli intelligentsia of our own time. Critical readers can only wonder: is it possible to be a professionally respectable historian and have a loyal Zionist outlook? Is it possible for post-modern criticism to leave untouched even a modicum of hope for the existence of historical truths that do not depend on deconstructivist political exegesis? > is book provides an explicit answer: no! > ere is no mercy. Everything is relative, long live post-modernism, the greatest tyrant of our age! And when post- Zionist discourse teams up with radical politics in the one-dimensional and pitiless way in which it wreaks havoc with the discipline of history, where shall we all fi nd refuge? History and politics have always been interwoven. > e historians of national movements never concealed the link between their scholarly What’s Left of the Onion? • work and their political views; so too with Zionist historiography.

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