Academic History Caught in the Cross-Fire: The Case of Israeli-Jewish Historiography

The Israeli case seems different from Hobsbawm's assertion, as the vast majority of contemporary academic historians and social scientists in Israel are not only Zionists, but also "proudly attached" to their Zionist convictions when producing their historiographical output, no less than the founding fathers of their vocation. At the same time they try to maintain high standards of scholarship, including the publication of their works in respectable referee journals and university presses abroad. However the major body of Israeli-Zionist historiography is still only available in Hebrew (in contrast with the works published by social scientists). There is an awareness of the danger of producing a parochial or sectarian "science of history," due to the small size of the academic community and the distance of the country from the leading scientific centers. However, when ideological commitments collide with standards of objectivity and impartiality, usually the "Zionist orientations" receive primacy. This general argument must be broken into smaller parts, in order to demonstrate the specific techniques, methods and practices that are employed to produce a heterogeneous Zionist historiography. As Zionist ideology is far from a monolithic world view, Zionist history also has many variations. However, two presumptions are common to all the variations: (1) the unequivocal right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel (referring to the fact that the geopolitical boundaries of this right are under permanent dispute, or the subject of bargaining); and (2) the ultimate and only correct Zionist "solution" to the so-called "Jewish problem" is the creation of an independent Jewish state (sometimes called a "commonwealth," "polity" or "national home") in what is perceived as the ancient fatherland, here and now (and not in a messianic or utopian future).
Historiography in general, and academic discourse in particular, are embedded in an active form of knowledge that shapes collective identity by bridging between different pasts (recovered, imagined, invented and intentionally constructed) and creating meanings and boundaries for the collectivity. Within a highly ideological and mobilized society, which within a relatively short span of time created a culturally heterogeneous immigrant-settler society and shortly thereafter a state, the agents who create the "past" occupy a central position. The scope of historiographical "output" is intensified by the internal struggles of different elite groups -- political, military, cultural and economic -- each with diverse personalities and "celebrities," all of whom are anxious to assure their place in the nation-building epic or to whitewash various "misdeeds," preferring to place responsibility upon the shoulders of their rivals. The armed forces have their own "history branch," whose aim is not only to document "everything that happened" in the army, but also to "determine the truth" about events under dispute. Dozens of non-academic institutions, afffiliated with different political streams or parties, maintain private and public archives and are involved in "historiographical production." There are also many non-academic professional historians and biographers who produce a vast "knowledge of the past." An additional genre is the widely developed writing of personal memoirs, which are generally connected with "grand" national narratives such as pioneering, the Holocaust, the rescue of Jews, wars or espionage. Under such circumstances a vast depository of knowledge about the past is accumulated, based on a complex mixture of myths, subjectivized events and fabricated stories.