Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel

Gershon Shafir continued this critical sociological journey into the Zionist past.(18) He was blunter than his predecessors and reconstructed Zionism as a typical colonialist movement in a colonialist era, despite its particular characteristics such as the absence of a proper mother-country, the marginal role played by capitalist profit-and-loss considerations in the Zionist project and the evident nationalist discourse and motivation (Zionist historiography likes to call the effort in Palestine colonization without colonialism).(19) His explanation of Zionism's distinctive features is in stark contradiction to that of Zionist historians such as Anita Shapira who tend to speak of uniqueness stemming from highly exceptional moral standards.(20) Shafir prefers to stress particular geographical and economic conditions as the unique features of the Zionist movement. For him Zionism is an intriguing example of colonialism since the movement succeeded in establishing a state notwithstanding its lack of vast military or financial means. Thus the pride of Zionism, the collective form of settlements (kibbutz and moshav) are described as types of settlers' colonies. "The conquest of labor" that epitomized the Zionist dream of creating a "New Jew" liberated from his despised diasporic occupations is seen as a typical colonialist means of excluding the native from the labor and land markets. In short, ideology is a retrospective justification for the brutal takeover of Palestine. It is a discourse that developed in relation to the occupation; it is not the occupation that poses dilemmas for the ideology (as presented by scholars such as Shmuel Ettinger and Yosef Gorni).(21) Pragmatism, another source of Zionist self-esteem, is not seen as the ability to compromise with the enemy, but rather as the result of the absence of any clear grand design of how to take over the land. Hence most Zionist compromises are not with the enemy, but rather the outcome of economic considerations.
Challenging the collective hegemonic Zionist historiography in Israel is a formidable task. Most of those who write on Zionist and Jewish history still subscribe to an impossible combination of positivist and ideological approaches to history: the facts, believed to be found exclusively in political archives, are treated as the basis for proving the validity of the ideologically based Zionist narrative. The professionalization of Zionist historiography took place when Zionism had already appeared as a significant social and political force in Palestine, and Israeli historiography, its successor, was formulated during the early years of statehood. As in the case of other national movements that have established nation-states, professionalization of history meant the accessibility of political archives for scholarly research. However, when the archives were opened, there was no disagreement between researchers and politicians on what should be sought there. They both sought the roots of Jewish nationalism long before the creation of the movement in 1882. Some were content to seek them in the seventeenth century, others went back as far as biblical times. Ben Zion Dinur, one of the dominant historians in the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) and early State of Israel, saw the quest as purely professional and ideological at the same time, ignoring ipso facto the inherent contradiction of such an approach. These historians, he claimed, fused scientific mastery of the material with a clear and correct understanding of Zionism.(3) The contemporary Israeli historian Shmuel Almog has remarked that this was a natural need of Jewish nationalism: "Zionism needed history in order to prove to Jews wherever they were that they all constitute one entity and that there is historical continuity from Israel and Judea in ancient times until modern Judaism."(4) The "Jerusalem School" of historians in the 1930s tried to reconstruct the chronicles of the People of Israel with the Land of Israel as its epicenter. When scholarly proof for a conscious recognition of the Land of Israel as the focus of Judaism was inadequate, an unconscious recognition was claimed in retrospect.(5)