Cumulative Contingency: Historicizing Legitimacy in Israeli Discourse

In any event, the respective choice of topic is largely the result of a primary commitment to an ethnocentric pattern in historiography. This is highly problematic for a Jewish historical understanding that views itself first and foremost as a history of Jews because it assumes a collective consciousness, existing somehow transhistorically, even though such a broad collective perception did not emerge until after 1945. In the choice of topic, the structure and organization of the work and the more covert judgment of the historian, one can discern the effects of an anticipatory notion of the Jewish people as a quasi-political concept intended to unite the Jews. Although this notion, when applied to the period prior to Auschwitz, may be consonant with that ethnically grounded, Zionizing concept of a Jewish people, it fails to do justice to the historical reality of the Jews in the diaspora at that time. Studies, for example, dealing with Jewish resistance to the Nazis or with the Jewish leadership's attitude at the time ("proper" or "improper") fall victim to the illusion of the existence of the Jews as political subject. Admittedly, after 1945 this historiosophical perception matched reality to a far greater extent; nonetheless, it did not correspond in any way with Jewish realities before the catastrophe. Again, this phenomenon of the historical reproduction of collective patterns and behavioral premises is not merely the result of political manipulation. Rather, it is the product of that readiness after 1945 to internalize collective basic premises not only with regard to the future, but to project them back into the past -- a readiness that is only too understandable in the light of the traumatic experience of the destruction of European Jewry. Moreover, the specific nature of the destruction has a profound effect on the way it is perceived and interpreted.
The "Western" approach of individual emancipation and the civilizational primacy of human and civil rights recognizes an injustice: that those universal values were fundamentally violated in the process of Zionist colonization of the land and the associated exclusion of the indigenous Arab population, and that this is the origin and basic template for the conflict between Jews and Arabs in and for the land. By contrast, the "Eastern" approach, Jewish experience rooted in the paradigm of ethnic nationality, takes cognizance of those elements, but subordinates them to the primacy of the collective.(14) The structure of valuation, interpretation and narrative of those two experiential contexts necessarily differs. The perspective indebted to "Western" criteria of emancipation will regard the act of Jewish land purchase as a legal transaction, yet have difficulties coming to terms with its claim of legitimacy, since it did not take place on a basis of equal and continuing exchange relations between Jews and Arabs.(15) Similarly, the principle of "Jewish labor," although cloaked in the righteous garb of socioeconomic conceptions of justice, was engineered mainly for the national acquisition of the land, i.e. the exclusion of the Arab population from the nascent Jewish polity not primarily by the direct use of force, but by the power of economic modes.(16) The forms of social collectivization served one aim: ethnic homogenization. Such practices were subjected to a liberally articulated critique both in the Yishuv and later in the State of Israel, at times couched in communist discourse in tune with prevailing political-philosophical winds. Such criticism was advanced principally by groups or individuals within or even beyond Zionism's pale who, by dint of their cultural or even values-grounded context, leaned toward Western conceptions of emancipation or stemmed biographically from German-speaking Central Europe.