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PDF FormatA similar claim against the Jewish character of the state was made by Uri Ram. Recalling his participation in a 1988 protest against religious coercion in Tel Aviv, Ram offered the following critique:
The common slogan in struggles by the secular is the “separation of religion and state”…. Yet the problem of democracy in Israel is not “religion,” nor even “the religious.” The problem is inherent in the ethnic definition of the state…. It is therefore not sufficient to separate religion from state; identity and citizenship must be separated.29
The strict separation of ethnic identity from citizenship proposed by Ram would effectively bring an end to Israel as the Jewish state, and replace it with a “state of all its citizens.” Critical sociologists are fully aware of this; indeed, Ram’s statement may be said to encapsulate the movement’s entire ideological agenda, and in particular its effort to negate the central concept of classical Zionism. What was once considered a fringe position in Israeli sociology has, over the last generation, become a powerful movement in the field, and threatens to grow even stronger in the years ahead.
III
To understand the rise of critical sociology, it is important to recognize that it did not develop in a vacuum, but reflected the most popular post-modern trends in Western academia. The critical sociologists, following these trends, seek to unmask what they see as the political and social patterns of oppression that dominate Israeli society. In the 1980s and 1990s, two theoretical models, known as the Marxist and the post-colonial approaches, became especially popular.30 These theories, long favored by academic elites in the West, provided Israeli sociologists with a conceptual foundation that was well attuned to their political predispositions. Yet in their fervor to prove the relevance of these theories, critical sociologists all but abandoned attempts to offer new analyses of Israeli society’s unique features. At times, they even went so far as to distort historical facts in order to fit them into their guiding paradigms.
The Marxist approach took hold in Israeli sociology beginning in the late 1970s. In 1978, Haifa University’s Department of Sociology began publishing a journal called Mahberot Lemehkar Ulevikoret (“Bulletins of Research and Criticism”), which attempted, in the words of founding editors Henry Rosenfeld, Deborah Bernstein, Shlomo Swirski, and Deborah Kalkin,
to foster analysis of the relationships of oppression, discrimination, alienation, and backwardness which are pivotal expressions of a class-based society… [and] to create in Mahberot a forum for a critical orientation that opposes the positivist methods and “neutral” conceptions common in the social sciences. These approaches constitute… an obstacle to understanding social reality, and also to changing it.31
From the outset, the Haifa scholars repudiated the very notion of academic objectivity, claiming it would be detrimental to “understanding social reality.” No less important, they saw the Marxist approach as a means of changing that reality according to their own ideological program. For the first time, critical sociologists dropped all pretense of genuine scientific endeavor.
According to the Haifa scholars, Israeli society is made up of two groups: The “underprivileged classes,” including Palestinians and the Sephardi proletariat,32 and the predominantly Ashkenazi middle class, which benefited from the patronage of the dominant Mapai party. The true aim of Israel’s foreign and domestic policy, they maintain, was not to build and preserve a state for the Jewish people as a whole, but to enable the Ashkenazi establishment to maintain control over society’s resources. This theory explains, for instance, the nationalistic, militaristic line the state adopted when dealing with its Arab neighbors, and its patronizing attitude towards both the Palestinians and Sephardi Jews. Shulamit Carmi and Henry Rosenfeld, two of Haifa University’s most prominent sociologists, illustrated this approach in a joint study published in 1989. In their version of Israeli history, the nascent state was faced with two choices: To become a binational, socialist society, or to follow the model of militaristic nationalism. The labor movement, they argued, chose the second option, in the process ignoring the problem of Palestinian nationhood altogether, and preventing the 1948 refugees from returning to Israel. Carmi and Rosenfeld lament this historic decision:
Socialism would have had to resolve the results of the 1948 war differently, by neutralizing and demilitarizing the area, by sharing responsibility for the refugee problem and the Palestinian Arab national problem, and by forgoing the immediate advantages and benefits that militaristic nationalism claimed as privileges of victory, and which it consolidated and institutionalized in the wars that followed….33
According to Carmi and Rosenfeld, the Zionist movement’s choice transformed the conflict between Jews and Palestinians from a struggle between communities into a confrontation between nations, and “relieved Israeli society of the need to make any serious effort at coexistence.”34 Israeli statism succeeded in preventing any possibility of agrarian reform, of creating equality of economic conditions for all ethnic groups, of establishing a civil constitution, or of securing the national rights of Arabs. Carmi and Rosenfeld trace the social pattern that developed in Israel’s early years to three distinct factors: The central role of the state in the country’s economy; the large amount of foreign aid, which enabled the state to develop and arm itself while maintaining a reasonable standard of living; and an aggressive defense policy. This pattern was established to further the interests of the ruling class, which took advantage of the weaker citizens as a means of preserving and tightening its control over the country.
If Marxist socialism condemned Zionism as a regime of economic oppression, post-colonialism condemned it as a rationale for the expropriation of lands belonging to the indigenous Arab population, and the subsequent imposition of rule over Arabs and Sephardi Jews alike. This argument was advanced in a series of books, the most prominent of which were Zionism and Territory: The Socio-territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, by Baruch Kimmerling (1983); Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by Gershon Shafir (1989); and The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951, by the historian Ilan Pappe (1992).35 According to these scholars, there is no essential difference between Zionism and the European policy of colonization in Africa and Asia. Shafir, who teaches at the University of California, San Diego, and has served in recent years as president of the Association for Israel Studies, asserts that “there is a fundamental similarity… between the Zionist settlement activity and the European colonization process overseas…. The changes that occurred in Israeli society after 1967 are to be understood not as a transition from a Zionist-socialist society to a right-wing, colonial one, but as the continuation of the colonial project by means of a transition from one method of colonization to another.”36
Like advocates of the Marxist approach, scholars of the post-colonial camp also inveigh against the Zionist settlement movement, dismissing its socialist aspirations as a fraud. Shafir, for example, argues that Zionism never really intended to create an egalitarian society in Palestine:
The socialist component of their thought [i.e., of the workers of the Second Aliya] assumed an ironic bent. They opposed the exploitation of Arab workers, but solved the problem by means of a struggle to prevent the employment of Arab laborers altogether… the workers found their “Rothschilds” in the form of the World Zionist Organization… which attempted to recreate in the land of Israel a Prussian settlement from eastern Germany.37
Critical sociologists portray the Zionist “conquest of labor” as a transparent effort to create a Jewish monopoly over the labor market, thereby forcing out skilled Arab workers willing to work for low wages. Even the kibbutz, which for most people symbolized the idealistic yearning for a model society, is to the critical sociologists “the most blatant expression of the strategy of conquest of land and labor that was undertaken by the Jewish settler-workers.”38 Uri Ram summarizes this viewpoint when he writes that “the crowning achievement of socialist Zionism, the kibbutz, was not the Israeli path to an alternative society, but the Israeli path to settlement.”39
