The Invention and Decline of Israeliness. Baruch Kimmerling
the builders of the Israeli state and society. During the past two decades, changes have accelerated, and few earlier assumptions about Israel's demographic composition, political and social boundaries, cultural character, or social and economic structures remain valid. In addition, Israel is undergoing processes of change in position and location on both the international and regional planes—processes that are strongly interlinked with domestic developments.
Nevertheless, the changes in rhetoric and social roles have left some of Israel's core characteristics and social institutions unaltered. Israel is still an active immigrant settler society, domestically and externally a relatively strong state (even if less stable than in the past), based on two deep cultural codes, common at least to its Jewish citizens—militarism and “Jewishness.” The increasing Jewish sentiment—a mixture of secular nationalism and mainly popular-fundamentalist religiousness—is at the same time a partial continuation of the initial social order and a consequence of its decline.
Perhaps the most dramatic changes that have occurred in Israel are the evaporation of the image of a single, unified Israeli society, the decline of a unique Israeli identity (notwithstanding excluded and marginal groups, such as the Arabs and Orthodox Jews), and the diminishment of hegemonic secular Hebrew culture. Within the Israeli state, a system of cultural and social plurality is emerging, but in the absence of a concept or ideology of multiculturalism. Today, Israel is undergoing an accelerated process of invention, creation, and institution-building by about seven different cultures and countercultures, without an accepted hierarchy among them. These cultures are based on and reinforced by ethnic, class, and religious components and differ in the sharpness of their social boundaries, the level of their organization, and their consciousness of the degree to which they are separate.
This process is being complemented by another trend, the subdivision of Israeli identity, nationalism, and collective memory into many versions, with only a soft common core. The result has been not only a process of reshaping collective identity but also a continuous conflict over the meaning of what might be called Israeliness, the rules of the game, and the criteria for distribution and redistribution of common goods.
The seven cultures, which are each presently in different stages of crystallization, are the previously hegemonic secular Ashkenazi upper middle class, the national religious, the traditionalist Mizrahim (Orientals), the Orthodox religious, the Arabs, the new Russian immigrants, and the Ethiopians. Although none of these social groups is homogeneous, and most of them harbor deep political and ideological divergences (e.g., “hawks” vs. “doves”), each still holds on to a separate collective identity and also wages an open cultural war against the others.
It seems that two contradictory phenomena have occurred within the Israeli state. The first phenomenon entails the decomposition of the original Zionist hegemony into many conflicting ideological and institutional segments, which have created a kind of diverse degree of separatist civil society or societies, as was mentioned above. The second phenomenon entails the persistence of the state's strength and centrality—in terms of both monopolizing regulation of the common good and passing legislation, as well as playing a key role in the continuous interrelations between the cultural sphere and the might and myth of the state's military.
The multidimensional relationships of this second phenomenon make for an almost total lack of boundaries between the military and social (public and private) spheres. This is not just a matter of military world-views (sometimes called the “military mind”) influencing civilian institutions, and neither is Israel the kind of besieged and completely mobilized “Jewish Sparta” it is often depicted as. Rather, the situation is one in which military and other social problems are so highly intermingled that social and political issues become construed as “existential security” issues and vice versa, making it almost impossible to differentiate between them. The Israeli military-industrial complex, which is well described by the professional literature, is merely a particular case of the wider military-cultural complex.
What is the historical background of this situation? How and why has it occurred, and what are the practical consequences for Israel? These are the major issues dealt with in this volume. The book attempts to provide a kaleidoscopic and multifarious picture of Israeli state and society by combining historical evidence, sociological analysis, and cultural paradigms.
In addition, I am arguing that the strength and capability of the Israeli military to penetrate society is predicated by the military's all-embracing and civilian nature. For this reason, the state and its extension through the military institution has been a major actor in the Zionist story. Nevertheless, because the state is not in a zero-sum situation vis-à-vis other actors of civil society (or semi-autonomous spheres of activity), a process of partial “normalization” and individualization has occurred, and non-statist bodies based on diverse organizational principles have appeared.
I also share my late friend and colleague Dan Horowitz's view that Israeli civilians are “partially militarized” and the military is “partially civilianized.” In this volume, I go further in analyzing just how partial this “partially” is, which parts have been militarized and which civilianized, how this was done, and, most important, why. Today, Israel is considered one of the most powerful medium-sized nation-states in the world. The Israeli state's internal strength is demonstrated by its high capacity to recruit internal human and material resources for collective goals, while its external strength is demonstrated by its formidable military might and its salient influence on global, economic, and political agendas. Nonetheless, the Israeli state and society still constitute an active immigrant settler sociopolitical entity (perhaps the last of its kind in the world), lacking a finalized and consensual geopolitical and social identity, boundaries, and location in the political and cultural environment of the Middle East. These traits create a strong sense of vulnerability and weakness, which continues to endanger the state's very existence in the region, as well as the stability and continuity of its original internal social fabric and structure.
As an immigrant settler society, Israel has not only faced violent resistance on the part of the hostile local population of the country and other nations of the region, but has also made confrontation with them a source of internal strength for its settler elites and leadership and a tool for material and human resource mobilization. As a society espousing an ideology of immigration, it has not only imported human and material capital, but has also been obliged to use the tools of “human engineering” in order to homogenize immigrants by imposing newly invented identities on existing ideologies, symbols, and identity codes.
The Israeli state came to being in the context of incremental Jewish immigration from many countries and continents, against the will of the local population, and in the face of both passive and active resistance. Unlike most other immigrant settler societies—in North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia—the Zionist colonizers did not choose their destination because of an abundance of natural resources, fertile free land, water, mines, oil, forests, or a comfortable climate. Nor did the immigrants to the so-called “Land of Israel” represent an imperial power. Rather, the target land was chosen because of a national ideology, Zionism, based on symbols and codes borrowed from the nineteenth-century European version of Jewish religion and ethnicity. The secular (liberal-or socialist-oriented) founding fathers and the inventors of modern Jewish nationalism borrowed the religiously preserved collective memory of the ancient Holy Land, Zion, as the territorial base for their nation-and state-building efforts. These reinterpretations of religious notions and myths were intended to serve as a powerful recruitment engine for Jewish immigration to Zion by proffering a collective form of salvation from persecution and oppression suffered in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in other parts of the world. At the same time, religious symbols and especially biblical texts, constructed and reinterpreted as “history,” were considered a very useful tool for generating internal and external legitimacy for the Zionist colonization venture.
In the beginning, Zionism was only a marginal idea among Occidental (so-called Ashkenazi) Jewry. About 150 years before the triumph of Zionism, the traditional form of European Jewish community (or ghetto) had been slowly dismantled by a series of internal and external events and processes (see chapter 1). The political and social emancipation granted to Jewish citizens