The Invention and Decline of Israeliness. Baruch Kimmerling
as one of the central variables, which determined many ingredients of ideological value systems, as well as the institutional and economic structures and practices.
This analysis is also central to my book Zionism and Economy (1983), which treats Zionism not just as an ideology and an idea but more as a set of social, political, and economic practices, which helps explain the creation of a highly centralized statist system (in Hebrew, mamlachtiut) during the first two decades of Israel's existence (e.g., the monopoly over land and its distribution between various societal segments).
At the same time, I engaged in a series of independent and collaborative empirical and theoretical studies of the impact of the military and wars on Israeli society. The major outcome of these studies was the book The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times (published in 1985), in addition to various papers about Israeli militarism. This book provided an analytical and empirical study of direct and indirect impacts of wars on Israeli civilian society.
During the early 1990s, I revisited my own and others' research in these fields and reached some additional and different conclusions. At this stage, I was influenced by the collection of Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (1985), by the historical sociology of Charles Tilly, and later by Joel Migdal's Strong Societies and Weak States (1985, 1988). The Israeli state was reanalyzed within the context of two external circles (in addition to “the conflict”): the mobilized Jewish Diaspora and the changing world order. Adopting a less institutional, more culture-oriented approach, I reinterpreted past findings, supported by new evidence, leading me to characterize the Israeli state as a special (but not unique) type of militaristic society. This “civilian militarism” was found to be not only a basic cultural code but also an organizational principle around which large segments of the society are “arranged.” This type of militarism, contrasted, for example, with the “classic” praetorian type, is much subtler and is mainly a consequence of the intrusion of “military-mindedness” into civilian institutions and cultures. This situation led me to analyze the “peace process” from both sides in terms of the militaristic culture and power game.
This series of works, and others that followed, also led me to doubt the ability of some producers of mainstream Israeli social science and historiography to free themselves from Zionist ideologies, Jewish ethno-centrism, and “nation-building” approaches in their conceptual and theoretical dealings with the existence of “others” and “the conflict” within so-called Israeli society. These arguments triggered a series of controversies within academic and intellectual communities and were interpreted as a part of the debate over “post-Zionism.” The controversy is well described and analyzed by Laurence Silberstein's The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (1999). Two additional important studies heralded a third generation of new critical approaches to Israeli society. Gershon Shafir studied the first period of Zionist colonization efforts and extrapolated from that limited period to the entire Zionist venture in his Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 published in 1989. Shafir mixed Zuriek's colonization approach with Edna Bonacich's ethnically split labor market theory. Michal Shalev's volume Labour and the Political Economy of Israel (published in 1992) analyzed the complex relationships between the state, the all-embracing labor union Histadrut, and the dominant Labor party.
The next major step was the formulation of a more coherent and developed sociohistorical conceptual framework for “the conflict” (or, better yet, the whole spectrum of Jewish-Arab relations). This major step was rooted in my conclusion (mainly following Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser) that a conflict (any conflict) is an integral social system, that in order to be fully analyzed and understood, knowledge of all parties involved must be included. In other words, in order to achieve a more accurate picture of the “Jewish side” of relations, the “Arab and Palestinian side” must be analyzed with the same tools. As previously mentioned, the Arabs of Palestine were not traditionally incorporated conceptually and theoretically in the analysis and research of Israeli state and society. Moreover, despite the abundance of monographic works on Palestinian society, there existed no single comprehensive social and sociohistorical study of this collectivity. Thus, together with Joel Migdal, I undertook extensive research on the society-building process of Palestinians from a sociological-historical perspective, both on institution-formation and identity-formation levels. This research was published in a co-authored volume, Palestinians: The Making of a People (1993). This sociohistorical research presented a “case study” of a stateless society divided between different internal segments and facing many external forces (e.g., Ottoman Turks, Egyptians, Zionist colonization, colonial powers, world market, and Arab and Islamic societies, states, and cultures). The work was built on the basic assumption of a refined version of the world systems approach. The Hebrew and Arabic versions of the book have been extended through the constitution of the Palestinian National Authority.
I should like to make my readers aware that, in addition to my professional activities, I am deeply involved in Israeli public discourse, both intellectually and politically. For the past thirty years, I have written freelance for different sections of the Hebrew daily newspaper Ha'aretz, from its literary and cultural supplements to the op-ed page. A polemical book entitled The End of the Israeli WASP's Hegemony is soon to be published in Hebrew.
Finally, I should like to say something about the structure of this book. Chapter 1 is a selective descriptive presentation of Israeli and, to a lesser extent, Palestinian historiography, serving a double aim. The first purpose is to shed light on events, “heroes,” and processes mentioned or hinted at throughout this volume for the reader, without giving overly detailed explanations. The second and more substantial aim of the chapter is to provide the reader with the sources of Zionist and Palestinian historiography, iconography, and mythology which are the cornerstones of Israeli and Palestinian collective identity and nationalism. The author of this volume strongly insists that it is impossible to understand the history of one without understanding the motives and the practices of the other.
Chapter 2 deals with the processes of building the Israeli state and the state's struggles over supremacy within and among its various agencies and pre-sovereignty institutions. Chapter 3 presents and analyzes the invention and imposition of Israeli Zionist hegemonic collective identity and nationalism, the beginning of its partial decomposition and decline, and the built-in causes of that decline.
Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to the analysis of a new societal reality and its crystallization in the aftermath of the decline of hegemonic culture and the subsequent regrouping of the Israeli system into seven cultures and countercultures. These chapters explore the relations between these cultures and the appearance of a civil society in the making. In chapter 6, Israeli collective identity, political regime, and nationalism and their connection to religion, gender, and ethnocentrism are reanalyzed, but this time in historical and ideological context, as well as in interconnection with the regime, or what usually is referred to as “Israeli democracy.” Despite the end of the cultural hegemony of one group, however, “Jewishness” and a consensual militaristic ethos have remained central pillars of the Israeli state and its institutional arrangements. In this new, highly fragmented social situation, the role of the state has changed, but its centrality and strength have remained.
Finally, chapter 7 sharpens the analysis of how power-oriented, security-related, and constructed social codes have penetrated the entire Israeli political culture, in such a way that war-making has not only become the state's ethos and the central binding code of a fragmented, pluralistic, cultural system, but even incorporates peace-making as part and parcel of itself.
CHAPTER 1
The Mythological-Historical