The Idea of Israel (47 page)

The Israeli deputy foreign minister affirmed this new Elders of Anti-Zion conspiracy in a speech he gave to the Jewish Agency in October 2010, in which he declared that Israel’s enemies recruit agents who work under the pretence of human rights activism to delegitimise the nation. To deal with this problem, the politician echoed the Jewish Agency’s position, which called for ‘a counter web made of Jewish and non-Jewish NGOs and academic institutions that would join forces in the front against the delegitimisation and describe the reality in the world as it really is’.
³⁷

By 2011, the government had already invested millions in creating centres for Israel studies in various universities around the world and in sending high school graduates – the most handsome and articulate among them – to market a youthful, Western Israel. Teams of Twitter users, Facebook users, and bloggers began to work 24/7, responding to anything that sounded remotely anti-Israel, while lobbies, modelled on AIPAC in the United States, began to operate on the European continent. The campaign was conducted with military precision. Major General Eitan Dangot, the coordinator of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, spelled this out when he said, ‘The war on legitimisation and public opinion is not easier than that fought in the battlefield … there is a culture of lies, distortion and fabrication’.
³⁸
He happened to be referring specifically to Hamas, but indicated that the phenomenon was global.

For example, in 2011 in the annual ‘State of the Nation’ conference organised by the aforementioned Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya, delegitimisation was chosen as a major theme. One speaker after another regarded this assault as part of the ills of a ‘left-wing postmodernism’ that wishes to ‘conquer the sources of cultural production to control the truth’. As they put it, an op-ed in the
Guardian
or
Le Monde
would not turn them into Zionists. They also complained that Israel would be blamed, no matter what it does and asserted finally that Israelis should not wash their dirty laundry in public and must instead present a united Israel.
³⁹

The academics working for the Jewish Agency blamed the United Nations, Western legal systems, and Western academia for the ongoing assault. Britain was singled out as being at the centre of the campaign to tarnish the idea of Israel, owing to the growing number of Muslims in the UK, although it was pointed out that there were still corporations, such as Tesco, that could be trusted to remain faithful to both the old and new versions of the idea:

Britain is the capital of communication in the world. It is the centre of the world’s principal NGOs but it is also a country with a fragile Jewish community. Amnesty and Oxfam are preoccupied with delegitimising Israel. The government is more sympathetic, so what should be done? Whoever is the delegitimiser, including Israeli professors [who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, or BDS], should be fought as in a war. They should be targeted and fought, not engaged intellectually, and all the means not used before should be employed. This is the battlefield for the Israeli right to function, defend itself.
⁴⁰

So far, it is the Harold Hartog School of Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University that has commissioned the most comprehensive analysis of the issue at hand. In 2008, it produced a ninety-page policy paper on the topic, ‘The Israel Brand: Nation Marketing Under Constant Conflict’. Yet that paper, as well as luminaries such as Alan
Dershowitz, a frequent visitor to the university, were somewhat at a loss as to what countermeasures should be offered that had not been tried before. The paper’s author, Rommey Hassman, proposed an interdisciplinary tool that would integrate strategic management, marketing, and branding approaches with diplomatic and ideological doctrines; underlying the mix would be the Jewish notion of
tikkun olam
, which, as Neil Gandal, the head of the Hartog School, wrote in his opening note, ‘posits the ethical and moral responsibility of the Jewish people to the world’. Gandal contended that the State of Israel could improve its image by emphasising its contributions in the field of humanitarian assistance and development, while also strengthening its work in the developing world.
⁴¹

The abstract of Hassman’s paper sets forth three main steps through which the government of Israel should market the nation:

1.
Establish a national communications council:
This council would be established in the framework of the Prime Minister’s Office, and would be headed by the government’s chief spokesperson. It would administer and oversee a network of government spokespersons, coordinating their stand on policy, security, and economic and social issues.

2.
Market the nation:
To do this, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would function as the international marketing arm of the State of Israel. In this capacity, it would coordinate the marketing of Israel, supervising international press secretaries and spokespersons, contact with foreign journalists and media, and monitoring the international media. The Ministry would also be responsible for all of Israel’s embassies, consulates, missions and representatives throughout the world.

3.
Establish a Communications Division within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
: This unit would coordinate an expanded IDF Spokesperson’s Bureau, any units in the military dealing with research and consciousness design, the network of soldier-spokespersons, and Israel Army Radio (
Galei Zahal
). In working with the foreign media, the IDF Spokesperson’s Bureau would function as an implementing body, acting on the recommendations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and under the guidance of the national communications council.
⁴²

He then ends the abstract by cautioning:

Since it is not possible to simultaneously address all target markets, priorities will have to be set. This paper prioritises nation marketing by country, based on a measure of the strength of the relationship between each country and the State of Israel.
⁴³

I introduce this lengthy quote in full because it constitutes the kind of knowledge that neo-Zionist academia is producing on Israel as we move into and through the second decade of the twenty-first century. The past has been rewritten as a Zionist narrative, while the present is depicted as a battlefield for survival. The impressive and hopeful challenge from within has disappeared. Here and there, yes, it is still alive in the work of brave NGOs such as Zochrot, New Profile, Ta’ayush, and others which, when counted together, form just a tiny minority within the society. But in the academy, media and other cultural stages, there remain few individuals who, under heavy censorship and a campaign of intimidation, still dare to offer alternative interpretations of past and present reality. As before, much of what they do relates organically to the Palestinian, native and indigenous narratives of the past and the information campaigns of the present.

But the sheer power of the Jewish state, and its potential to destabilise the region, if not the world, fuels the continuing attempt to comprehend the idea of Israel in the twenty-first century. Such efforts take place mostly outside the entrenched state, although quite a few fugitives from it are important partners in this enterprise. In the new division of labour, at present, Palestinians seek to redefine who they are, following a century of dispossession, fragmentation and colonisation. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, since Israelis have ceased to do so, is trying to grasp the nature and future intentions of the State created in 1948, with the blessings of the international community
but against the wishes of the indigenous population and the region on which that State was forced. For everyone concerned, one issue is painfully – or gratefully, as the case may be – clear. The idea of Israel became a living organism: a state of seven million people, an advanced economy, a powerful army, a thriving culture and a third generation of settlers who become native as time goes by.

In recent years, two progressive paradigms have emerged in the scholarly/activist attempt to depict the phenomena of Zionism and Israel as accurately and ethically as possible. They are the settler colonialist paradigm and the apartheid paradigm. Both challenge effectively the official Israeli, and mainstream scholarly, approach, which insists on seeing Zionism exclusively as a national liberation movement and Israel as a liberal democracy.

And yet, despite their usefulness, both paradigms are unsatisfactory. They apply historical case studies with a known closure to an ongoing reality. In the conventional study of colonialism, settler colonialist states are states whose colonialist history is behind them. But until we find something more appropriate, these paradigms are the best we have. In this respect, we face difficulties similar to those faced by the academics, experts and pundits who try to explain the nature and orientation of the revolutions in the Arab world, the so-called Arab Spring. Both are open-ended phenomena. Their closure is yet to occur.

Pressure from the outside world reached a peak in the summer of 2013 with the decision of the EU to impose partial sanctions on Israel. The cartographic image Israel has broadcast of itself since 1948 – an island of stability, civilisation and morality in a sea of barbarism, primitivism and fanaticism – has already been challenged. Even the half million Israelis who demonstrated in vain for a better standard of living in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011 recognised that this map is becoming reversed, not only in the eyes of the world but also in their own perceptions. ‘Tel Aviv is the new Tahrir Square’, they chanted, and in 2013 threatened to create a new Tahrir Square because the government that had been elected in 2012 was not meeting any of their basic demands for better housing, employment and education.

The powers that be in the State of Israel are thus far tolerating the uglier face of the Arab Spring, in particular that of the Syrian government as it sends its air force to bomb freely whatever it deems a strategic threat to the state. The Israeli élite are hoping that the Spring will once more produce a monstrous Islamic sea that will restore Israel’s image as an island of stability. But this is not going to happen.

Even in the most chaotic and violent moments of this new historical process, world opinion has not absolved Israel from its continued oppression of the Palestinians. Israel is seen more and more as a colonialist state that survived the twentieth century but is maintained because of its usefulness to the United States and its effective role in the global capitalist economy. There is no longer any moral dimension for the global support, and when the more functional side of this support starts to weaken, the scenarios shared, for better or for worse, by post- and neo-Zionists alike – of life in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime – may come true. This book was written with the hope that these grim scenarios would not transpire, but with the uncomfortable sense that they are already unfolding before our eyes.

Notes

Introduction: Debating the Idea of Israel

1
Yosef Gorny, ‘Thoughts on Zionism as a Utopian Ideology’,
Modern Judaism
, 18: 3, (October 1998), p. 241.

2
Yossef Barslevsky, ‘
Did You Know the Land
?’:
The Galilee and the Northern Valleys, Volume A
, Ein Harod, Israel: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1940, p. xi (Hebrew).

3
See report in
Haaretz
, 13 July 1994.

4
Here is how the debate was described in one of the dailies: ‘Ilan Pappe claimed that Zionism is colonialism. He claims that the equation between the two became commonplace in Israel, because those who subscribe to it have tenure in the Israeli universities.’ As a result, the report goes on, a more theoretical debate developed. ‘Sounds boring? More than 600 people filled the university hall and gave up the game in which Bulgaria kicked Germany out of the World Cup.’ Zvi Gilat,
Yedioth Ahronoth
, 13 July 1994.

5
I have described this in Ilan Pappe,
Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom
, London: Pluto, 2010.

6
See Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
, New York: Free Press, 1992.

7
Gorny, ‘Thoughts on Zionism as a Utopian Ideology’.

8
This is part of a campaign led by the Israeli Ministry of Information called ‘The Faces of Israel’ launched in 2000.

9
See Omar Barghouti,
Boycott, Divestment, Sanction: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights
, New York: Haymarket Books, 2011.

10
Edward Said,
Orientalism
, New York: Vintage, 1979, pp. 5–28. See also the discussion in Tikva Honig-Parnass,
False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine
, New York: Haymarket Books, 2011.

1 The ‘Objective’ History of the Land and the People

1
Based on ‘Der Wacht am Rhine’ and quoted in Michael Berkowitz,
Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 20.

2
Naftali Arbel, ed.,
The Great Epochs in the History of Eretz Israel, Volume I: A Land Without People
, Tel Aviv: Revivim, 1983 (Hebrew).