Kimmerling Baruch - The invention and decline of Israeliness: state, society and the military

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The Invention and Decline of Israeliness

State, Society, and the Military

Baruch Kimmerling

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the S. Mark Taper Foundation

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2001 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kimmerling, Baruch.
The invention and decline of Israeliness : state,
society, and the military / Baruch Kimmerling.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-22968-1 (cloth : alk. paper).
1. National characteristics, Israeli. 2. Jews
IsraelIdentity. 3. IsraelSocial conditions
20th century. 4. IsraelEthnic relations.
5. Religion and stateIsrael. I. Title.

DS113.3.K56 2001
306'.095694dc21 00-067238

Manufactured in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To Diana

Without whose lifelong support I would

have had nothing

Acknowledgments

This book is a summary of an approximately ten-year process of professional and intellectual discussions, debates, and sometimes bitter controversies with friends, colleagues, students, and rivals. I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by highly stimulating intellectual environments in the offices, faculty clubs, and corridors of the Hebrew University and the University of Washington at Seattle. I have also been supported and spoiled by a vivid global exchange through the wonders of the Internet and the electronic mail system. The names of those who have contributed to these environments are so innumerable that, with the exception of the late Dan Horowitz, I shall refrain from listing them. The final version was rewritten following very thoughtful, wise, and constructive comments of three anonymous peer reviewers of the University of California Press.

I would like to thank my devoted students and assistants who have aided me throughout all these years and made possible the implementation of this mission: Jon Simons, Matthew Diamond, Lauren Erdreich, Michal Laron, Hagit Schwartz, and Keren-Or Schlesinger. I also am pleasantly indebted to the Eshkol Center of Israel Studies and to the Silbert Center for Research of Israeli Society and Director Arieh Schachar for their generous support in funding the research demanded by the present volume. I am deeply grateful to Malcom Reed and Cindy Fulton of the University of California Press, who handled the manuscript so carefully, and special thanks to Peter Dreyer for his excellent editorial work.

Parts of this volume are based on previously published material. 's main source is an essay titled Political Subcultures and Civilian Militarism in a Settler-Immigrant Society, published in Security Concerns: Insights from the Israeli Experience, edited by Daniel Bar-Tal, Dan Jacobson, and Aharon Klieman (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 1998), pp. 395-416.

I am grateful to all the publishers who so generously granted me the right to use the material. Nonetheless, all these papers served only as foundations for the present chapters of this volume. Most were completely rewritten to include (or sometimes exclude) new material and ideas and to present a coherent narrative.

Introduction

This book offers an overview and analysis of the construction and deconstruction of hegemonic, secular Zionist Israeli national identity from the early years of the Zionist movement to the present. Today, for better or for worse, Israel is a very different polity than was envisioned by any of the streams of Zionism, or even by 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 planesprocesses 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 citizensmilitarism and Jewishness. The increasing Jewish sentimenta mixture of secular nationalism and mainly popular-fundamentalist religiousnessis 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 centralityin 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.