The Idea of Israel Read Online Free

times more simplified and explicit, form. From there the challenge spread to other cultural domains: music, the visual arts, literature. In the ninth chapter, I discuss how this debate contributed to shaping Israeli cultural representations of the idea of Israel. Chapter 10 will revisit these post-Zionist representations on stage and screen.
    This book’s final section looks at reactions to the post-Zionist challenge and the resultant emergence of a more extreme version of Zionism in the twenty-first century, which has lodged in the heart of the Israeli production of knowledge. I have chosen to name this development the triumph of neo-Zionism. In addition to presenting a general description of it in Chapter 11 , I devote Chapter 12 to its manifestations in the new research being conducted on 1948 within Israeli academia. A postscript to this book takes into account the recent upheavals in the Arab world, the stagnation of the peace process, and new developments in the study of Zionism – with particular attention to the emergence of the settler colonialist paradigm – in order to achieve some grasp of future trends in the struggle, inside and outside, over the idea of Israel.

PART I
    The Scholarly and Fictional Idea of Israel
     

PART TWO
    Israel’s Post-Zionist Moment
     

NINE
    The Post-Zionist Cultural Moment
In a little town in the south of Iraq, Basra, there were thirty million palm trees, but there was not even one sunflower by Van Gogh … George Shemesh was among those who left the rivers of Babylon and arrived in Jerusalem. There he found out that Zarisky [a well-known Israeli Ashkenazi painter] was the king of painters. And this truth was also revealed to Benny Efrat from Lebanon, Ben Haim and Doctori from Iraq and many young ‘Franks’ [derogatory term used by Ashkenazi Jews to refer to Mizrachim ] who arrived in the land. But from these ‘Franks’, Zariskies did not emerge; nor did they engage with ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ art … However, when they arrived in America they learned from Matisse the Frenchman and Sol Lewitt the American that everyone [in the West] was talking about Islamic art and for a short moment this reignited their memories.
    – George Shemesh, text accompanying the exhibition
Six Israeli Artists from Arab Countries , Tel Aviv, 1978 1
    I n the spring of 2002, the Mother Tongue Festival was launched with exhibitions, a film festival and an academic conference. In more ways than one, it summed up the 1990s attempt toproduce, or at least point to, the existence of a distinct Mizrachi discourse. The gist of the films, the visual arts exhibits and the talks delivered at the conference had to do with connectivity – the strong, almost undeniable ties that had been exposed between Arabism and Mizrachi Judaism. Yet this theme captured the paradox of the event: could Mizrachi culture return to its roots without re-adopting at least the mother tongue of that civilization, Arabic?
    Most of the films and discussion at the events were in Hebrew, reinforcing the fact that the Arabic language was not part of the new culture. The participants in the event were, in their own eyes, Arab Jews, but culturally they wished to be defined as Mizrachim , the Orientals. Loyalty to Hebrew was probably pragmatic, not ideological. Or perhaps the use of Hebrew involved deeper layers, for as one acute Mizrachi observer noted, this attitude to the Arabic language in the new post-Zionist Mizrachi culture, including music, was also an attempt to run away from the role played by Mizrachi Jews in the oppression of the Palestinians:
We did all kinds of things there; we were governors in the occupied areas of 1948, agents in the Mossad, agents in the Secret Service, officers in the military rule inside Israel until 1967 and then in the occupied territories [the West Bank and the Gaza Strip]. 2
    The documentary films produced by the Mizrachim tried to revive the contribution of Jews to Arab culture in general,