Activism and Academia: The Case of Palestine

Abstract

This paper addresses the rise and fall of the intellectual and academic critique of Zionism within Jewish society in Israel. Such critique emerged in the late 1980s as a result of social, political, and economic developments that began with the 1973 October War, and culminated with the first Intifada in 1987. Doubts about the state’s foreign, security, and domestic policies motivated more critical research on the past and present realities in Israel. The declassification of new documents on the 1948 War produced a “new history” among a group of professional historians who recognized the major chapters of the Palestinian narrative of the war, followed by the questioning of Zionism’s moral validity and the state policies in the 1950s by sociologists. This trend was called post-Zionism, and it affected cultural producers in all walks of life in the 1990s. Since the second Intifada and the death of the Oslo process, however, most of the post-Zionists retracted from their criticism or left the country. The public space was recaptured back by Zionist academics and intellectuals who, in fact, subscribed to an even tougher version of Zionism. Pappe argues that there is very little chance for change from within the Israeli Jewish society without pressure from the outside.