Vol. 63 No. 3 1996 - page 452

452
PARTISAN REVIEW
me to a related issue - the current status of some of Israel's founding
myths - in the eyes of a section of its own intelligentsia.
You may have heard that one of the more interesting current debates
in Israel - initially confined mainly to historians, writers, and academics -
revolves around the claim that Israel has entered a new phase of its short
history, commonly referred to as post-Zionism. This appellation would
seem to imply that Zionism has ceased to be relevant to the values and
identity of contemporary Israelis; that it has completed or played out its
historic function. This is probably the most benign view of post-Zionism
which we could take, in which the "post" merely means that which
comes
qfter
Zionism, without any particular value-judgement being
in–
volved. However, I would argue that most historians who define
themselves as post-Zionists are often difficult to distinguish from those
who were considered only a decade or two ago to be outright anti–
Zionists. I can still vividly recall the 1970s, when I used to argue in Great
Britain and other European countries against the fashionable left-wing
denigration of Zionism and Israel as a tool ofWestern imperialism and as
an essentially colonialist enterprise. Today, many of the theses which
were so commonplace at that time are now being recycled by post–
Zionist Israelis, as if they were the latest in political and historical wisdom.
What does this trend add up to?
It
is surely significant that the post–
Zionists have focused focus on the 1948 War (the Israeli war of inde–
pendence and the birth of the Jewish state), as if it were a creation
conceived in the state of "original sin," since it resulted in the
"dispossession" and flight of so many Palestinian Arabs.
It
must therefore
have been an act of historic injustice. Indeed, for the post-Zionists, Israel
has been a "colonial fact" since its foundation. What is now called the Is–
raeli-Zionist "narrative," is thereby reduced to a propagandist self-serving
account of the past which at best can be put on a par with the equally
valid Palestinian version of Israel's history. However, post-Zionism, with
its built-in sympathy for the Palestinian case, tends to lend far more cre–
dence to the "victims" of the conflict and therefore to morally
delegitimize Israel's foundation, even if it does not challenge the Jewish
state's right to exist.
The effect of this post-Zionist revisionism inevitably undermines any
kind of special, moral or historic claim that the Jewish people or the Zi–
onist movement might have to the territory that is now called Israel.
In
the old-new post-Zionist Israeli form of "political correctness," Israel was
never really peace-loving or the Arab states belligerent; Israel consistently
missed or avoided opportunities for peace; it has been an oppressive
power, regularly inflicting injustice on hapless Arabs and relying solely on
force to maintain its existence. The new historians seek to totally divorce
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