 exclusions of women, Mizrahi, and Arab writers (Fuchs, 1987; Gover, 1994; Berg, 1996; Hever, 2002; Gluzman, 2003; Brenner, 2003). This critical discourse was defined as “post-Zionist,” and extensively reviewed and widely debated (Silberstein, 1999, 2008).
Post-Zionism was bitterly attacked as a symptom of cultural decline and disorientation (Schweid, 1996; Hazony, 2000). Some suggest that this new discourse betrays a confused desire to return to origins, to a pre-Zionist situation, a time when the Land of Israel was still only a Promised Land (Attias and Benbassa, 2003). The post-Zionist dream of pure origins resembles in this regard the purist doctrine of the extreme right wing seeking a return to the biblical land. The Post-Zionist demand that the historian identify with the position of the victim and the vanquished rests on a reductive ethics of purity that refuses to admit the history of the last two centuries, in which the land was “dirtied” by the strife and tribulations of two people over it. In this sense the “imagined community” of Post-Zionism is no more realistic than the “dreams” and “designs” of the early Zionist settler–colonists (Troen, 2003).
Uri Ram (2008) contextualizes Post-Zionism within a broader framework of what he defines as the “globalization of Israel.” According to Ram, Post-Zionism is the preferred ideology of Israeli libertarian, coastal, middle-class citizens over against the collectivist, neo-Zionist ethos of the Jewish settlers in the territories of biblical Israel, and their many supporters in the religious and right-wing parties. Ram sees Post-Zionism and neo-Zionism as two opposing identity paradigms emerging from the classic schism in previous generations between civic and ethnic Zionism. “Neo-Zionism accentuates the messianic and particularistic dimensions of Zionism, whereas post-Zionism accentuates the normalizing and universalistic dimensions of it” (Ram, 2008, 233).
The postcolonial deconstruction of Zionism and the postmodern deconstruction of feminism suggest that as distinct modernist narratives both have reached a point of completion (Feldman, 1999; Shohat, 2006). Both Zionism and feminism have been transformed by difference (McClintock, 1997). Gender difference is an effect of relations of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980) and the cultural production of subjectivities and bodies (Butler, 1990). “The effect of poststructuralist theory is to see difference as material, as produced, but as ungrounded in any fixed nature” (Weedon, 1999, 24). Difference cannot be thought outside of situated, located, and politically positioned narratives of identity that construct the subject through a process of identification (Hall and du Gay, 1996, 1– 17). Cultural identity, or what Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994) refers to as the “nation,” is mediated through such discourses of identity or narrations that are nevertheless doubled. Post-Zionist counter-narratives of the nation disturb the ideological or essentialist identities constructed through pedagogic discourses of cultural identity. To use Derrida’s deconstructive terminology, the condition of Zionism’s possibility, is at the same time its condition of impossibility (Thomassen, 2006, 6).
This reader opens up an interval or spacing between gender and Zionism in which both discourses intersect through various articulations and performances of difference. With Derrida, I understand “difference” here as a historicized space where women and nation intersect (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem, 1999, 1–16). Each essay focuses on the problem of difference differently, and all of them refuse essentialist definitions of the difference they examine.
In “The Evolution of Critical Paradigms in Israeli Feminist Scholarship: A Theoretical Model,” I call attention to different discourses of Israeli feminism. My argument is that contemporary Israeli feminism evolved through three phases: the liberal phase of the 1980s, the radical phase of the 1990s, and the postmodern phase since the turn of the millennium. All three phases overlap, each continues to be influent