even as he read Zionism as a modern modality of Jewish mystical traditions of paradoxical redemption, rather than as a secular revolution in traditional Judaism (Kurzweil, 1971).
In the 1980s a “new” or “revisionist” historiography emerged that questioned Zionism as a nationalist ideology. The terminology of hegemonic Zionist histories was questioned. Thus, the terms “aliyah”—immigration—or “yishuv—settlement—were questioned as nonobjective and nonscientific substitutes for settler–colonial activities during the pre-state foundational period of Israeli nation building (Kimmerling, 1983). The Labor Zionist terminology of “redemption of the land” and “redemption of labor” were critically re-examined as nationalist legitimizations of class warfare between an early capitalist model of colonization based on Arab labor, and a second socialist–collectivist model that excluded Arab labor (Shafir, 1989). New histories were written of the War of 1948 that questioned its representation as the “war of liberation” (Silberstein, 1991; Rogan and Shlaim, 2001). The fate of Arab Palestinians who fled as a result of the war and became refugees beyond the unstable borders of the new state was revisited as the tragic result of both Arab and Israeli policies (Morris, 1987, 1999). The status of Arabs who remained in Israel as a national minority was critically examined (Lustick, 1980). Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Ella Shohat (1989) questioned the exclusion of Mizrahi Jews from Eurocentric representations of Zionist identity. In the 1990s new cultural critiques of Zionist meta-narratives appeared, targeting militarization and heroism (Zerubavel, 1995; Kimmerling, 2001), Zionist rejections of traditional European Diaspora culture (Boyarin, 1997), Israeli interpretations of the Holocaust (Porat, 1990; Zertal, 1998), the idealization of the Sabra (Oz, 2000), ideals of the body (Weiss, 2002), and heterosexual norms of masculinity (Raz, 2004). The politics of literary canonization was critically reexamined, notably previous 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 di