Society: Diversity

The criticism of the image of homogeneous society of mainstream sociology emerged in the late 1970s. In this chapter, critical sociology and its propositions regarding Israeli society, nationhood, and identity are discussed. The presentation is carried out in the following steps: the first three sub-headings address the modernist critical streams that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s: elitism, Marxism, pluralism, feminism, and colonialism. The fourth sub-heading addresses the postmodern streams that emerged since the 1990s, including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and post-Marxism. For each of these streams we analyze its wide social context, the theoretical assumptions, the ideological implications, and its image of “Israeli society.” All of these approaches in their various ways present a more variegated and more divided society than the one depicted by the Jerusalem school.

The first frontal alternative to the homogeneous, or homogenizing, structuralfunctional image of “Israeli society” was formulated in the beginning of the 1970s by sociologist Yonathan Shapiro (1929-1997). Shapiro shaped the Israeli version of the “sociology of elites” that he consumed as a student at Columbia University. Upon graduation, in 1964, he was invited to establish the social sciences faculty at Tel Aviv University, of which he became the first Dean. He led the formation of a Tel Avivian species of sociology which was antithetic to the Jerusalemite one. While the Jerusalem “thesis” focused on the common values integrating “society,” or the “nation,” the Tel Aviv “antithesis” diminished the role of values and integration and highlighted instead power and antagonism. Two factors propelled the emergence of critical sociology in the 1970s: one,

a shift in the sociological discourse in the West at large; and two, political developments in Israel. Shapiro was associated with the formulation in Israel since the late 1960s of “conflict sociology” or what was also called at the time “leftWeberian” sociology. In the international arena this approach was associated with writers such as C. Wright Mills, Ralph Darendorf, John Rex, Frank Parkin, Anthony Giddens, and others. Conflict sociology positioned itself midway between the Parsonian analysis of the “social system” and its “value consensus” and Marxist analysis of the “capitalist mode of production” and its “class struggle.”

As against Parsonianism, it maintained that society is inherently hierarchical and contentious; whilst, as against Marxism, it maintained that social schism and antagonism do not necessarily stem from relations of property. It was argued that in late capitalist society both private corporations and state

bureaucracies had become the depositors of complex rungs of authority, and that this has become the new source of stratification. So there is inequality (rather than equity) yet it stems from authority relations (not property relations). In a very influential treatise Darendorf argued that the main antagonism in late capitalist society is not between “owners” and “workers” (or property-owners and the property-less), but rather between employees placed higher in the rank of authority-those who issue commands; and employees who are lower on the rank of authority-those who receive and obey commands inside organizations, whether private or public (Dahrendorf 1959). In an even more influential study Mills revived in a critical mode the sociology of elites (Mosca, Pareto, Michels), and argued that in American society, power is concentrated in the upper echelons of office holders in the three modern giant corporate orders: industry, the military, and the government, who together form the American “power elite.” This power elite overshadows both the middle ranks, in which democratic politics is played, and the large masses, who are rather passive receptors of the social order (Mills 1956). These studies largely replaced the concept of “pluralist democracy” on the one hand, and of the “dominant class” on the other hand, with that of “the ruling elite.” Shapiro received his academic education in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the

London School of Economics and in Columbia University in New York, the home universities of Dahrendorf andMills respectively. The results of this apprenticeship are well recognized in his work. The second factor in the development of the elites school in Israeli sociology was

political. Just as the modernization approach provided a sociological apologia for the domination of the Labor movement, so did the elites approach provide a sociological apologia for the termination of this domination, or at the least provided intellectual ammunition to those who opposed it. In this respect the work of Shapiro reflected the accumulating impetus of the 1970s, which brought about the eventual fall of Labor. Though Shapiro was adamant about distinguishing politics from science, indications to the political significance of his work are not absent. In a book aboutDemocracy in Israel (Shapiro 1977) he put forward the contention that under a formal democratic guise, the Labor regime had been oligarchic-and then called upon the readers to draw the (obvious) conclusions themselves. A colleague of his testifies that he “hated mapai” (the ruling Labor party) (Shokeid 2002: 162). The political significance of Shapiro’s sociology became clear in the occasion of

his one-time irruption into the political foray. Shapiro was one of the founders of the Shinui movement and one of the authors of its program. Shinui was the centerliberal flank of the wide and varied protest movement that sprouted after the October war of 1973 and was directed against the Labor regime. In its later turn as the Dash party (after Shapiro himself withdrew) the movement contributed directly to the “Turnover” of the regime from Left to Right, when it drew the

electorate from Labor and after the elections preferred a coalition government with the Likud. Shapiro’s explicit political proclamations in support of the values of the middle classes and in opposition to the rule of the bureaucratic ruling Labor fit neatly his sociological analysis, as we shall now turn to see. Shapiro’s sociology of elites turned upside down the image of “Israeli society” as

it was depicted by the sociology of the “social system.” Shapiro maintained that Israeli democracy is such only in a formal sense, but not in the essential sense of regard to civil rights. There are periodical elections and parliamentary institutions but the rights of the individuals and of minorities are not respected and the division of powers, as well as the distinction between state and civil society, are routinely breached. In this kind of criticism Shapiro in fact anteceded the themes of the famous

“constitutional revolution” that was led by the Supreme Court (under Supreme Court judge Aharon Barak) in the 1990s (Navot 2007; Lahav 2009). He especially disparaged the mix between elected bodies and the civil service and between the government and business. For him “Israeli society” was not founded upon a consensus of values but rather upon manipulation and coercion. His major work, The Formative Years of the Israeli Labor Party: The Organization of Power (1976), tells a story not of idealist pioneers (the structural-functional view) but rather of a power elite. He analyzes the consolidation of power by this elite and its creation of a ruling apparatus. The socialist vanguard of the Labor epoch turns under his pen into a bunch of ambitious andmanipulative political dealers. These people brought from Eastern Europe the Bolshevik organizational culture and in Eretz Israelmanaged to clinch the valves of the national financial flows. The elite became powerful by monopolizing the mediation between the workers

in Palestine, who submitted to its authority, and the Zionist donor organizations, who cared for settling the land. It was by positioning itself in the crucial junction between (socialist) labor and (national) finance that Labor became so essential to the whole Zionist project and thus became hegemonic. Without it, workers would not have found employment, and thus would not have immigrated to Palestine, and the national organizations would not have settled the land. This power positionnot a dedication to any socialist ideals-secured the special status of Labor in Israeli history since the 1920s. Though the movement was officially democratic, it ruled itself and the larger body politique by oligarchic means (nominations of electoral lists by committees; actual decision-making by few powerful leaders outside formal institutions; clientalistic electoral politics and so on). Until 1977 Shapiro’s work dealt with analyzing the sources of power of the

Labor regime. The “Turnover” of 1977 changed his problematique and he turned instead to two new questions: one, what explains the demise of the left-wing elite in the 1970s; and second, what explains the rise of the Likud right-wing party. The answers he formulated for the first question was in generational terms:

the elite fell because it did not generate inheritors, or let them take over. The natural successor of the elite was the generation of the Palmach (special units of theHagana, pre-state Jewish military militia, which was the kernel of the Israeli military when the state was established), or the Israeli born generation (the “Sabra”; see Almog

2000) that filled the ranks of combatants in the 1948 war of independence. Yet this generation, in Shapiro’s analysis, lacked the competence for political leadership. Its members were educated in the new schooling system of the pre-state community, which was poor in resources and impoverished culturally. They lacked the wide education of the former generation, whose schooling took place in Europe and who were adept in European languages. Socially, this generation was shaped in the paramilitary organizations of the pre-state period. All the training they had was in the military practice. Therefore, when the generation of the “founders” started to give way and the generations of “sons” started to get into leadership positions-a transition symbolized in 1974 with the passage of the prime ministership from Golda Meir to the Israeli-born Yitzhak Rabin-this generation did not manage to retain power and it slipped into the hands of other players (in the 1977 elections). This is the thrust of another of Shapiro’s influential works: Elite without

Successors: Generations of Political Leadership in Israel (1984). In the years to come the “generation of the sons”was yet again pushed out-Rabin’s assassination in 1995 was considered as the collective symbolic death of the 1948 generation (Almog 2000) and following it a still younger generation of Israelis came to power, representative of which are Ariel Sharon (Likud and later Kadima), Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) and Ehud Barak (Labor). Their style of rule does not seem to refute Shapiro’s main thesis. Though this generation is also military-trained, in politics it in fact expresses the transition in Israel from European party politics to Americanmediated politics, fueled by the professionalization and commercialization of the political (Galili-Zucker 2004; Peri 2004; Ram 2007). Be that as it may, the hold on government that Labor lost in 1977 was never

resumed. While it had been “the natural party of government” up to 1977, since then the Likud has fulfilled that role. In Shapiro’s analysis Israeli politics moved then from the politics of “meeting rooms” to the politics of “piazza place”: the politics of agitating the masses by populist rhetoric that appeals especially to their sense of honor and identity. Administrative (pragmatic) politics was alternated with rhetorical (non-rational) politics. Shapiro addressed the rise of the Likud to power in his book The Road to Power: Herut Party in Israel (1989). It was now discovered that his disdain for the Right is no smaller than his disdain for the Left, if not even greater. Whereas he had portrayed the Zionist Labor movement in red communist colors, he now portrayed the Likud party in brown fascist colors. From his perspective, the Likud came to power not because it proposed practical solutions to actual problems, but rather because it proposed a “symbolic compensation” to two groups whose self-respect had been trampled by Labor: one group was constituted of the old nationalists of the pre-state right-wing armed undergrounds (Etzel and Lechi), who in the state period created the Herut party (the core of the Likud party, which formed in 1966); and the other group, much larger numerically, was the second generation of the Mizrachi immigrants, who provided the Likud with its mass electorate. The common denominator of these two groups was their rebuff by Labor and their reciprocal detestation of it. Shapiro saw all this as utterly irrational. In years to come, political scientist Dani Filc (of Ben-Gurion University) proposed a corrective to Shapiro’s concept of populism (Filc 2006). He maintains

that the “inclusionary populism” of Menachem Begin (the historical leader of the Likud) in fact broadened the political public in Israel by entering the Mizrachi population into it. On the other hand, Filc considers the “exclusionary populism” of the Likud in the 1990s (under Netanyahu) as aiming to limit the democratic political public, by rejecting from it the Palestinian Arabs in Israel. It turns out that the “sociological elitism” of Shapiro expresses a centrist political

culture, which is unhappy about what it considers as Labor social leftism and Likud nationalist populism. This approach considers “Israeli society” through one narrow angle, as an arena of instrumental power struggles. Whereas such perspective is useful for criticizing the powers that be, it is useless for the search of genuine democratic politics. And so, while the Tel Aviv school in sociology aptly rejected the one-sided idealistic notion of “Israeli society” of the Jerusalem school, it itself was equally one-sided, only “realistically” so: what politics can generate is only a circulation of elites (be that oligarchic or populist ones). The normative lesson is of critical resignation, rather than of critical engagement. Both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv lacked a dialectic, which Haifa was now to offer. While the new critical sociology that formed in Tel Aviv expressed the liberal

concerns of the new middle class and the bourgeois elite that characterized the Tel Aviv region (the business capital of Israel), a new sociological approach formed also in Haifa University (in the north), that expressed the new public voice of the Mizrachi population. As mentioned already, the new bourgeoisie and the low-class Mizrachim were the two main opposition groups to the Labor regime. “Mizrachim” are Jewish immigrants that arrived in Israel during the 1950s

and 1960s from Middle Eastern and North African countries. By the 1970s they became a demographic majority and elements from their “second generation” ushered in a protest movement by name of the Black Panthers (Bernstein 1984; Shitrit 2004). They protested the social discrimination and economic deprivation that mizrachim suffered in Israel. “Ashkenazim”—Jews from European ancestrywere shocked by the expressions of ethnic rift in Israeli society, which was supposed to be nationally unified and homogenous. Sociology could no longer cover up the conflict under the terminology of modernization, which always puts the blame on the underdog’s cultural backwardness and always promises a better integration in the future. One approach that made the “ethnic gap” its focal issue was the “pluralism

sociology” that was applied to the case of Israel by Sammy Smooha (b. 1941). Smooha is from an Iraqi family that immigrated to Israel in the 1951 and he became the first senior academic sociologist whose personal background was that of an immigrants’ transitory camp (maabarot, residential camps where immigrants were accommodated temporarily, but for a considerable period of time, in rough living conditions), rather than the benches of the Hebrew University or the trenches of the war of independence. The remarkable distance that Israeli sociology traveled between the 1960s and the late 1970s is revealed by comparing the title of Eisenstadt’s magnum opus: Israeli Society: Background, Development and Problems (the Hebrew title; 1967) with the title of Smooha’s breakthrough book: Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (1978). Smooha indeed sharply captured in

this title the two big themes that were absent in the structural-functional account of Israel: pluralism and conflict. From now on, indeed, the sociology of Israel would look less into “Israeli society” in the sense of an integrated whole, and more into the components and divisions that constitute it. Smooha’s entry into the sociological field was typical of the 1970s and of

the new universities in yet another sense: he was a graduate of an American university. Not only this, he studied for his Ph.D. in the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in the peak era of the student rebellion there. Though he never identified with the New Left (or any Left for that matter), the sensibility of “pluralism” and “conflict” affected him. In 1974, after graduation he returned to Israel and started a career in the new department of sociology and anthropology at Haifa University. Smooha chose to analyze Israeli society in the framework of the “sociology of

pluralism” that flourished in that time. At its core were the social realities of postcolonial societies, which are composed of heterogeneity of ethno-cultural groups, who share a common political unit-a state (Kuper & Smith 1969). The basic question addressed by this approach is: what are the modules of integration among the different sub-groups within the common polity? Three basic modules were identified. In an “equivalent integration” the distinct groups enjoy equal status within the political framework; in a “differential integration” different groups have different status within the political framework; finally, in a “universalist integration” the political status of the sub-groups is dissolved and individuals are linked to the political framework as citizens regardless of their “original” group of affiliation. In Smooha’s analysis, the Israeli regime is of the second type. This regime

is assumed upon a “differential integration” of five major sub-groups: the secular Ashkenazim are the dominant group. The mizrachim are regarded as a majority group that is amenable to assimilation in the nation, and they are integrated by means of paternalism and cooptation. The Orthodox Jews are regarded as a separate and dissimilar minority, but of an equal status within the nation. Palestinian Arab citizens are regarded as a separate and foreign minority, and therefore they are not assimilated or integrated, but are being dominated. The Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories are regarded as a foreign and enemy group and therefore they are excluded from the polity and are dominated militarily. At the time-1978-this was a radical re-definition of the concept of “Israeli society,” not as a “social system,” but as a hierarchical system of differences. Some 20 years after Smooha’s path-breaking book other radical sociological

critic of the modernization school, Baruch Kimmerling, in fact adopted the pluralistic approach of Smooha and updated it. In a book that summarizes his analysis of Israeli society-The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (2001)—Kimmerling coins the idiom “pluralism without multiculturalism.” He relies on authors such as Maffesoli (1996) to depict Israeli society as an amalgamation of separate “tribes,” who are defined by their cultural identities. By “tribes” he refers to secular Ashkenazim, religious Jews,mizrachim, the “Russians”

(1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union that arrived Israel between 1989 and 2009), the “Ethiopians” (immigrants from Ethiopia, the Jewishness of whom is contested by Orthodox authorities) and Palestinian Arabs. Whereas Eisenstadt and his school had portrayed the strong and charismatic “center” which forms the focal point for the “periphery” and which forges the cohesiveness of society, Kimmerling is worried about a society that is ransacked by centrifugal impetus. In the time lapsed between Eisenstadt and Kimmerling, through Smooha, the image of “Israeli society” has been radically changed, from a successful integrative society into a deeply divided society. Though problems of integration are common inside Jewish-Israeli society,

they are much more acute with regard to the relations between Jewish-Israeli society and the Arab-Palestinian sector (Smooha 1989, 1992, 2002; Smooha & Hanf 1992). In 2009 the population of Israel (not including the occupied areas) included 7.3 millions, of which 5.7 millions are defined as Jews, 1.5 million as Arabs (plus 300,000 “others”) (CBS 2009: Table 2: 1). According to Smooha, a majority group can co-exist with a minority group in relations of assimilation (“melting pot”) or in relations of federation, based on different levels of group autonomy and on agreement among the elites of the distinct groups (Smooha & Hanf 1992). There is yet a third pattern of majority-minority relationships-that of enforced domination. Smooha maintains that this is how Israel relates to its Arab citizens. Cultural exclusion obtains-they are not invited to be part of the nation; but this without the recognition of them as a distinct political collectivity. The state behaves as if there are “Arab individuals,” who compose the “Arab minority,” but there is no “Arab collectivity” in the formal political sphere.1

As against the cultural and political means of inter-group integration in other cases (the intra-Jewish cases), in the Jewish-Arab case the domination is effected by economic dependency and clientelism and by state surveillance and coercion (Lustick 1980). Smooha estimated that since the 1970s enforced domination over the Arab

minority was somewhat watered down and that the formal status of citizenship and the actual state of living together generated in the two sides a more tolerant altitude towards each other, and that this could serve as a starting point towards an integration based on a wider accord. The outcome of the 1967 war brought about a far-reaching change in the

identity of the Palestinians in Israel. Between 1948 and 1967 the PalestinianArab community in Israel was entirely cut off from the Palestinian-Arabs across the border. The occupation of the West Bank and of the Gaza Strip facilitated a reunion between the communities across the border and sharpened their sense of common national identity. Smooha, who during the 1980s moved his research focus from the issue of the mizrachim to the issue of the Palestinian-Arabs, determined that despite this, they did not become more “anti-Israeli.” He distinguished between “radicalization,” which he defined as the denial of Israel’s right to existence, and “politicization,” which he identified as combining two demands: an equal status in Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories, alongside Israel.