ABSTRACT
The problem is not changing people’s consciousness – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
In an article published in March 1999, entitled Can Israel Survive Post-Zionism? Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of MEMRI, 1 wrote:
The attack by intellectuals on Israeli nationalism and Jewish particularism poses more than a passing threat to the State of Israel. Israel is now facing a crisis of identity and values that strikes at the basic components and elements of the Israeli identity: Judaism and nationalism. 2
Others were quick to dismiss the possibility of new ideological currents holding sway over the majority of Israeli Jews. Amongst them was Aharon Megged, winner of the Israel Prize for Literature in 1993, and a supporter of the Israeli political left. He declared in an interview:
Post Zionism [is now emerging as the prevailing trend]. These trends have a strong voice in the media. But as a matter of fact, they have neither a strong hold on the people or on reality. 3
However, the idea – whether true or not – that the changes in Israeli foreign and domestic policy that allowed for Oslo were accompanied by a signifi cant reconfi guration of the ‘nation’ and its identity stimulated a debate both in Israel and abroad. This work argues that the depth of this process of reconfi guration was confl ated. Oslo, as a political juncture, provided the space for critical voices to participate in the debate over the nation’s future. This does not imply that voices of challenge and resistance did not exist before Oslo – merely that they had been confi ned to the margins of society and were limited in their ability to affect political pressure or change. Chapter 4 of this book evinced the incoherency and inconsistency of New History as an ‘emancipatory movement’, and made the collapse of the New Historians intelligible.
