ABSTRACT
Zionism has been the modern Jewish national movement. Post-Zionism and neo-Zionism are the postmodern thesis and anti-thesis that Zionism generates in the postmodern era. Postmodernism is the cultural counterpart of post-Fordist capitalism (see Lash & Urry 1987; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1992; Crook et al. 1992). In postmodernity the fundamental tenets of modern culture are deconstructed and subverted. Here we focus on one of the conspicuous aspects of postmodernization: the incredulity toward metanarratives, as Jean François Lyotard put it (Lyotard 1984). “History,” “Truth,” and “Subject” are dethroned from their capital-letter majesty, into small-letter commonalities and pluralitieshistories, truths, and subjects substitute them in a volatile changeability, resulting from the destabilization effects of globalization, especially on the major identity foci of modernity, national identities. We ponder in this chapter how the general suspicion toward the big narratives of Western modernity, such as “progress” and “emancipation,” is directed in the case of Israel toward the big narrative of ZionismJewish national identity and its teleology, uniformity, and linearity. Such devaluation of nationalism is a foremost expression of the transition from
state-centered modernization-a process involving nation building-to global postmodernization-a process involving transnational interactivity. Whereas modernity is centripetal, postmodernity is centrifugal. This transition is manifested most clearly in the sphere of collective memory. Whereas modernity tends to fashion a pattern of national memory, postmodernity tends to defuse it and to substitute the “his-story” of the one “us” with the “manifold-story” of many “others” (Jenkins 1997, 2003; Iggers et al. 2008). In the current chapter the following issues are addressed in order: first, the deconstruction of the Zionist metanarrative; second, the epistemological challenges posed to the objectivist notion of history; third, the political context of the said shifts and challenges; and fourth, the historical debate in Israel since the late twentieth century is analyzed, and three major perspectives are explicated: nationalist, neo-nationalist and post-nationalist historiographies.
