Jew: West or East?

Israel and the Mediterranean Option
Dr. David Ohana

http://www.passia.org/seminars/2000/israel/part11.html

Zionism sprang up against the background of the rise of nationalism, the 
spread of secularism and the dominance of Eurocentricity. One of the chief 
cultural ambitions of the Zionist movement was to create a ‘new man’ - an 
idea which made its appearance in the period of the Enlightenment at the end 
of the 18th Century, at the time of the historic encounter between the Jewish 
Diaspora and European culture. It was thought that the Jew could be 
transformed by the adoption of secularism and modernism, and so be made fit 
to join European society. However, the myth of the ‘new Jew’ came into 
being 
only when the idea of a separate Jewish nationality was accepted and realized 
in Israel. It was believed that there was an affinity between the people and 
the land: only in the land of the forefathers, in the east, would the desired 
change in the image of the Jew come about. Jabotinsky, in the Zionist 
Congress of 1905, spoke of the "Palestinian personality", and Martin Buber 
believed in a mystical connection "between the people and the land." The 
realization of Zionism in Israel linked ideology to geography, history to a 
spatial identity.


One of the paradoxes of the situation was that, from the 1920s onwards, one 
of the models for the creation of the ‘new Jew’ was the Arab. The Arab was 
seen by some of the Zionists as an exemplar of belongingness, of an 
existential and natural connection with the land, and he was the antithesis 
of the stereotype of the exilic Jew. The Jew was weak in body, over-spiritual 
and physically uprooted, while the Arab was active, independent, authentic 
and lived in harmony with nature. The east was not only a place of refuge 
from the Jewish exile in Europe, but also a source of vitality and a place 
where the individual and national personality could be renewed.


Zionism was from its early days characterized by a highly ambivalent approach 
to the east. Theodor Herzl was among those who rejected the eastern option, 
claiming in his pamphlet The Jewish State: "For Europe we will constitute a 
bulwark against Asia, serving as guardians of culture against barbarism." 
This approach was contested by some Zionist ideologues, who discerned vital 
values in the east; thus Ben-Gurion stated (in 1925) that "the significance 
of Zionism is that we are, once again, becoming an Oriental people."


The Zionist approach to the east is a particular instance of the orientalist 
ideology; that is, the way in which the west relates to the eastern region of 
the Mediterranean. It is, however, an approach far more complex than the 
classic European orientalism, since the east is conceived not only as the 
locus of the ancient history of the Jewish people, but also as the supreme 
aim of the people's envisaged return to itself. It is the source, it is the 
cure to the national plight of the Jewish people, in-built in its national 
identity - but to an equal extent it also represents ‘the other’, 
fundamentally exterior to the Zionist Jew and identified as ‘there’ whether 
as an alien, even antagonistic, entity or as the object of an unquenchable 
aspiration. The increasing lure of the east in the eyes of the 19th Century's 
European romantics and the prevailing sense among the intelligentsia of the 
west's decline, together with a yearning for primordial ‘true’ and 
‘sound’ 
foundations prompted Jews with Zionist inclinations to see in the east not 
only the cradle of their national identity or a safe haven, but also a source 
of values, strength and moral regeneration for their people.


Until the 1930s, Zionists saw in the east an object of longing and desire, a 
source of power and an opportunity for redemption. At the same time, however, 
they started out from a position of western arrogance, an attitude of fear 
and suspicion, which also made them see the east as a threat. In the wake of 
the 1929 Arab riots, a rift was created between Jews and Arabs and a period 
of Jewish separatism began, during which all signs of orientalism were 
suppressed. Since then, the east has been perceived as a political reality, a 
place of ‘otherness’, a sort of absence or gap, rather than as an object of 
identification emanating positive values. Thus, the perception of the east 
has been tainted by the Arab-Israeli conflict.


The east was and remains foreign to many Israelis - whether to those who 
wanted to touch it, become a part of it and internalize it, or (all the more 
so) to those who wanted nothing to do with it. The oriental tradition was 
never adopted by the Zionist settlers in Eretz-Israel, but was simply a spice 
in the new national-popular recipe. The pioneering society remained 
essentially Eurocentric and regarded itself as an extension of European 
culture and not a product of Mediterranean culture and certainly not of Arab 
culture. The Jews, like the Europeans, felt culturally superior to the Arabs 
and saw Middle Eastern culture as backward and inferior in comparison with 
western culture. With the founding of the state, mamlachtiut (statism) became 
the order of the day, which meant an enormous concentration of power in the 
hands of the ruling elites. Processes of social standardization began to form 
a national community, as was reflected in expressions like "the in-gathering 
of the exiles" and "the fusion of the exiles". In practice, this represented 
the abandonment of eastern culture in favor of western values and modernity.


The establishment and consolidation of a coherent and distinctive Israeli 
identity has been a remarkable historical feat. It would have been virtually 
impossible without the ability to harness such potent ‘myths’ as the 
in-gathering of the exiles, the up-building of Zion as a model society, the 
creation of a new Hebrew of ‘Jewish’ type and an overarching vision of 
national redemption. Even without the devastating blow of the Holocaust and 
the wall of Arab-Muslim hostility that confronted the new Israeli state, the 
challenge of constructing a collective identity in Israel would have been 
formidable. To convert an urban-based diasporic people whose cohesion had 
already been significantly eroded by cultural assimilation into a ‘normal’ 
nation rooted in its own land and with Hebrew as its language was a huge task 
even under the most optimal set of circumstances. The ideological synthesis 
of socialist Zionism and the driving myths that shaped Israeli society in its 
early years reflected many of these imperatives, constraints and challenges. 
The emphasis on national security, unity, rootedness, pioneering settlement 
and military virtues as well as the priority attached to a ‘melting pot’ 
ideology, seemed appropriate to the immediate imperatives of survival under 
adverse conditions.


The ideology of the melting-pot and the Zionist concept of the ‘new man’ 
later gave way to the old-new idea of a non-ideological Mediterranean 
melting-pot, blending together immigrants from east and west, from the 
Christian countries and the Muslim countries. This new identity was not 
ideologically based, but was formed by geography and culture.


New forms of integral nationalism and religious fundamentalism related to the 
sanctity of the Land of Israel began to change the contours of the Israeli 
identity. The balance between the constituent elements of Israeli collective 
identity were further affected by the erosion of the dominant 
Zionist-socialist pioneering ethos in the early 1970s, by the gradual rise in 
influence of Israel's underprivileged Sephardim who helped bring the Likud to 
power in 1977, by growing settlement across the green line and violent 
confrontation with Palestinians in the territories and by the sharpening 
divisions between the religious and secular segments of Israeli society. The 
decline in the internal national consensus and the increasingly harsh 
criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies abroad were two of the most 
obvious symptoms of malaise in the 1970s and 1980s. Inevitably, they too 
began to change the contours of Israeli identity, the focus of its collective 
consciousness and memory and the perception of Israel's role in the world. 
Thiswas the context in which the Zionist ideology itself came to be called 
into question from within and the older nation-building myths, which had 
already lost much of their mobilizing power, were challenged. Israel's 
international isolation and the successive traumas of the Lebanon War, the 
Intifada and the unaccustomed Israeli passivity during the Gulf War provided 
important external stimuli for this fundamental debate about the place of 
Israel in the region and its geo-political orientation. 


With the progress of the peace process the southern shores of the 
Mediterranean are now open for Israel to pursue cultural relations with the 
entire Mediterranean Basin. It is time now to explore the concept of a 
Mediterranean culture by comparing images, symbols and myths of Mediterranean 
societies and by searching for whatever is shared or different in various 
cultural arenas. The Mediterranean links three continents, three religions 
and thousands of years of civilization. Throughout history the Mediterranean 
has been the conduit for reciprocal influences and cultural exchanges, and 
these processes have always affected Jews and Israelis. As Israel is emerging 
from its isolation in its immediate cultural environment, the cultural 
identities of the Israelis need to be re-thought. Through the exploration of 
Mediterranean Culture and the place of Israel in it, the Israelis also hope 
to be able to gain an insight into the various elements that make up their 
own culture.


The Mediterranean option is not a call for ethnic isolation or a return to 
roots, but for an Israeli ethos which would constitute a common cultural 
platform for the discussion of tensions and separate identities. It is too 
ancient, important and central to be one more reason for ethnic denial, for 
the nursing of sectorial interests, folkloristic tendencies or sentimental 
longings.


The Mediterranean is not the Levant. It is the Levant as well as other 
things. The Mediterranean includes both the Levant and the west, and out of 
this synthesis it created the European space and western culture. The 
Mediterranean did not give rise to a hegemonic, all-inclusive culture with a 
single, homogeneous character. It created a variety of historical models of 
cultural meetings and exchanges of intellectual goods, such as the Italian 
Renaissance or Christian-Muslim-Jewish Andalusia. In the words of the French 
historian Fernand Braudel: "To sail in the Mediterranean is to discover the 
Greek world in Lebanon, prehistory in Sardinia, the cities of Greece in 
Sicily, the Arab presence in Spain and Turkish Islam in Yugoslavia"


It is true that, from the 1960s onwards, hotels were built on the neglected 
shores of the Mediterranean, concealing it from the view of the inhabitants 
of Tel Aviv. For many years, there was a feeling that the Mediterranean 
identity had been laid aside, that it was an option that had been passed 
over. The Jewish Israelis had a suspicious and hostile attitude to the sea, 
perhaps because they had been urbanized in the countries of exile (there was 
no sea in the Polish shtetl or the Atlas Mountains), perhaps because it 
symbolized wandering or perhaps because the Israelis had an ethos of conquest 
of land.


The feminist essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff, a Jewish immigrant from Egypt, had 
insights on the Levant and the Mediterranean which were ahead of their time. 
Levantinism, which developed in the Eastern Mediterranean, was not in her 
opinion "a new craving for monolithic unity which denies all differences", 
but a phenomenon that originated


“in places where there is an interaction between cultures-where there can be 
a flowering, where there can be amorphousness, but there must be interaction. 
Just as there are experiments in genetic hybridization, so one must 
experiment with synthesizing cultures in order to create one that is living 
and successful. This will obviously not arise out of stagnation and rigid 
cultural polarities. If there is to be any relationship between ourselves and 
our neighbors, it will come about through the Levantine cultures.”


Levantinism represents a culture with an independent existence, a culture in 
the process of formation, the configuration, which will result after many 
years from the encounter of Europe and the east. With the decline of 
colonialism, the idea began to take the form of a genuinely new culture. As 
Kahanoff wrote: 


"I am a typical Levantine, inasmuch as I give equal value to what I have 
received from my Eastern origins and what I have now inherited from Western 
culture. I see this cross-fertilization called Levantinization in Israel as 
an enrichment and not an impoverishment!"


From many different sides, people began to envisage the goal of developing 
and disseminating a cultural policy and regional strategy for the 
Mediterranean Basin, in order to produce the cultural content for 
understanding between the various peoples and states of the entire Basin, and 
of its eastern end in particular. Many voices in Israel society began to seek 
to strengthen the Middle East peace process by creating cultural 
understanding among the states of the Mediterranean Basin and destroying 
barriers between peoples. Thus the Mediterranean option is not only a 
creative and innovative proposal, but also an aspect of regional cultural 
dialogue in its own right.


Why should we speak about dialogue, pluralism and tolerance between peoples 
in general and between Jews and Arabs, specifically in the Mediterranean 
context?


The historian Shlomo Dov Goitein claimed that the Jews were a Mediterranean 
people, open, free, mobile, not shut up in their corner of Southern Asia but 
dwelling in the countries which had inherited the classical culture and 
assimilated it into the Islamic culture. In his monumental five-volume study 
entitled A Mediterranean Society Goitein described a mediaeval Jewish society 
living within a Mediterranean geographical and cultural framework. The unity 
of the Mediterranean area is also the starting point for Fernand Braudel and 
Henri Pirenne. Braudel believed that similar natural and climatic conditions 
throughout the Mediterranean Basin produced a basic Mediterranean 
civilization. Pirenne stressed the emergence of Islam as the main cause of 
the split of the former Latin Europe into two parts: a larger part 
concentrated on the shores of the Muslim countries and a smaller part which 
was Christian.


Why do we have to mention the dark side, the "shadow" to use Albert Memmi's 
term, that lies over the Mediterranean Sea? Because it is necessary to try 
and avoid a tendency towards sentimentalism and kitsch, and because an 
effective debate about tolerance and pluralism can be significant only where 
they do not exist.


It must be possible to mould a new regional culture, in which the stress 
would be on awareness of the role and importance of the other as part of the 
inter-regional fabric. The Mediterranean Basin is a mosaic of interlocking 
influences; it has been the most important region of cultural, artistic and 
religious cross-fertilization in the world. The consequences of these 
influences and collaborations are manifest in all its sub-regions and 
countries. The Mediterranean as a whole comprises centers of multifaceted 
contact; trade routes and markets, in which commercial and cultural dialogue 
have flourished for thousands of years. In our own days, however, this vital 
dialogue has not found an appropriate expression.

[Remainder of article and bibliography can be found on 
http://www.passia.org/seminars/2000/isreal.html]