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Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel
Introduction
In the last quarter of this century History -- the academic discipline -- has been debated, revised and deconstructed to the extent that Historiography has become a useless term unless it is a priori defined by its practitioners. This transformation, as Quentin Skinner points out, took place amidst a battle over the definition of history.(1) Lately the battle has subsided and in its wake certain historical "truisms' and historiographical conventions have been severely undermined. Consequently, a new set of historical rules has been formulated which has helped to stabilize the historical discipline. The two main features of this reconstructed and revised historiography are a growing awareness of the discipline's shaky scientific credentials, on the one hand, and the employment of interdisciplinary methodology in the historian's work, on the other. These two new phenomena have formed a new generation of historians who are not content merely to describe and analyze a historical case study, but also strive to relate their findings to methodological questions. Methodology serves to understand particular cases and at the same time examine how the treatment of particular cases can contribute to general theoretical and methodological conceptualization.(2)
The reader may be justified in asking what this introduction has to do with the subject of Zionist and Israeli historiography. The answer, alas, is indeed not much. There is hardly any connection between global historiographical developments and the community of Israeli historians writing on Zionism, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Middle East. I do not wish to belittle the achievements of Zionist historiography. It is endowed with great narrators who can tell a spellbinding story and keep faithfully to the sequence of a commonsensical plot. Yet these historians are still committed to historiographical methods which have been thoroughly revised and deconstructed by their peers elsewhere. Neither the emergence of a critical historical school of thought nor the coexistence of a diametrically opposed Palestinian counter-narrative, which is also based on the works of professional historians, has shaken the confidence of the majority of these historians.
This article is written in the wake of a scholarly debate in Israel that seems to end this era of blissful ignorance. It will follow the emergence of the challenge to the...