The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village

Conclusions

We should note, however, that the achievements of the control system cannot in and of themselves explain the success of the discourse on the Arab village. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, one must acknowledge today that what the control system produced was a “secondary order” reality at best, a representation superimposed over, and obscuring other social realities. It never managed (nor did it try) to stop the proletarianization of peasants. It never managed (though it did try) to put an end to illegal construction and de-facto urbanization. It did not even manage to repress the emergence of grass-roots national political organization in the villages. More often than not, its sole achievement was to obscure official (and academic) perception of these processes. Thus, one often finds nowadays settlements to which the term “village” is officially applied, while their physical structure already merits urban status. Urbanization took place in the villages regardless of the designs of planners, and this fact alone is enough to demonstrate how discourse detached them from reality. This was also why, in 1976, Orientalists and government experts were completely taken by surprise, when the “committee for national direction” (composed of “village” mayors!) organized mass demonstrations to protest government plans to confiscate more Palestinian lands. The events of this day, later known as “land day,” signaled the emergence of rural Palestinians as a national political force to be reckoned with. Quite contrary to what the notion of “hamula struggle” led them to believe, experts discovered that the villages were an effective mobilizing ground for national political action.

I think it is precisely the dubious character of the achievements of the control system, arising from the systematic blindness inculcated by discourse, which demonstrates that these achievements were indeed of secondary importance in comparison with what was the raison d'etre of the control system and the discourse on the Arab village: their premier achievement was to reproduce the separatist character of Israeli identity. The origins of the control system were diverse indeed: they included “divide and conquer” practices developed by “Arabists”; land planning practices; modernization discourse formulated in response to immigration; cooptation strategies developed by the Labor party for electoral purposes; bifurcation of the labor market by Jewish labor unions. There is no one person or group responsible for these. What organized all these diverse practices together was the specific rationality of the control system. This rationality was not an economic one, nor political, nor scientific, nor was it given in any of these practices. It was identical with Israeli identity and the procedures that separate it from its “other.” This is why Israelis still adhere to the control system and the discourse on the Arab village, even though they fail to predict Palestinian behavior or control it (i.e., it was not their goal to begin with).

It is ironic that the discourse on the Arab village would reach the height of its prestige just as the achievements of the control system were evaporating. The conjunction of these two events cannot be explained by the Weberian view of power as the realization of a will, i.e., by focusing on the interest of Jews in maintaining control over Palestinians. Such a view leads to an unavoidable contradiction: If the action of participants in the discourse and the control system is based on “their” interests, why are they unable to recognize their failure? And if they are not capable of monitoring “their own” interests, how were they able to create a coherent and effective control system? The answer is that their action is circumscribed by what discourse and the control system permit them to grasp, and this understanding is indeed both limited and enabled by the premier achievement of discourse and the control system: a position of a Western-modern Israeli subject, strictly demarcated from that of the traditional-Oriental rural Palestinian. Power is not so much “exercised” to realize an Israeli interest, as it is constitutive of the very self-understanding that underlies this interest, a self-understanding predicated on the rejection of the “Orient” and its exclusion.

In this sense, this article merely provides the rough outlines for a future debate on the origins and nature of Israeli separatism. Such a debate has scarcely begun, but implicit understandings of separatism are implicated in the contemporary political debate in Israel. The mainstream of Israeli political thought tends to treat the separation between Jews and Palestinians as a taken-for-granted fact, a direct consequence of Zionism as a nation-building project. Others, on the political left, question this assumption and suggest that separatism should be understood as an institutional system erected in response to certain economic, military, or political interests, a system based on the control and exploitation of Palestinians by Jews.

I think both positions limit the debate about separatism. By ignoring the cultural side of separatism, its character as an identity that requires a permanent effort of constitution, they supply an “alibi” for intellectuals and academics. These can continue using their disciplines and discourses, and even present these as sufficiently “detached” for a critique of Israeli politics, without examining their role in the reproduction of a separatist identity. Moreover, if separatism is understood merely as control over Palestinians, thus ignoring its side as the subjection of Jews, the consequence is that the “distinction” usurped by the Israeli upper class is mis-recognized. This class can continue to present its taste, values, and style of life - all those cultural arbitraries that are marked by the double exclusion of the “Orient” and the “diaspora” - as the sacred cultural consensus of Israeli society. It was my aim in this article, on the contrary, to demonstrate that separatism informs the core of Israeli culture, and thus the intellectual tools to understand it and fight it can not be taken from among what it consecrates.