Towards a Critical Analysis of Israeli Political Culture

Abstract

The theoretical framework introduced in this chapter is the social criticism framework of the Frankfurt School, associated with such theoreticians as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm. This framework embodied a bold attempt to combine psychoanalytic ideas with the Marxian tradition of uncovering and unmasking collective ideologies. Moshe Zuckerman approaches his subject matter, the major ideological themes in Israeli political culture, inspired and informed by the Frankfurt School. His goal is to analyze the production of a common identity, which is by necessity a “False Consciousness”. To uncover the process responsible for the creation of this consciousness, what is habitually hidden must be uncovered, and what is hidden is the Other. It so happens that there are three groups of Others that haunt Israeli consciousness: Holocaust survivors, who are physical survivors but psychical victims, Palestinian natives, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel, who represent the historical presence of the Diaspora. Uncovering the production of ideology means stripping away layers of guilt and anxiety. At the end of this process Zuckerman makes it clear that getting rid of the false ideology means a radical de-Zionization of Israeli society.