Sunshine Recorder

Gabriel Piterberg on Zionism and Anti-Zionism

FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic.

An Israeli historian, who rejects Zionism, tells us about works of scholarship that have challenged the Zionist Israeli narrative of modern history

Zionism is the national political movement dedicated to the establishment and preservation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. You’re an Israeli historian but you are not a Zionist. Perhaps you could tell us about your background and how your views on Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians have evolved and developed.

I was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina. My parents were communists and we emigrated to Israel in 1963, when I was seven years old. We went to a Marxist kibbutz, where I grew up for the first few years, and then we moved to another cooperative settlement of the Labour Movement, a moshav. That was where I spent most of my life in Israel.

I always belonged to the Zionist left in Israel. My views began to change and radicalise around the time of the Lebanon war in 1982, which is something that happened to a number of people of my generation and social background. It wasn’t only the war that changed my perspective, but it was the massacres at [the Palestinian refugee camps of] Sabra and Shatila and the hand grenade that was thrown by a [Jewish] settler at a demonstration in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office which killed one of the leaders of the Peace Now movement.

You served in the Israeli army in Lebanon, didn’t you?

Although I knew there was going to be a war and I knew why, to my shame when I was called to serve and participate in the operation against the Syrian surface-to-air missiles in the Bekaa Valley, I went without having too many hesitations. When I was demobilised it dawned on me that I had really obeyed orders that were given by a state of which I was part and I had not questioned them, even though I knew the war was a bad idea. The whole experience made me start doubting many other things.

Anyway, after the war I completed my BA degree and then an MA at the School of History at Tel Aviv University. And then in 1986 I went to Oxford University to do my doctorate. I was already doubting the whole notion of Zionism and the Jewish State as I was going to Oxford. My stay there really tipped the balance and I became not only a non-Zionist, but in certain ways also anti-Zionist.

You’ve selected five books on the history of Zionism. Can you tell us what ties them together?

In different ways they do not accept either the grand Zionist Israeli narrative of the modern history of Israel/Palestine or of Jewish history. Some of them take on the entire story, others take part of the story and dissect it and reject it. So what I’d say underlies all of the books here is the non-acceptance of the Zionist narrative on a variety of topics but especially the grand narrative of Jewish history and of the Israel/Palestine history since 1882. Kornberg is a bit of an odd one out in this list, because although his work is critical I am not sure whether this is matched by his politics.