[wvns] Learning from 'his own words
Learning from 'his own words'
By Yitzhak Laor
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/865058.html
In the conclusion to his book "The Invention and Decline of
Israeliness: State, Society and the Military" (University of
California Press, 2001), Baruch Kimmerling writes: "To understand what
is happening in the Middle East today, it is necessary to note the
existence of a number of social and political limits to Israeli
democracy, which paradoxically also serve, by reason of their
multiplicity, to present a sort of pluralist facade and thus provide
the Israeli state with a veneer of democratic legitimacy." Kimmerling
notes the five limits of Israeli democracy: Jewish law (which the
state has embraced); the limitation of Jewish female citizenship
(which includes discrimination even against Ashkenazi Jewish women);
the limitation of Israeli citizenship (that is, discrimination against
Israel's Arabs); the ethnic limitation (that is, Israel's Ashkenazi
hegemony); and the limitation of the Israeli control system (namely,
the occupation).
I heard someone on television say in an awed voice that Kimmerling,
who died on May 20, at the age of 67, took care to use "his own words"
rather than repeat "what others had said." Grieving for one man's
death should not be an opportunity to settle scores with another, and
therefore it should be noted only that Kimmerling's use of "his own
words" was not anything out of the ordinary: It was a beginning, a way
of clearing the table, of preparing to redefine the present - that is,
sociology.
Kimmerling gave political accounts of what his surroundings - the
media, politicians, the university - preferred not to describe, but
rather only to recycle, or to hide behind cliches. The occupation is
an excellent example of this. He devoted much of his scholarly work
and journalistic opinion pieces to the occupation. At times, when
reading "critical texts," it seems as though the very use of the word
"occupation" - which for years was considered oh-so-subversive - is in
itself enough; as though when the radical professor stands in the
classroom and says "the occupation," and when his students write down
"the occupation" in their notebooks - the need to say something has
already been met, and everyone is absolved of the need for political
or sociological description. But what does the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian territory even mean, after 40 years of wild, unbounded
rule, whose defenders like to say that it is "more enlightened than
any other occupation," forgetting that this "enlightened" quality has
yet to be examined from the Palestinian side of the boot and failing
to note that no other occupation in modern history lasted this long?
What is it precisely, this 40-year occupation, what is it in
historical or sociological terms?
Well, we have many scholars who love to pontificate - not from their
university podiums, of course - and wail "What is this doing to us?"
How bad we have it. How corrupt we are. And the occupation, the
occupation, the occupation, and when will it end, and why is it
happening to us? We so wanted our beautiful, innocent Zionism. Well,
beyond all the claptrap about "when will it end," what, exactly is the
scientific nature of the occupation? What is its political meaning?
What will the occupation of 2007 look like from a historical standpoint?
For example, how was the political and social entity of the
Palestinians eliminated? How was the last remaining terrain in which
they could have built their state crushed? It's too easy to say, "Two
states for two peoples." Even President George Bush says that. But
where exactly does the Palestinian state begin? How exactly did the
Palestinian people disappear as a national entity? That, after all, is
the historical question. The barbaric wall cutting through Palestinian
land is only the symptom of something broader, and that something
isn't security.
More than 'okay'
This is why Kimmerling was much more than an "okay" sociologist;
that's what we can learn from his use of "his own words." When he
described the occupation in terms of control, he was looking for the
place where the Israeli state had expanded to monstrous proportions
what before it had allowed itself to do to its own citizens in only a
very limited way. There was a Shin Bet security service before 1967,
and there was a military and there were prisons; the occupation,
however, meant that all of these branches became monstrous.
Kimmerling moved from the present to the past not only when dealing
with the occupation - that is, when he described it as it was, with
its heroes and their interests. He followed the same path when he
considered the dispute with the Palestinians and defined it as a
dispute over land, and soon he came to realize what the difference was
between the so-called Zionist left (which eventually became absorbed
into the political center) and the other kind of left (which
eventually all but vanished from the political map): 1967 was not the
wound, but the pus of a wound that had been left untreated. They were
not naive, those who thought to themselves, both before 1967 and
after, "time will pass, and the world will forget"; they were not
naive, but stupid. The sixth day of that war, ceremoniously called the
Six-Day War, has stretched out like a 40-year coma.
Kimmerling trained many younger scholars; in the last decade, an era
when critical scholars have been hounded, some of them paid dearly for
being his students. As he said several times, especially in his
chilling interview with Dalia Karpel in the Haaretz Magazine in
October 2006, he himself was left untouched; but his students, or
those for whom he wrote letters of recommendation, paid a price in
that horrible environment where freedom primarily means vacation.
To understand the effort he made - whether in his first study, which
dealt with the land struggle, or later, using other tools, especially
in books he published abroad and in essays he published in Israel
about the demolition of Palestinian political society and the
disintegration of Israeliness - to understand that effort, one must
take into account that the most representative work to be produced by
Kimmerling's colleagues in the Hebrew University sociology department
in recent decades was "Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of
Israel," by Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak. Even those who have not
read the book can see from its title how the Israeli crisis is
perceived by mainstream sociology, with all its power and ability to
produce more and more scholars, scholarships and "heirs." In the
mainstream discourse, our problems are a kind of pain in the groin of
our Zionist vision.
Here, for example, we can learn something about Kimmerling's effort
and courage; not because he defined himself as being one thing or
another, and not because his model of democracy was a state for all of
its citizens, in the American style, but especially because he
insisted on toppling the ideological house of cards that his fellow
Israeli sociologists, those residing in the offices along the same
hallway, had built and even took pride in.
What about Weber?
The pattern was provided by the enterprise of Shmuel Eisenstadt,
because of the way he undertook to be part of the state's projects,
without factoring in that a state, any state, is primarily a control
mechanism of the elites. Is it possible to write sociology as though
Max Weber never wrote what he wrote, as though Emile Durkheim never
studied what he studied? We can't, unless we are the exception. That
was the scientific effort Kimmerling made in his sociology: to hold us
up to the general rule.
I knew, from dozens of e-mails, how much he needed, how much he
yearned for camaraderie, for friends, especially on the Mount Scopus
campus. At the same time, he never wavered in his convictions, not
even when it jeopardized his immense need for company, for friends.
This was the most important thing for him: intense friendship, and a
refusal to relinquish his position. This is a difficult thing for an
immigrant born of immigrants; it is even more difficult for someone
who is born disabled [Kimmerling suffered from cerebral palsy]. That
courage, and not only the clarity of his analyses, was what we so
admired.
*********************************************************************
WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE
To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
Need some good karma? Appreciate the service?
Please consider donating to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@yahoo.com for instructions.
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:wvns-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:wvns-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
No comments:
Post a Comment