Book Review by Joachim Martillo (
ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
[Originally published on Monday, Nov 3, 2003 -- republished because of the debate over the proposed UK boycott of Israeli academia]
Even if
The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, Theory, Ideology and Identity by Uri Ram is somewhat dated, this book remains useful because it surveys a lot of the important English and Hebrew sociological literature about the State of Israel. Non-Hebrew readers can thus gain some access to otherwise inaccessible scholarship. Because Zionist censorship for the most part controls US public discourse, the ability to cite genuine Hebrew sources can protect against attempts to silence discussion by means of accusations of anti-Semitism.(*)
I now understand more why so many Israeli sociologists write history books and articles. So much of Zionist social activity connects to various (mostly false) conceptions of Jewish history that Israeli sociologists need to develop a historical perspective in order to do sociological research.
Because Uri Ram is a post-Zionist, he tries hard not to act as a Zionist propagandist. He is aware of the complete fabrication of modern Zionist identity. If I am not mistaken, his earliest important work describes how Ben-Zion
Dinur and colleagues created the educational system in the
1950s that constructed the Zionist national consciousness first among Israeli Jews and then among American
Ashkenazim.
Before this
propagandization, normal Rabbinic Hebrew terminology describes the Jewish community with phrases like
klal yisrael, the community of Israel. Thanks to the efforts of the Zionist educational establishment,
ha`am hayyehudi (the Jewish nation or people in the Central and Eastern European
voelkisch racist sense) has gradually replaced
klal yisrael or similar idioms in popular usage and in the dominant consciousness of Israeli Jews,
Ashkenazi Americans, non-Jewish Americans and many Europeans. While Ram even correctly labels the 1967 Israeli aggression as a preventive war and not as a preemptive war, he like all other Israel-trained sociologists occasionally shows the effects of the indoctrination of the Zionist educational system.
Even though this relatively short book (207 pages) is quite lucid in comparison with sociological papers, the text is probably tough reading for the non-sociologist. The first chapters that discuss the initially dominant functional school of sociology are probably the hardest, but they contain useful information. In particular, the discussion supports the contention that Israeli academia does not constitute a system of higher learning in any real sense but plays the role of a system of higher propaganda. The material in these chapters provides support for the boycott of Israeli academics because they are mostly not scholars but serve Zionist aggression and racism on the intellectual front.
The chapter on the sociology of elitism identifies the intellectual origins of the Israeli polity in Eastern Europe and bolsters the contention that Israel is a formal democracy that combines characteristics of
inter bellum Poland and other Eastern European states of that time period with aspects of the Soviet organizational model. Americans often have difficulty grasping this point that Israel is only an apparent democracy because they are unfamiliar with Eastern European
pseudodemocratic posturing.
The reader must approach some of the material in the discussion of elitism
cum grano salis because
Yonatan Shapiro, the creator of the Israeli sociology of elitism, was himself an unrepentant Labor Zionist and consciously or unconsciously confused the distinct ideologies of Fascism and Nazism.
Shapiro has no problem identifying the authoritarian nature of
Herut (Begin's) politics but is blind to the Leninist authoritarian style of the politics of Labor and its predecessors even though Ben-
Gurion and most of the founders of
Ahdut ha`
Avodah were open and frank admirers of Leninist political techniques.
Shapiro's prejudices make it difficult for him to understand of the fall of Labor from power in 1977 or to relate it to similar developments in Eastern Europe.
The following comment (
p. 72) in the chapter on elitism has qualified relevance to the politics of family values in the USA: "As for the role of 'values,'
Shapiro insists that they are mere derivatives of strategic interests and instruments of domination, which cannot in themselves explain much about any social structure."
Sami Smooha introduced the school of pluralism to Israeli sociology. I have not read much of his work, but if Ram describes it correctly,
Smooha was daring by the standards of Israeli academia. Yet Zionist indoctrination has distorted his work, for he appears to view the accidentally fabricated
Mizrahi (oriental Jewish) identity as comparable to Eastern European
Ashkenazi ethnic identity.
Shlomo Swirski introduced the Marxist perspective to Israeli sociology, but if Ram's description is accurate, he has not read much of
Katznelson's,
Arlosoroff's or
Jabotinsky's writings, for he is unable to identify Labor Zionism as fascist and fails to perceive the abstract Nazism in Revisionism (
Jabotinskian or
Likud ideology).
Swirski needs to investigate more about the behavior of Zionists in the pre-State period toward
`edot hammizrah (oriental communities).
The actions of pre-State
Ashkenazi Zionists toward those few Oriental Jews, who wanted to assist the Zionist movement, shows that
Ashkenazi Zionists had no genuine interest in Jewish Arabs or Persians and only worked to bring them to Israel when they realized
1) that there were not enough
Ashkenazi settler-colonists to hold Palestine and
2) that the Zionist state needed a class of native collaborators as raw manpower and cannon fodder.
Swirski believes that Israel needs a "second"
Mizrahi Zionist revolution to achieve social equality. The point of view looks confused to me but was so offensive to the Israeli establishment that
Swirski was driven from the Israeli university system. He is probably better off.
The discussion of Israeli sociologists of feminism is interesting, but these researchers apparently do not know enough about Eastern European
Ashkenazi gender roles or relations to provide much useful information about gender-related developments either among Israeli Jews or among American
Ashkenazim.
Nordau's concept of
Muskeljudentum, which is superficially a call for Jews to be come athletic but at a deeper level proposes to remake Judaism into a religion or ideology of conquest and violence, is probably a direct reaction to the traditional Central and Eastern European perception of
Ashkenazi males as weak and effeminate. The gratuitous violence that the
IDF commits on all Palestinians as well as the gross vulgarity of
IDF soldiers toward Palestinian women and girls is probably a form of psychological compensation for historic European attitudes toward
Ashkenazi males.
In Ram's book, the best comes last. The Israeli sociology of colonization is closest to the reality of the State of Israel and Zionist crimes against the native population. Colonization sociologists have developed some interesting euphemisms and linguistic distinctions, but to their credit they have made more progress in bringing their analysis into public discussion than comparable American academic investigators and researchers of Israel have achieved.
I liked the phraseology on page 176.
"The Israeli economy is unique in that it does not rest either on a profit economy or on the accumulation of debt, but rather on unilateral capital transfers. This enables the Israeli ruling bureaucracy to maintain an enormous military establishment and simultaneously to guarantee a reasonable standard of living to the population."
I would have bluntly stated that Israel has no genuine economy but serves purely as a racist Jewish garrison colony in the Middle East for the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland and its dependent and intimidated client state, the USA. The public face of the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland is the Israel Lobby.
Either formulation suggests the following obvious questions.
1. What possible reason could Israeli leaders have to work toward a reasonable
modus vivendi with Palestinians? And
2. what possible reason could
Neoconservatives have to work for the stabilization of the ME?
If there were no conflict over Palestine and if the Middle East became stable, the US-to-Israel capital transfers, which are directly or indirectly the major source of funds for the Zionist and
Neoconservative leaderships, would end, for the American political leadership, no matter how dependent and intimidated with respect to the international Jewish Zionist plutocracy, would no longer be able to justify the massive US economic support of the State of Israel.
Israeli colonization sociologists are unfamiliar with the Czarist colonization enterprise in the Caucasus and Southwest Asia although it provides the template for Zionist efforts in Palestine (think
Chechnya). These researchers also seem to lack an understanding of the collectivist nature of traditional Eastern European culture and in particular of traditional Eastern European
Ashkenazi culture.
Israeli sociologists have generally failed to relate modern Israeli culture (and modern
Ashkenazi American culture) to traditional ethnic
Ashkenazi culture because they are so entranced both by Zionist sloganeering for the negation of the Diaspora and also by Zionist myth of a single Jewish
Volk -- even those researchers like Ram, who intellectually know that
`am yehudi is purely a Zionist nationalist construct.
The book itself provides inadvertent evidence that the traditional Eastern European
Ashkenazi social mechanisms for the control of deviance are still operative (albeit weakened) among Israeli Jews just as they continue to exist among
Ashkenazi Americans. Even though Ram is oblivious to the obvious need for a unified sociology of traditional Eastern European
Ashkenazi culture in its Eastern European context and of the evolution of this culture both in the American and Israeli context, reading his book is well worth the effort, for gaining an understanding of the historical and current flawed state of Israeli sociology helps the reader to understand the Zionist enterprise and provides him with much data necessary to inform the American public of the truth and to combat Zionist propagandists in the USA.
(*) Zionist control of public discussion in the USA about Israel is particularly obvious in the current murderous
IDF rampage. I have yet to see any English media source connect the ongoing killing of Palestinians with the accusations of corruption against Sharon and his family. When Israeli leaders run afoul of the law or into trouble at the polls, they invariably order the
IDF to slaughter Arabs as a distraction because killing Arabs is very popular with Israeli Zionists as Israeli polls have shown since the
1950s. Yet, no hint of the connection of Israeli domestic politics to Israeli murder of Palestinians appears anywhere in the US media.
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