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| Maisara Baroud, I'm Still Alive (2024). Ink on Canson paper, 21 x 30 cm. Link. |
In a recent interview with the Van Leer journal Hazman Hazeh, the historian Derek Penslar claims that when he started researching Israeli history four decades ago he "was probably the only historian in North America who dealt with Israel." Disregarding Palestinians and Palestinian history for a moment (as Penslar usually does), we may note that the historians Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin were writing about Israel from the late 70s onwards (to mention only some of Penslar's prominent contemporaries).¹ But Penslar's claim is interesting not because of his own disciplinary myopia, but for how it speaks to Israel Studies’ disciplinary formations.² He goes on to say that American political scientists and sociologists were writing about Israel, unlike historians.
In the United States, Israel Studies was institutionalized by political scientists (the Association for Israel Studies in 1985). So dominant were political scientists in the new association—all the officers were political scientists—that early editions of their newsletter pleaded to those outside their discipline to contribute to their journal and meetings. Meanwhile, sociologists represented the vanguard of the proverbial "New Historians” in Israel itself. Penslar's first book Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (published in 1990, based on a 1987 Berkeley dissertation) was, in line with earlier currents of Zionist historiography, a narrative with some distance from the confrontation with colonialism represented (imperfectly) by the "New Historians." The sociologist Gershon Shafir (whose Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was published in 1989, when he was already at UCSD), provides a useful and illuminating review—entitled "Tech for Tech's Sake"—of Penslar's first book. Shafir wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies:
This work can potentially be used to reinterpret important aspects of Zionist history, although the author, for reasons one can only surmise, underplays much of his own innovative perspective and claims only to have tried to round out the historical account of the sources of Zionist colonization in the Ottoman era... In spite of Penslar's novel and suggestive emphasis on the formative impact of social engineering and technocracy on Zionist settlement, his work is old-fashioned in its disregard for the Jewish-Palestinian conflict as a formative influence on the colonization process... Penslar's thesis, however, emphasizes the technocratic, and downplays the colonial dimension of Zionist settlement. Part of the author's reluctance to develop this side of his argument seems to result from the cautious attitude that is the hallmark of the historian's responsibility. This circumspect demeanor puts the European colonial influences in proper context, recognizes their multiplicity and limited impact, and highlights the fact that sometimes they played only a legitimating role. At the same time, Penslar's caution leads him to ignore the broader context of technocracy, its political and colonial character. Colonization was never a technocratic process only; its political, and hence moral, dimensions were never far below the surface.³
In the same interview with Hazman Hazeh, Penslar reiterates his usual objections to Israel being understood as colonial, namely a unique Jewish historical connection to the "land of Israel" and the language of Hebrew, and admits that it doesn't really matter if people disagree with him, seemingly abandoning his position in an ostensible "debate" he has proffered for decades. What matters, Penslar contends, is that Israel exists now and we must pour our efforts into defining the future of “Arabs” and “Jews” (his categories). That colonialism is not simply a question of the past, but a pressing matter in the present, remains lost on Penslar (or rather, denied). Penslar notes that he fell in love with Israel when he went to the kibbutz Ma‘agan Mikhael in 1981 (a place that shares the same coast as Gaza, which lies only 75 miles south, but is a world away). Ma‘agan Mikhael was established in 1949, after the coastal area south of Haifa, including the village of Kabara, was depopulated of its native Palestinians.
¹. We may dwell endlessly on this point. Arthur Hertzberg, of The Zionist Idea (1959) fame, was a professionally trained historian, for example. And why ignore those efforts in England, i.e. Morris, Shlaim, and Pappe? Even developments in Israeli historiography were not separate from the American scene. An English edition of Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis was published in the United States in 1986 (Segev himself studied German history at Boston University).
². On this point, I note that the development of Palestinian historiography and Palestine Studies in North America was an unabashedly transnational undertaking with little regard to discipline, which included professional historians, and historically minded scholars with degrees in Oriental/Near Eastern/Middle Eastern Studies, literature, economics, political science, sociology, etc. As a field in North America it was developed adjacent to, but decidedly outside, universities and traditional academic publishing.
³. Gershon Shafir, “Tech for Tech’s Sake,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 21:4 (1992), 103, 105. Like Penslar, Shafir also studied at Berkeley, but in the Sociology Department, where he completed his Ph.D on Gramsci in 1974.
