Is the Israeli Discipline of “Middle East and Islam Studies” Decolonizing? Open Access

Abstract

Introduction

The above appraisal, made by politically critical Israeli Middle East studies (MES) social historians about their own discipline, is emblematic of a common self-perception by Israeli MES scholars.² The narrative it follows portrays a rupture, progression, or transformation within the field between its colonial–orientalist past and its alleged present as a self-aware, critical, and unproblematic part of a global, if not placeless, discipline. Cohen and Osheroff’s essay (published in Hebrew) provides a convenient example and starting point for discussing this widespread—yet rarely published and sometimes implicit—narrative within (and about) Israeli MES,³ thus creating an unusual opportunity for analyzing the narrative. However, their intervention is also noteworthy due to the authors’ own anti-colonial stance, and because they go further to argue about the “decolonization” of their field, which they situate at the vanguard of all Israeli disciplines:

The aim of our intervention is to inform about and argue against this narrative, as well as to ponder the problem of whether a “decolonialized” Israeli MES is at all possible, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. While we acknowledge greater inclusivity in this field, we argue that Israeli MES is not ahead of but behind other disciplines in Israel and MES abroad, in both calls for and practice of “decolonization,” and we suggest possible reasons for this.

In the context of knowledge and education, “decolonization” typically refers to emancipation from the colonial legacy by prolonged unlearning, reframing, challenging, and recontextualizing curricula, research, and stakeholders that maintain the colonizer’s perspective, as well as hierarchies in knowledge and voices.⁵ Therefore, for Israeli MES to be “decolonized,” they will need to acknowledge, unearth, and actively reverse their particular settler-colonial conditioning in power and knowledge, as part of Israeli Zionism and of the global discipline. The uncovering and undoing of latent colonial structures are also essential for the promotion of “strong objectivity,”⁶ an epistemic ambition to sense reality despite the appreciation that all perspectives are subjective and interested, not through merely having an “awareness” of the bias, but through countering the significantly greater voice and narrower experiences of the powerful. Conclusively, any decolonization in academia depends on a recognition of the political reality, and of the necessity to actively counter the knowledge production, agencies, and perspectives that it fosters. Contrary to these two necessities, we argue that the coupling of Israeli MES’ adherence to “political neutrality” and inaction, with an overwhelming underrepresentation of Palestinians, effectively safeguard the “unity” of the field’s Zionist elements over the possibility of solidarity and action, resulting in persistent avoidance of explicit, meaningful, and concrete decolonization practices. Finally, we propose that the discipline’s premises may not allow a true decolonization.

Are Israeli MES No Longer Colonial?

In asking whether Israeli MES are no longer colonial, we do not wish to make a historical argument. We are also wary of how historicizations of this field have proven to drag discussions into a distracting deliberation about the past, rather than focus on the debate we wish to promote about the present. Consequently, a historical background of the colonial aspects of the Israeli expertise,⁷ while relevant, is beyond the aim and scope of this article. Instead, as a point of departure, we assume Cohen and Osheroff’s observations of changes in knowledge production in their field to be true: the appearance of criticism of colonial and imperial practices; criticism of orientalism and Islamophobia; paradigmatically adopting indigenous perspectives; preference for social, cultural, and intellectual history over political and diplomatic history; researching the role of Israel and Zionism as part of the region; and (the impression of) a more inclusive social composition of PhD students (Palestinians, women, and mizraḥi⁸). These observations lead them, and many in Israeli MES, to deduce that their discipline underwent, or is on the verge of, a momentous metamorphosis.

Evidence of changes within the Israeli discipline should not be dismissed. There may well be an increase in the proportion, centrality, or number of young (or other) researchers in Israeli MES units who focus on the importance of power contexts, from globalization to capitalism, and, importantly, imperialism and colonialism, thus contributing valuable evidence and ideas. While works from these perspectives have been common in Israeli critical social sciences for decades, they were considered harmful and outcast or ignored in Israeli MES until recently, indicating a movement in this regard. Additionally, given the widely accepted “colonial past” of the local expertise,⁹ a radical repentance could, in theory, correspond to the sociological theory that certain groups “gain the right” to speak more critically after having proved their loyalty in practice. Changes in Israeli MES could also be responding to a need for legitimacy and/or compensating for historical practices or common accusations against them. Finally, the effects that “the reflexive turn” and postcolonial theory had on the global (US-based) fields of Middle East studies and cultural anthropology (with Israel–Palestine being an exception¹⁰) could have inspired similar developments in Israeli MES.

However, the observation that Israeli MES are radically transformed is highly exaggerated and not new. In the only monograph dedicated to the study of the Israeli expertise until recently, sociologist Gil Eyal narrated it through an evolutionary process of “disenchantment,” where the expertise allegedly developed from “enchanted” orientalist romanticism in its past into an alienated, “disenchanted,” modernist, academic professionalism at present.¹¹ Aptly, Chinski and Lavi cautioned in response that neither was the expertise “merely enchanted” then, nor is it “disenchanted” now.¹² We urge for similar skepticism to be applied to the temporal rupture being devised between past and present here, as well as to any legitimizing comparison to other Israeli disciplines. The conventional wisdom that MES was historically “the most Establishment-oriented site of Israeli SSH”¹³ requires proof, would face competition,¹⁴ and is hardly measurable; much more the claim that it is the least one today.

Consider the resolutions of both the Israeli sociological and anthropological associations in 2016 and 2018 respectively to boycott Ariel University (which is based in a West Bank settlement and received university status by military decree), or against institutional racism and violence in 2020. These stand in stark contrast to the atmosphere in the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI), which time and again opted to take the political decision of being supposedly “non-political.”¹⁵ Initiatives to declare solidarity with Palestinian universities when the Israeli military forcibly closed them (2005); to protest the (then-planned) location of the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem over a historical Muslim cemetery (2006); to prevent Ariel University from joining MEISAI (2007–2014); or to join hundreds of faculty members and the Israeli Sociological Society in a letter protesting the disciplinary hearing of a Palestinian student who quoted the poet Mahmoud Darwish in Arabic at a Nakba memorial event (2022) were all thwarted before crystallizing into motions, citing a threat to the unity of (the Jewish elements of) the Association, and in the name of adhering to “political neutrality.” These are, of course, not politically neutral decisions. The assumption underlying this is that politics is irrelevant to the production of knowledge, and therefore that proactively countering the political context is not necessary for better knowledge.

Remarkably, this adamant avoidance of political action allows exceptions when it comes to BDS (the Palestinian call for international boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel, to end the Occupation). This was the case recently, when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the leading scholarly society of the discipline worldwide, resolved to ratify its endorsement of the Palestinian call for BDS on Israel, and its Israeli counterpart, MEISAI, overwhelmingly resolved to respond immediately with a protest statement.¹⁶ The Israeli response portrayed MEISAI as peace loving and rejected claims of discrimination against Palestinians from the occupied territories in Israeli universities (which it calls “a model of academic freedom”), making reprimanding whataboutist complaints against MESA for the attention it pays to Palestinian oppression over other injustices in the region (albeit none of which made a similar BDS plea).¹⁷ The statement disingenuously neglects the deep relations that Israeli universities have with the security apparatus;¹⁸ the spatial prohibition on Palestinian (but not Jewish) residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories accessing, studying, and working in Israeli universities; and that one of the nine Israeli universities is located in an illegal settlement at the heart of the occupied West Bank. Indeed, much can be learnt from political statements issued by scholarly associations,¹⁹ but in this case, it would suffice to note the overwhelming majority who supported the response statement in a membership referendum to cast doubt on decolonization or anti-colonial claims. Taken together, these examples show that Israeli MES do not yet recognize the need or support for, let alone lead in, decolonization action, in comparison with either global MES trends or other Israeli disciplines.

Another indication for decolonization is the volume and centrality of colonized voices. In this measurement, too, Israeli MES falls short. Unlike the ethnic diversity of scholars in the discipline in the West, in Israel, the number of “minorities,” that is, non-Jewish scholars (and students), is negligible, despite Arab-Palestinians composing more than 20% of Israeli residents.²⁰ Half of the large MES departments are also located in areas where Arab population is markedly higher. Blatant underrepresentation is common across all Israeli SSH, but bears additional importance in MES due to the unique subaltern perspective of Palestinians and their clear advantage in common Middle Eastern language, culture, religion, and so on, particularly considering the importance Israeli MES attribute to the Arabic language. Meanwhile, Israeli MES continue to be manned almost exclusively by Jewish Israeli faculty, not a few of whom served in orientalist roles in the Israeli security apparatus, and now hold senior MES roles.²¹ An extreme version of such self-unawareness manifests in Tel Aviv University’s Vice Rector, Eyal Zisser, a Syria expert, senior consultant for Israeli intelligence, and former MEISAI board member, who made time in his busy schedule to pen an op-ed in a Hebrew daily to avert any potential public worry about MESA’s BDS resolution. While Palestinians of his generation have not known a day of liberty and basic rights in their lifetimes, Zisser preferred to focus on reassuring Jewish Israelis that nothing would change, highlighting the nation’s many new international academic agreements being signed away from spotlights, in a contradictory display of unconcerned alarm, where the speaker scrambled to draw attention to the very action he called to ignore.²²

Furthermore, when all the MES agents and agencies in Israeli academic institutions are accounted for, it transpires that a significant number of them are not part of the described shift, or oppose it actively. Many do not engage with the contextualization of power, reflexivity, or methodology altogether; several resourceful research centers seek to influence policy through joint events with the Establishment, policy papers, and “objective,” non-peer-reviewed, periodical current event analyses, which are distributed to a large readership in Hebrew and English; influential public commentators advocate Israeli policies or right-wing propaganda, sometimes while relying on undisclosed official sources; and a handful of individuals use their academic authority to disseminate hate speech, without being excluded from the field.

These anecdotal examples are not negligible in a field that totals around 100–200 senior faculty members. Israeli MES locations also benefit from security resources, either directly (as part of agreements and programs of Israeli higher education institutions, or by gaining access or sources) or indirectly (e.g., Arabic language training and informal recruitment methods), and/or maintain contact with officials, invite them to speak in academic platforms, advise governing bodies, are offered opportunities for their reserve military service or opportunities to their students, and have a variety of other relationships with the establishment.²³ Even in “critical” Israeli MES circles, postcolonial criticism is often met with skepticism, curtailment, or harsh responses.²⁴ Not a single positive review of the ground-breaking and only (!) postcolonial work of Eyal²⁵ on the genealogy of local expertise can be found. The overall engagement with, let alone development of, postcolonial theory is negligible, and likewise explicit efforts to decolonize the discipline. While it is possible that a promising young generation is emerging, it will have to face challenges before this promise is fulfilled. These practices, taken together with the historical context, the resistance to action or solidarity, and the strong support for the berating response to MESA’s resolution testify to the limited scope of changes within the discipline. Conclusively, it is too early, at best, to conclude that a radical transformation is occurring.

Especially curious is the attribution of an “increase in openness and inclusivity” to “the discipline’s familiarity with the Other.”²⁶ In reality, these occurred despite trends of remoteness from the object of study, as manifested, inter alia, in a preference for written text and language (Mendel 2016).²⁷ When the source of these ideas and practices was interrogated in interviews with relevant Israeli MES agents, their origins were traced back to external factors, such as other academic fields (specifically American academia and other disciplines) and Israeli public discourse and sociopolitical events (e.g., peace agreements, changes in sociological and public discourse in Hebrew, “the new historians” and subsequent evidence of the Nakba, reactions to criticism, and growing competition within local higher education²⁸). These developments did not, by and large, draw on interpersonal familiarity or immersion experiences.

Not a “Turn” but Inclusion

While not stagnant, and without ongoing changes being taken lightly, such trends are better understood as growing inclusivity of the critical alongside the existing, as part of the interested expansion of any academic expertise. Axiomatically, given the eternal appetite for innovation and authority, all areas of expertise aspire to expand to terra incognita, preferably subversive, from which they can draw, refine, and harvest new power-knowledge resources. This was certainly the case throughout the history of Israeli MES, where every cohort contested the assumptions of its predecessors. The founding “generation” settled and acted in the East, and even expressed an ambition to “regenerate it,” despite the premise of remoteness advocated by their German mentors. Their students, who grew up in and were shaped by Mandatory Palestine, defiantly studied the modern era, and unlike their teachers, partially worked as specialists for the Zionist security apparatus. The next cohort provocatively studied contemporary affairs in the 1960s, with a few recognizing early Palestinian nationalism, or making daring controversial peace initiatives. From the 1990s, marginalized actors mobilized postcolonial or reflexive theory, challenging Zionist narratives. Perhaps a turn to a globalized perspective will be next.

These generational challenges were also informed by opportunity and interests, questions of identity, constructions of uniqueness and novelty, responses to exclusion, changes in power relations within the discipline, sociopolitical context, and/or the need to break through in the academic field. They all seemed like “deep and meaningful change” in their time and were often described as “new mizraḥanut” (Israeli expertise on Arabs and Islam; literally: orientalism). Yet the large ship of Israeli MES did not turn on its axis, nor was the water upon which it sails replaced.

In a recent initiative that declared itself “new mizraḥanut,” one of the authors joined forces with a few colleagues to give presence to critical Israeli MES voices in the wider Hebrew reading public by creating dedicated electronic platforms: Eastern Wind (est. 2005), Can Think (est. 2011), and The Forum for Regional Thinking (FORTH, est. 2014).²⁹ A retrospective review of these initiatives is beyond the scope of this paper, but in contrast to impressions of increasing openness, decolonization, and radical trends in the local discipline, several Jewish-Israeli MES research associates opted out of FORTH recently, citing an “overly critical” agenda.

Caution is therefore advised in considering yet another pronouncement of new, reformed, or transformed MES, particularly when basing it on accounts from within the field itself. It is not incidental that we, the authors, hold a more critical perspective about Israeli MES. Being outside the field’s conditions positions our subjectivities in ways that experience it differently than researchers who are part of it. However, while unmethodical impressions, particularly by invested agents (such as Cohen and Osheroff), lack the rigor of systematic empirical evidence about the present (or past), they do provide an important account of the experiences and perspectives of their authors, from which we can learn what stands out as noticeable to subjects in certain social positions (e.g., male Jewish-Israeli MES researchers). This allows us to appreciate the value and importance of such accounts, but also requires us to be careful when taking them at face value.

Can Israeli MES Be Non- or Anti-orientalist?

What, then, might attest to Israeli MES undergoing “decolonization”? A large proportion of Palestinians working in the discipline, with conferences and modules delivered in Arabic? Discussion and analysis framed around the term “decolonization” that develop into actions? Critical examination of global power and social structure? Zionism taking center stage in curricula, and being examined comparatively with other settler-colonial projects? MEISAI following other scholarly societies in detaching itself from colonial projects and in support of Palestinians’ struggles for equal rights? A development rather than a mere implementation of (or worse, avoidance of or scorn for) social theory? A rich, nuanced, and critical methodological discussion similar to those in other disciplines? Israeli MES evaluated positively by more than just its own agents? These and other ideas could be important indications.³⁰ However, a preliminary question must first be considered: Is such an outcome likely or even possible?

There are two reasons for which we are inclined to a negative answer. The first is that the field is contingent on economic, sociopolitical, and discursive conditions, which, in effect, make its decolonization impossible. Discursively, unlike the case in Said’s wider Orient,³¹ the discipline’s object is a blend of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim qualities, which conveniently mirrors the image of the Zionist self, as a meld of nation, language, religion, and space.³² The (interested) Arab/Muslim object therefore manifests more prominently in Israel than elsewhere, for example, in naturalized academic bundling of the Middle East with Islam in academic units, whether nominally (e.g., MESA vs. MEISAI) or informally (in teaching and writing practice).

Politically and economically, the size, resources, and status of Israeli MES draw on the mutual relations between expertise on Arabs and Muslims (within and outside academia) and general Jewish-Israeli society. The latter holds political control over most of the field’s resources (students, legitimacy, tolerance, funding, audience, readership, etc.). While Israeli MES, like all professional fields, are also influenced by their professional world, the combination of control over resources, powerful knowledge–power regimes operating within orientalist Jewish-Israeli-Zionist society, and the closing of discursive space in Israel means that decolonization is not a likely outcome at present. Put differently, besides optimism, tenacity, and luck, a decolonization of Israeli MES is unlikely to succeed without a radical change in the political reality.

The second reason is the difficulty of imagining an Israeli expertise on the Middle East, Arabs, and/or Islam that would be divorced from orientalism. Not only because of its political history (and present), but also because the very existence of such expertise, in academia and generally, is an expression of Western power, in a way similar to women’s studies or black studies by white men being inevitably an expression of patriarchy and racism.

Moreover, to be distinguishable as a discipline requires both internal cohesion and differentiation from other knowledge areas. In this case, the difference between “Middle East studies” and studying a Middle Eastern case in fields such as sociology, politics, economics, global studies, or culture/religious/language studies is the latter’s commitment to theoretical engagement with human behavior broadly. MES, by definition, depend on the existence of a different object, and do not wish to make deductions about greater human phenomena. Without this difference, the discipline would become redundant and dissipate into various social and historical studies. This detachment of the region (and religion!) from the global and the human testifies to MES’s inherent political nature. And, while this is true of all area studies—which are indeed a Western imperial heritage—not all area studies have the same degree of imperialism, velocity, and politicality (for example, Scandinavian or Christian studies remain rare, while MES flourish, especially in Israel). In other words, decolonizing a discipline defined by detachment from global context is paradoxical. Such an undertaking would bring into question the very necessity and knowledge effect of the discipline’s existence. Therefore, perhaps it is MES’ disappearance—as a social phenomenon, as a nominal concept, and as an independent field of knowledge practice—that would allow us to conclude that it was, indeed, decolonized.

Notes

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