Telling the Story of a Politicized National History: The Field and Habitus Making of Israeli Historians

Israeli historians have shaped some of the national narratives which have established Israel’s geopolitical and socio-cultural self-determination vis-à-vis the autochthonous population. This assessment, though it has never truly been studied from the angle of political sciences, raises the following sociopolitical questions: What has been the role of Israeli historians in forging Israeli identity and what have been the connections between their academic world and that of institutional politics? A sociological toolkit enables us to detect the social and political features of these Israeli historians (as a hermeneutic community) through their interpersonal relations as well as the trajectory of their careers by delineating the fields and structural dispositions they themselves contribute to select, codify, formalize and even institutionalize within the realm of politics (i.e. the national ethos as an interiorized collective habitus (N.Elias,1991; P.Bourdieu,1998). Israeli historiography (meant as Jewish and Zionist) is a socio-political and cultural construction that is based on the dichotomy ‘We vs. They’ and posits national identity as superior to any sort of otherness. Thus it erects walls and boundaries between two distinct national demands over the same land. The issue can be analyzed by delineating a process which consists of both a double-end categorization: a) Israeli historians as identity-makers, contributors to the Israeli nation-state building (a political ‘survival-unit’) at the service of politics; b) Israeli historians as identity-bearers who are socialized within Israeli society and thus inculcate their own vision into the discipline. This is shown by the continuous clash between traditional Zionist historiography vis-à-vis the enterprise of post-Zionist historians (the so-called ‘New historians’) and the issues they study (mostly labor Zionism vs. Jewish-Arab relations). The prosopographical construction and the description of the “geographic” contours of the historiographical field not only shed light on the individual, sometimes incoherent, attitudes and professional experiences of Israeli historians but clearly show how the sociopolitical fabric of Israel changes\has changed vis-à-vis international and domestic challenges and transformations. While critically following the dividing line between the world of academia (with all its institutions and inner dynamics) and the general socio-political space, this paper seeks to place the generations of Israeli historians and the nature of their intellectual work (the field of ideas) within the macro world of politics and to use it as a solidly social unit to investigate and to detect trends in the delicate balance of Israeli politics. In order to do so, the analysis uses techniques of story-telling in-depth interviews to prominent historians, while it examines their overall scientific production in the original language (Hebrew); hence, offering a less ‘mediated’ biographical and analytical sources. Key-concepts: Israeli national history, identity, field, habitus, survival unit