According to Dalia Shechori's requiem in Ha'aretz (see below or here ) :

Segev stresses it is not easy to agree on who is a post-Zionist, because it is not easy to agree on who is a Zionist, and that impedes the discussion.

Segev is right that it is not easy to agree on who is a post-Zionist. In fact, most people who get to be called 'post-Zionists' rush off to deny it. Segev falls into the trap of trying to define post-zionism according to who is a post-zionist. It is impossible to define any movement or ideology or approach according to who belongs it and who does not, without referring to its ideational content. However, since there is no common ideational content or any other useful distinguishing characteristic of "post-zionism," people try to define post-zionism by giving examples of post-Zionists - only to have the examples flee their categorization in disgust.

Segev is wrong in saying it is difficult to agree about who is a Zionist. Maybe what he means is that he himself has doubts as to whether he is a Zionist. If he can't name ten Zionists, that is a failing of the Israeli educational system. It is easy to agree on what is Zionism, and we have no problem in agreeing on examples of Zionists. Ariel Sharon, Geula Cohen and Yossi Sarid are all Zionists despite differences in ideology, and they won't deny it.

For the uninitiated, and order to go about our business in an orderly manner, we need to define Zionism, and try to define post-zionism. If we can't define it, we don't know what we are talking about. Zionism refers either a) to the idea that the Jews are a nation, and that, being a nation, Jews should have a national home, or b) to the movement that was created in 1897 to implement that idea. There is no problem defining what Zionism is - it is a political movement and an ideology, nor is there any problem defining the program of Zionism. Post-Zionism is not definable in the same way, and you will not find any straightforward definitions of what it is. It is a banner under which various critics of Israel have been assembled, often unwillingly, for diverse purposes.

The vehicle that probably made "post-Zionism" into a fashionable fad was a 1999 book by Laurence Silberstein, "The Post Zionism Debates. Silberstein used the same tactic as Segev: if you can't define post-Zionism, all you need to do is show that it is impossible to define Zionism - that will lend legitimacy to post-Zionism. Silberstein wrote:

Postzionism, like zionism, is in constant motion. The boundaries of postzionist discourse, like those of zionism, are in a constant state of flux. Comprised of nomadic concepts that assume different meanings in different contexts, postzionism lacks a distinct structure or organization, and its boundaries are often blurred.

It is easy to know who is, or who was a Zionist. It seems to be impossible to know who is a post-Zionist, because the major candidates for post-Zionist ideological guruship insist that they aren't it:

However, like Kimmerling, he [Pappe] eschewed the label postzionist. Pappe preferred instead the label a-zionistic or non-zionist.[40] (Pappe 1995c,) In this, he differs from Kimmerling who eschews all labels. However, notwithstanding their differing positions with regard to the usage of the term postzionist, Morris, Pappe and Kimmerling have each posed serious challenges to zionist discourse and problematized the scholarship that they identify with it.

Could you imagine a situation where, say, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann denied that they are Zionists, Lenin and Stalin denied that they are Communists, or Camus and Sartre denied that they are existentialists? Absurd.

From the above, it seems that many "post-zionists" don't want to be associated with post-zionism, though Pappe seems to have changed his mind in the Ha'aretz article below. It also seems that Silberstein thought that he could identify a group of ppost-zionist scholars based on their critique of Zionism. Indeed! The right-wing historian Uri Milstein (inter alia he wrote a book "debunking" Yizhak Rabin) and some others like him, not to mention Noam Federman and Rabbi Kahanah as well as Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, have also each "posed serious challenges to zionist discourse and problematized the scholarship that they identify with it." Does that qualify them as "post-zionists?" According to the above paragraph, it should.

The phrase "problematized the scholarship that they identify with it" should give us pause. I didn't know what "problematized" means. Do you? I looked it up. It means 'to pose problems.' Is that what Silberstein means? Probably Silberstein just means that they trashed 'Zionist' scholarship. But what is 'Zionist' scholarship? Some people, some of whom deny being post-zionists have identified some body of scholarship with Zionism, and have "problematized" it, whatever that means. In some regimes, certain scholarship was identified as "reactionary" "bourgeois" or "left-deviationist" and the authors of said scholarship were problematized off to jail or firing squads. There was no objective definition of what constitutes such "wrong" scholarship, and there is no such definition for wrong "Zionist" scholarship. If this assertion astounds you, it is because you may have taken at face value the assertions of Silberstein and Pappe and others that all Israeli scholarship before a certain date is tainted by ideology and full of myths. You are probably sure that it is so, and certain that I must be the father of all reactionaries for asserting otherwise.

Consider again. In the annals of the state of Israel and Zionism there are few greater paragons of Zionist patriotism than Colonel Meir Pail. Had he had an equivalent career in support of Soviet Communism, he would certainly have been rewarded with the order of Lenin First Class and probably would have been a Hero of the Soviet People. But Pail was a Zionist, and the reward of the best Zionists is usually to be dumped on by other Zionists. Pail devoted the first part of his life to the defense of Israel. He has written books of military theory and instructed generations of Haganah and IDF officers. Only the most doctrinaire right-wing fanatic would claim that Pail is not a Zionist in the best traditions of the Labor Zionism that is despised by Pappe and others. In 1972, long before the putative birthdate of the post-zionist movement which supposedly was founded in the 90s or perhaps a decade before, Pail published a true account of the massacre which revisionist Zionists committed in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. So the massacres were known before they were discovered by new historians or post-Zionists, and there were Zionists who told about them. Is Pail's account of the massacre, or of Golda Meir's secret agreement with King Abdullah of Jordan, part of the body of tainted Zionist history that the knights of post-zionism are debunking? Is there any honest way in which we can say that Pail's historiography is NOT Zionist history? Doesn't he work for Zionist institutions, the most Zionist institutions there are? The biggest myth, is the one created by the post-Zionists: that there was a unified and identifiable body of "Zionist" discourse that reigned supreme in darkness before they spread the light of reason. Were the "myths" that the new historians or post-zionists exploded really believed by all Israelis? Was I the only person in Israel who read Pail's article in 1972? Yediot Ahronot was after all a very popular newspaper. Or perhaps my uncle, who told me the story of Deir Yassin in 1958, was the only Haganah officer who admitted it, and nobody else in Israel knew about Deir Yassin. Or maybe it is true that Pail is one of those rotten lying Zionist historians, and maybe Mort Klein of the ZOA, who denies that there was a massacre in Deir Yassin, based on what he calls new evidence, is really a "post-Zionist?"

Post-Zionism is supposed to be a movement that arose to provide a scholarly and correct version of Israel's history as well as a scholarly and objective critique of Israeli society. If so, the following remark by Tom Segev is certainly very strange:

"post-Zionism is dead, because of the Palestinians,"

Dr. Ilan Pappe, a post-Zionist and diehard leftist, who describes himself as anti-Zionist, believes that since the outbreak of the second intifada, post-Zionism has been virtual. Not active.

Post-zionism, if we include those who are usually identified with it, is not dead. Zeev Sternhell has not stopped writing. He is not "virtual." Benny Morris is not "virtual." He published a book just now, and made a lot of noise about it. Baruch Kimmerling is not virtual, and he didn't stop publishing either. Uri Avnery is not virtual, and he didn't stop publishing. However, what they publish doesn't add up or necessarily support each other. It isn't a movement, or an ideology, and it never was. They each have different ideas that are critical of Israeli society.

We can infer from the belief of Segev and of Pappe that the Intifada has hurt post-Zionism, that post-Zionism is a political program, and not simply an attempt to look at history and society objectively. A political program is not objective. All they are saying perhaps, is that the Intifada stabbed the entire Israeli peace movement in the heart. Well OK, we knew that. What does that have to do with scholarship of history or sociology?

Another clue lies is in the statement that Pappe is an anti-Zionist. For Pappe, "post-Zionism" simply means anti-Zionism, and it never meant anything else. If so, then Post-Zionism is just a way of sugar coating an outmoded and unacceptable ideology. Anti-Zionism is not about criticizing faults in Israeli society, it is about abolishing Israel. Supposedly, "post-zionism" arose after Zionism had finished its work, or because Israelis were unsatisfied with their society, but anti-Zionists like Pappe were dissatisfied from the beginning. Pappe is not dissatisfied with Israel because some Zionists massacred Palestinians in 1948, or because it has maintained the occupation, or because the first Russians that came here discriminated against the Moroccans, or because the Moroccan Jews now discriminate against the Russians that have come in later years. Pappe is dissatisfied with Israel because, like the Grand Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini, Pappe thinks that Jews should not have their own state, and favors abolition of Jewish immigration to Israel. Anti-Zionists are not part of a community that lost its way or is looking for new answers after the old ones failed. The anti-Zionist ideology was there from the inception of Zionism, and it is easy to define, unlike post-Zionism. Anti-Zionists are those who believe that the Jews are not a nation, and therefore do not require or deserve a national home. They have a right to their beliefs, but they shouldn't pretend that those beliefs are based on any new findings. They believed the same things in 1947 and in 1917 and in 1897.

Whatever the merits of his arguments, Uri Avnery, also named frequently as a "post-zionist," has been making the same criticisms of Israel since the inception of the State of Israel and perhaps before. He founded his journal, Ha'olam Hazeh, right after the War of Independence. He is not a "post-zionist." Avnery and others might be "alternative Zionists" or critics of Zionism. He is not in favor of abolishing Israel and is not in the same camp with Ilan Pappe. Likewise Morris and Kimmerling and all the others mentioned have somewhat different criticisms of Israeli society. They are not part of a single movement. Not surprisingly, they have different political agendas. Why should people be surprised that Benny Morris is not an anti-Zionist, and in fact, seems to be quite a proponent of right wing Zionism?

If post-zionism is anti-Zionism or any other ideology with a specific set of answers, then it has no business obtruding itself into academic discourse of any kind in an open society. Allowing such a movement to replace "official" Zionist history (if there is such a thing) would simply be substituting one set of bumf for another. Histories, sociologies and sciences that are written to order for an ideology, never produce much more than propaganda, whether it is Zionist propaganda or anti-Zionist propaganda or Stalinist propaganda. You cannot find the truth by attempting to whack the facts of history into a particular shape with an ideological sledge hammer.

This may seem a somewhat strange claim, since post-zionists often claim that they champion the individual against society and ideology, and therefore, post-zionism has been compared to post-modernism - the end of the age of ideologies. Is it so? Laurence Silbersein wrote of Uri Ram:

Ram made it clear from the outset that his study is politically engaged and shaped by his "personal, social and political involvement" and participation in "the Israeli left and the peace movement."

This is not a program for an open society of individuals. This is a program worthy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in the worst days of Stalinist orthodoxy. It is science in the service of the party. Scholarship is to be judged on the basis of whether or not results confirm the tenets of ideology. Woe unto those who fail to take the correct Marxist-Leninist (or whatever) approach! If the "social and political involvement" requires that acquired characteristics must be inherited, then indeed it will be found that in successive generations, progeny of mice whose tails are cut will have shorter tails. Uri Ram has volunteered to be the Trofim D. Lysenko of Israeli sociology. If Ram finds facts that do not support the "politically engaged" correct view, do you think they will be reported? If Ilan Pappe finds evidence that the Zionists were not entirely responsible for the plight of the Palestinians, would he report it?

But wait, perhaps that is not what post-Zionism is about at all. Here is a different definition:

According to Avishai Erlich (p. 64), the term denotes a liberal ‘ideological offshoot of capitalist globalization’ that is equally opposed to mainstream conservative Zionism, to rightist religious Zionism and to sodeletedt Zionism.

So, to Erlich, post-zionism is capitalist and liberal, while to Ram it is leftist. The emperor's clothes are of silk, and also of ermine. "They are a beautiful purple," says one. "They are splendid in white and gold," exclaims another. My friends, it seems to me that the emperor has no clothes. There is no post-Zionism, there are only many critics of Zionism and of Israeli society.

In any case, until someone can tell you what post-Zionism is (or was) don't be in a hurry to decide if it is (or was) a GOOD THING or a BAD THING. You may disagree. If so, please offer a coherent definition of 'post-Zionism' that can embrace all its adherents. Enthusiasts beware: until you can define what it is you are enthusiastic about, "Ye worship ye know not what."

Ami Isseroff

Haaretz
April 20, 2004
Post-Zionism is dead or in a deep freeze
By Dalia Shehori
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/417258.html

Perhaps the period of post-Zionism was born a decade ago or perhaps only
then was the term coined. For some, the conditions essential to the
concept have disappeared in the current intifada. This article is the
first of a series.

The term "post-Zionism," argues Dr. Uri Ram, a senior lecturer in the
University of Haifa Behavioral Science department, was first coined "and
entered public discourse with dizzying speed" after the 1993 publication
of a book that he edited, "Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives." The
book was a collection of articles, including one by him that used the
term post-Zionism in its text and subheadings.

Ram adds that he wrote the "editor's note" to the book on September 13,
1993, the day the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn. "And
since there's a connection between the concept `post-Zionism' and its
acceptance in public discourse, and the Oslo Accords, which provide hope
for an end to the conflict, I think that September 13, 1993, is the
symbolic and fitting date of birth, when the term burst into the public
consciousness."

He says it is possible people used the term before then, "but it wasn't
absorbed and didn't catch on as an intellectual stream until 1993." He
will soon publish an article entitled "Post-Zionism at 10: Gone or
Assimilated?" And next month, he will lecture on "Post-Zionism at 10:
Preliminary Assessment," at a departmental seminar for the sociology and
anthropology departments of Tel Aviv University.

Dr. Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in political science at the University
of Haifa and the head of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian
Studies there, agrees with the date and notes that at the time, he wrote
a review of the book in Haaretz (January 28, 1994) which was titled,
"Post-Zionist sociology." According to him, until that time, there was
only talk of "the new historians" who focused on critical research into
the events of 1948, but the book edited by Ram widened the net and
showed that for some time academia and social science departments had
been engaging in critical reviews not only of 1948, but also of other
eras from the beginning of Zionism until the establishment of the state,
and not just of political and military history, but also social and
economic history.

"Since 1993, the Israeli universities have changed unrecognizably," says
Pappe. "They became a wrestling arena. First, they were the domains of a
single elitist group. Post-Zionism placed before them a counter-force
with its own hegemony."

Prof. Moshe Lisk of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a recipient of
the Israel Prize in Sociology in 1992, who is among the opponents of
post-Zionism and its parallel in sociology - critical sociology - says
the beginning of post-Zionism came two years earlier, with the
appearance of the first issue of the journal "Theory and Criticism,"
which, he says, became the post-Zionists' bible.

Historian and journalist Dr. Tom Segev, one of the new historians,
considers Uri Avnery the one who coined the term post-Zionism, years ago
when he was the editor of Ha'olam Hazeh and encouraged new historical
disclosures and the questioning of accepted historical truths. "Only a
short-sighted sociologist can say that post-Zionism is 10 years old,"
says Segev. "Perhaps I might comment on this tendency to view history at
the place where we started from. That's not the way. There were always
people before us, and it didn't start with Uri Ram nor was the beginning
ten years ago."

So perhaps post-Zionism is ten years old or perhaps it was around before
and ten years ago it just came out of the closet. In any case, this is a
small anniversary, an opportunity to ascertain whether post-Zionism
exists and how it fares, and if it's gone, is this just temporary?

Perhaps it's the nature of post-Zionism that it says different things to
different people. The article will focus on those who think that
post-Zionism died or is in a deep freeze. The next will focus on those
who believe it is alive and kicking.

Back to the womb

In his book, "The New Zionists," Segev describes post-Zionism as a
modern variation of what was known in the early days of the state as
"Zionism in quotation marks." He writes that essentially the term is
used as an insult: it stigmatizes anything from willingness to
compromise in the Israeli-Arab conflict to questioning the historical
myths nurtured by Zionism. Therefore, right-wingers use it to prove that
they are bigger patriots than left-wingers. The term, post-Zionism,
Segev continues, is also used to assess the situation: it is the next
stage after Zionism fulfilled itself or completed its role with visible
success. Segev stresses it is not easy to agree on who is a
post-Zionist, because it is not easy to agree on who is a Zionist, and
that impedes the discussion.

Three years after the publication of that book Segev says, "post-Zionism
is dead, because of the Palestinians," i.e., because of the second
intifada, which has already been going on for three and a half years.
But he softens the diagnosis somewhat: "At the moment, post-Zionism is
in the best-case scenario in the fridge. It's not a living thing. It's
not the golden age of post-Zionism." He says that "the intifada forced
us to go back into ourselves, into Zionism and ideology. Palestinian
terrorism is pushing us back into the Zionist womb. All of the openness
I saw at the time of the Oslo Accords is, for now, not proving itself,
in my opinion because of the terrorism. The matter that was at the heart
of the post-Zionist environment was the debate over how to create a
Jewish and democratic state. No one is interested in that anymore. We
feel as if we must fight for our lives again, because of the Arabs."

The terrorism led to the brutalizing of Israel Defense Forces
operations, but also to the "brutalizing of thinking," says Segev, and
"that's its primary danger, everywhere in the world: that it affects
people's ability and willingness to think in a rational way." Segev
notes that terrorism's effect is so powerful "specifically because we
went through the post-Zionism stage, in the sense that we moved to such
an individualist period." The collective ideology lost some of its
importance - no one now says `it is good to die for our country' - the
individual's importance has increased, "and that's almost the essence of
the post-Zionist condition" and therefore people "are taking the
terrorism so hard. Everyone knows that terrorism is not destroying the
state. But it is hurting me. I'm personally offended by the terrorism,
because I sit in a cafe and they strike at me. We are not a collective
that has died for its country. We want to go to a cafe and not have the
table explode underneath us."

Segev believes that the post-Zionist condition will return and even
burst forth inevitably "when we somehow arrange our relations with the
Palestinians. At the moment there is nothing to aim for to resolve the
conflict. I don't know how to solve it and post-Zionism doesn't require
a solution. But I think that there are better ways of managing the
conflict than the current one. It seems to me that the post-Zionist
condition is possible also when there is no final peace and even when
there is a certain level of terrorism, it is possible to live with it."

Frozen sperm

Dr. Ilan Pappe, a post-Zionist and diehard leftist, who describes
himself as anti-Zionist, believes that since the outbreak of the second
intifada, post-Zionism has been virtual. Not active. "They froze its
sperm. Maybe one day, in a convenient lab setting, it will be possible
to implant them using artificial insemination." But for the moment,
society has dropped post-Zionism. "Look hard for us in another three,
four or five years," he says, "when the disgrace, shame and barbarism
that are today an inseparable part of Israeli policy go so far that even
people in Israel, and certainly many people outside it, will say,
`Enough is enough.' But we haven't reached that point yet."

Pappe says that indeed it is impossible to separate academic studies
from ideological positions and this quality of post-Zionism - taken from
post-Modernism - has made Israeli academia much more relevant.
Previously, "who was interested in what academics wrote about Israeli
society?" Even his work, he says, is not objective, but he hopes it is
fair. "I also don't understand how an Israeli or Palestinian writing
about the conflict can be objective."

And then, when the second intifada began, "many of the people whom I
defined as critical and courageous turned out to be chickens. Some of
them even admitted that they were recanting, some just lowered their
profile and nowadays it is very hard to find in Israeli academic
institutions what we found there in the 1990s. Anyone with some kind of
critical urge is very cautious today. Lecturers, even those with tenure,
and even full professors, are today afraid to voice criticism."

Pappe says this was a very great disappointment for him. It took him 25
years to understand that "academia in general follows politics. In no
place is it a spearhead or does it take the initiative. What created
post-Zionism? The Oslo Accords," which were made by politicians, not
academics. "It turns out that academics think much more about their
personal career than about their debt to society," he says.

Post-Zionism will return, he says, when the left in Israel becomes
politically stronger. "Then we will again hear post-Zionism songs from
the ivory towers of academia." But that won't happen before things get
worse. For example: a war in the north or the total deterioration of
Israel's ties with the Arab world, or terror of a kind we have not yet
experienced - as a result of the continuation of the current policies on
Palestinians - in addition to severe outside pressure on Israel, after
there is further deterioration of its international standing and it
begins to be a pariah state.