National, ethnie or civic? Contesting paradigms of memory, identity and culture in Israel

Abstract

Zionist national identity in Israel is today challenged by two mutually antagonistic alternatives: a liberal, secular, Post-Zionist civic identity, on the one hand, and ethnic, religious, Neo-Zionist nationalistic identity, on the other. The older, Zionist, hegemony contains an unsolvable tension between the national and the democratic facets of the state. The Post-Zionist trend seeks a relief of this tension by bracketing the national character of the state, i.e., by separation of state and cultural community/ies; the Neo-Zionist trend seeks a relief of the same tension by bracketing the democratic nature of the state, i.e., by consolidating the Jewish ethno-national character of the state. The focus of the study is upon two dimensions of this unfolding cultural-political strife: the conflicting perceptions of time and space, and the ways they affect the perceptions of the boundaries of the collectivity, either in an inclusionary manner (the "post") or in an exclusionary manner (the "neo"). © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.