I have an announcement here from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East:

I am going to chance posting the Introduction to this fascinating-looking volume here in the extended entry below.

Introduction by: Donna Robinson Divine

When we think of postcolonialism, it is hard not to think, first and foremost, of Edward Said whose book, Orientalism, became the foundational text for a scholarly approach that has worked a powerful effect across the humanities and social sciences.1 Insisting that both scholars and scholarship must be liberated from a presumed 'racialized' understanding of the world, Said also offered serious challenges to habitual ways of thinking about identities. Orientalism presumably showed how the West both created the Orient as a proving ground for its own identity and forged a discourse that sustained its domination over a large part of the globe. Marinated in a cauldron of provocative ideas that promised empowerment, Orientalism launched both an all-out attack against once carefully drawn disciplinary boundaries and a comprehensive assault on meanings once taken for granted. Both have gained considerable ground.

Orientalism has made its presence felt in most disciplines and is credited with generating totally new approaches in such traditional fields as anthropology, comparative literature, history, and political science, not to mention serving as a catalyst for the development of postcolonial studies. Inspired by Said's critical insights, postcolonial theorists have carried on his burden of dethroning many long-standing Western modes of domination and absolutisms by deconstructing what are widely taken to be its structures of knowledge.2 Although they continue to evoke images of their earlier marginal status, postcolonial theorists now occupy as conventional a standing in the academy as can be imagined. Tenured at the most prestigious universities, many also edit the important scholarly journals, publication in which carves out the path for advancement into the ranks of the professoriate. Postcolonialism has become a very visible part of the academic establishment.

Despite its widely acknowledged flaws3, Orientalism inspired some very imaginative work by academicians who found the book's approach fertile ground for confronting not only how empires were won, but, more importantly, how they were held, focusing attention on the abuses often accompanying imperial ventures. We now know that political authorities in countries where the seeds of civil rights were deeply planted could be brutal overseas: democracies could be alive in the metropolitan centre and dead in the colonies. In Orientalism, scholars found a warrant for a vernacular perspective purportedly bringing the human dimension into the study of imperialism and revealing - supposedly for the first time - that this practice of power was very bloody indeed. Finally, Orientalism seemed to open up seductive possibilities for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to engage in a collaboration promising that truth would not only confront but also destroy unjust power structures.4 In affirming the links between knowledge and power, Said instilled in generations of scholars the faith that their work had political significance and that deconstructing Western discourse would delegitimize imperialism because established authorities required command over language as well as over the means of violence and production.

To Said, imperialism was the great moral monstrosity that had escaped both scrutiny and a full moral judgement. It may have quickened the pace of European commerce, but it also siphoned off wealth and freedom from peoples too weak to resist the onslaught of modern canons. A large portion of the globe was presumed to exist primarily for the convenience and enrichment of Europe and America. For centuries, Europeans and Americans, according to Said, hid the magnitude of their oppression and violence behind improvised rationales that celebrated their power to encircle the globe as bringing enlightenment and civilization to peoples depicted as 'savages'. From the imperial vantage point, the masses who suffered so terribly were not people with problems; they were the problems. But the 'savages' saw the process in another way. Where Westerners saw problems, the colonized peoples, themselves, saw possibilities. And their creativity has been the object of study for postcolonial theorists, many of whom have moved so far beyond Orientalism's dichotomies that they believe they have created something entirely new.

Perhaps, as a corollary to these evolving studies of postcolonial literature, Said wrote Culture and Imperialism, a book intended to complete the accounting begun in Orientalism. In his second study of colonialism, Said presented two literary narratives - one, he claimed, characteristic of imperial powers - France, England, and America - and the other emerging in places shaped by the trauma of colonialism and expressing the will of the colonized to continue their struggle and strike back. Intending to hold up a mirror to the brutal story of imperialism, Said, instead, opened a doorway enabling postcolonial scholars to look at the Empire from the inside. For imperialism was as much an experience as a system of domination bringing all sorts of people into contact as well as into confrontation. Subordinated groups invented languages that spoke between the lines of the dominant colonial discourse; they fashioned rituals and behaviours that crossed cultural boundaries despite the hegemonic administrative practices of the state, and they forged identities that fused so many different traditions and elements that no single nation state or territorial borders could contain them.5 Postcolonialism's best academic studies have not only surpassed Said's intellectual labours, they have rendered them obsolete.

One question we raise in this volume is whether postcolonialism, despite its arresting questions about the conventional understanding of imperialism,6 is still trapped by its own methodology and its passion for radical change. One might ask whether the view of language as the key to understanding both colonialism and the process of becoming emancipated from the strictures of foreign domination has not encouraged postcolonial theoreticians to treat all texts as alike. Novels, political speeches, policy statements, and newspaper articles are cast, simultaneously, as reflective of a distribution of power and of an outlook. No matter that novels are typically composed by a single individual, whereas policy statements are hammered out in committees or through hierarchies and across bureaucracies, postcolonial theorists sometimes tend to read even events as texts, and they are not at all disposed to distinguish between speeches formulated to stake out a position and those intended to open a path to compromise. Neither has the fact that a novel may take months or years to complete and a newspaper article less than a day prompted alterations in the technique of postcolonial scrutiny or evaluation.

Consider one novel of paramount interest to Said. On Said's reading, the narrative of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park takes for granted the existence of a slave-holding imperial dominion and the exploitation of lands too distant to be worthy of much comment or notice by the prosperous guardians of the social order on the home front who are also driving the search for profits on the global frontier. Empire, according to Said, bestowed benefits and riches on people who created a realm of order and beauty very distant from the misery imposed on the people labouring to generate the profits necessary to support it.7

Whether or not Said's argument about Austen's novel is correct, the abhorrent thinking he claims to find in this book is not typically matched by the record of policy debates that propelled many of these Western expeditions. Position papers often reflected the interests of competing domestic factions and also the wider international balance of power. Rivalry among European powers heavily influenced the decisions of particular regimes to expand or contract their overseas enterprises. Moreover, global politics largely defined the mechanisms of controlling land and resources available to imperial powers. And although Orientalism cast empire as Europe's unilateral process of self-definition, imperialism was actually more like a series of multiple encounters not simply with far-flung foreign cultures but often with nearby rival powers.8 Surely, in any serious work on empire, it is vital to draw distinctions between concrete manifestations of imperial power such as territorial occupation, political domination, and economic exploitation, on the one hand, and its more informal and cultural expressions, on the other.

Unfortunately, many postcolonial theorists are reluctant to acknowledge the need for such distinctions. Some are still obsessed by the idea of language as literally embodying power, and thus some of Edward Said's most zealous acolytes insist on conflating historical documents and literary productions and even more problematically, published and unpublished material. The inclination to turn actions into texts and to read texts as if they were all embodiments of identical power and meaning locks some postcolonial studies into a predictable political narrative where grey is polarized into black and white and ultimately into good and evil.

One telling example comes from articles written by Joseph Massad who has never weaned himself off of Said's dichotomous categories. Relying on the standard template of Said's criticism of colonialism, Massad delegitimizes Zionism by labelling it with the derogatory terms of 'religio-racial discourse'.9 Massad gives the impression that Zionist policies grew out of a racist outlook expressed in a language that offered Palestinians nothing but dispossession and subordination. But positing such a rigid racism cannot explain the willingness of the very official agencies of that purportedly 'racialist' ideology to divide Palestine into two sovereign states - one for Jews and one for Arabs with borders fixed either by Great Britain as Mandatory authority in 1936 or by the United Nations in 1947. Nor does Massad's static depiction of the Zionist view of Palestinians, culled by cherry picking quotes from disparate texts, disclose anything but one aspect of a very complex picture. In fact, Hebrew literature in the early years of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine is saturated with romantic notions of the Arab as overflowing with life in contrast to the Diaspora Jew who is typically represented as withered and dying.10 Zionists aimed at bringing a new civilization to the Diaspora Jew and not to the Arabs they encountered in Palestine. In short, although Zionism may have focused on transforming the Jewish people, this was a cultural programme that at least, initially, made room for so-called 'others'. Ironically, Massad falls into the trap of essentializing and misrepresenting Zionism, the methodological flaws that replicate the problems his mentor, Edward Said, presumably uncovered in the Orientalist depiction of the Arab world.

The analytic quality of postcolonial studies is also ensnared and weakened by the field's commitment to scholarship as a form of political action. The terms 'resistance' and 'political disorder' often accompany each other these days, but they are rarely attributed by postcolonial studies to domestic failures in Asia and Africa. The silence tells a great deal about postcolonialism's predisposition to consider academic work as battlefield deployment. For that reason, postcolonial practitioners search for the sources of violence and poverty beyond the borders of newly-won independent countries and indeed outside of the continents once objects of imperial exploitation and conquest. Following Said's insight about the evils of imperialism as so deeply set they could not be erased or even diminished simply by independence, postcolonialism typically uncovers traces of Western power lurking in the world's economy, its politics, and in its so-called Western defined culture; and it too often comfortably projects the national heirs of former colonies as innocents and still powerless.

On the subject of Israel and the Middle East conflict, postcolonialism's analytical rigor is particularly compromised by its advocacy function. There are at least two postcolonialisms - one a study of the extent to which imperialism has shaped the culture of the West as well as of ex-colonies across Asia and Africa and the other an intellectual insurgency against the West and the global dominance of its ideas.11 The first objective that gives postcolonialism such critical purchase on understanding fiction written by people in former colonies, could easily have prompted serious and thoughtful examinations of Zionism and the creation of Jewish statehood. But the second demands that postcolonialism champion the Palestinian cause in an echo of the politics of Edward Said and so, for the most part, the field has been inclined to produce indictments against Israel rather than a full and clear understanding of that country's history or society or of the Middle East conflict.12 One could easily argue that Middle Eastern regimes and the liberation movements they have supported - perhaps, even more than Israel - have deprived Palestinians of their political birthright, but apart from an occasional critical comment, the politics of the Arab world have rarely been regarded by postcolonial theorists as having anything to do with Palestinian failures to achieve self-determination.

Not surprisingly, Orientalism found a number of willing conscripts in Israel.13 But Israelis who write and teach the history of their country did not need either Orientalism or postcolonial analysis to liberate them from subscribing to a narrative of their country's state-building experience as fulfilling a progressive national mission. Mining recently opened archives and declassified material, many newly minted Israeli academicians - some calling themselves new historians, others critical sociologists - had already been scrutinizing and probing the Zionist nation-building project from the perspective of Palestine's Arab population, through the prism of its Middle Eastern immigrants, and from the vantage point of women's lives years before postcolonial texts commanded serious attention in the country.14 Moreover, it is important to remember that the generation that witnessed Israel's founding debated almost every aspect of the country's public policy even if these heated discussions were not always translated into English and incorporated into the published material reaching bookstores in the West.

Scholars and journalists in Israel recognized that the benefits of statehood came from a crucible of undeniable pain, and they naturally pondered whether the suffering could have been avoided or mitigated. Long before Edward Said issued his polemic to look at Zionism from the perspective of its 'victims', Zionist writers, themselves, counted both the blessings and curses of sovereignty for Israel and for the region. And although postcolonial publications and the works of Edward Said are often cited in Hebrew texts, they did not lay down the organizing principles for Israeli scholars - long accustomed to calibrating their country's shortcomings - for a radically transformed view of their nation's history.

This collection presents essays which originated in a 2005 conference organized by Philip Carl Salzman and Peter Haas at Case Western Reserve University and sponsored by the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an international organization devoted to promoting and sustaining scholarly discourse on the Middle East. Philip Salzman and Peter Haas brought together a group of recognized experts to tackle an extremely important set of questions about the discourse on the Middle East and about a number of the scholarly studies fostered by postcolonialism. Hence, this volume is interdisciplinary and includes scholars from anthropology, history, legal studies, philosophy, political science, and psychology. One of the critical questions we ask in this book is whether the recent disposition in the academy to postcolonial analysis has deepened our understanding of what happened to people and societies during and after empire. We hope to show in these essays the benefits and losses of a postcolonial approach because knowledge will come only from challenging what has now become the new conventional wisdom in the academy and not from simply accepting it.

Postcolonial Theory

We begin by providing a theoretical and methodological overview of postcolonialism with an examination of the work of Edward Said by Irfan Khawaja, who probes the coherence of the arguments developed in Orientalism. Recognizing the need to explore the conceptual fault lines of the various critiques presented here, Laurie Zoloth then speculates on whether destabilizing one theoretical approach only creates another set of equally flawed or mistaken assumptions. Because interpretive schemes aspire but never fully grasp the whole truth of any subject, Zoloth wonders whether critiques ought to begin by admitting their provisional status and by stipulating their own possible errors of judgment and fact.

Setting his sights on the process of defining identity, Ed Morgan juxtaposes Chaucer's 'Man of Law's Tale' with the legal reasoning in a First Court of Appeals' decision in Ungar v. Palestinian Authority to show how both texts assemble definitions of the Western Christian self as well as of the non-Western Muslim 'other' that are too complex and varied to fit into Orientalism's dichotomous rubrics. Although postcolonial theorists have accepted Said's notion that Western culture is stamped by an explicit and tacit acceptance of imperialism, they have not, as Ronald Niezen illustrates in his research on postcolonial utopian thought, produced serious work on how to abrogate this presumed and proclaimed insidious relationship. And although postcolonial utopian thought may appear attractive in these dark times of low expectations, it avoids rather than confronts the vexed problems of our day, filling imagined harmonious communities with people who possess no deep and conflicting attachments, no zealous ideologies, and no capacity for violence.

Postcolonialism In The Disciplines

Herbert S. Lewis and Gerald Steinberg provide an overview of the impact of postcolonialism on the disciplines of anthropology and peace studies. Questions of how to represent ethnic and racial differences, gendered and otherwise, have unsettled conventional paradigms and gained currency - if not become coin of the realm - in several scholarly disciplines. But although postcolonial practitioners have targeted what they describe as hegemonic truths endorsed by scholars entrenched in academic institutions that benefit from race and class privilege, they have failed to submit their own views and support systems to similar inspection. Nor have they considered what would be lost by divesting such disciplines as anthropology of their traditional methodologies.

Postcolonialism And Middle Eastern History

Andrew Bostom, David Cook, and Efraim Karsh ponder whether Said and postcolonial theorists provide an adequate accounting of both 'oriental' and 'imperialism' as historical phenomena. Bostom and Karsh both point out that Said's thesis would have been much stronger had he included a serious analysis of the expansion of the Muslim domain and the establishment of a series of Islamic empires that resembled the kind of imperialist domination he condemned when it was mounted from Western shores.

Postcolonialism And Middle Eastern Culture

Although postcolonial theorists claim to have produced a superior form of knowledge by giving political expression and humane affirmation to subaltern groups, that have shown little interest in - and thus could not build on - past research that dug beneath official written records of elites to investigate the codes, signs, and practices through which ordinary people communicated their values, organized their societies, and structured their behaviours. Philip Carl Salzman sees the culture framing Arab society and politics as shaped by a pattern of behaviour and set of values that are not open-ended and infinitely malleable. Rather, they are in the grip of the region's tribal origins that laid down a very particular mode of contesting power and left the postcolonial Arab state without the cultural resources to forge legitimate structures of authority and nationwide social solidarity. For Arabs, their cultural legacies cut against not only the prospect of establishing a unified polity but also of conceiving it as a possibility.

With a focus on culture, Richard Landes uncovers one of the great ironies generated by postcolonial theorists who attempt to be simultaneously faithful to the epistemological foundations of their approach and to its explicit political agenda. For although postcolonial practitioners embrace marginalized people and ideas in defiance of established hierarchies and knowledge, aligning with the weak and impoverished in post-imperial countries poses serious problems for Palestinians because Arabs generally construe weakness as a sign of dishonour. Passivity holds so little value for Palestinians that even violent actions generating chaos may be preferred to a stability purportedly denying honour to individual and community. Although the pursuit of honour may strike some as incompatible with a rhetoric that accords high praise to those oppressed by Western racism and imperialism - anticipating that only such people can speak 'truth to power' - this incompatibility has barely registered with postcolonial theorists, who certainly have not diminished their support for the Palestinian cause.

Postcolonialism And The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The final section explores postcolonialism's engagement with various aspects of the Middle East conflict. Because so much of Said's work was fixed on Palestine and what he claimed were the misrepresentations of its people in the Western press, the topic is a natural focus of attention for this volume. A set of diverse essays by Gideon Shimoni, S. Ilan Troen, Donna Robinson Divine, and Irwin J. Mansdorf acknowledges the complexity of the conflict and demonstrates that the typical postcolonial effort to deal with it descends into polemic, leaving little room for analytic reasoning, and is seemingly more interested in conscripting followers than in imparting knowledge.

Edward Said was spokesman and adherent of the Palestine Liberation Organization before it signed the Oslo Accords, displayed an apparent willingness to adopt a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine, and grant recognition to Israel as an independent state. Because postcolonialism presumably exposed the impossibility of any single national identity incorporating the diversity of cultures that actually make up a sovereign state, it reinforced Said's inclination to support the establishment of one Palestine offering citizenship to Jews and Arabs to end the victimhood of both peoples. However, very few Jews or Arabs living in the territory to be designated as Palestine backed Said's proposal. Even Said's position, which presumably offered some accommodation to Jewish nationalism, seemed confounded and undercut by the many polemical attacks he launched on Zionism and by the arguments he advanced to sow doubts about the authenticity of its Jewish roots. Working with Said's postcolonial paradigm has led scholars to escalate his original charges by contending that the Jewish understanding of their past is totally spurious and that Zionism not only transgressed Palestinian national rights, it also invented a tribal history and appropriated an ancient homeland through a politicized reading of the scriptures and a gross distortion of the archaeological evidence.

Contesting the right of the Jewish people to claim the land of Israel, whatever its borders, as its heritage may suggest that Jews and Arabs are really fighting over history, identity or ethics, but it is also important to remember that the spiral of violence in the Middle East between Arabs and Jews has actually been ignited by concrete disputes over land, water and power also.

Much postcolonialist scholarship on Palestinian and Jewish history in the land of Israel is not designed to recover the experiences of the peoples but rather to focus on gathering information to support the Palestinian case. The production of knowledge about the past is intended to project a new view of the past as a means of disrupting the certainties of the present and presumably to open up the way to imagining a different trajectory for the future. For that reason, many in the academy embrace the work of Edward Said both as a rallying cry for undertaking studies aimed at radically changing the configuration of power in the Middle East and as the model of how to change the way the Israeli-Palestinian story has typically been told. This scholarly campaign began at the margins as an intellectual insurgency challenging both the precincts and the standards of the well-established disciplines that had produced the familiar narratives that lacked the correct or desired political edge. It has now moved into the mainstream, marking a trend that ought to raise as many questions in the halls of the academy as on the battlefields of the Middle East.

As noted above, this collection of essays derives from the international, invitational conference on Postcolonial Theory and the Middle East held in the Samuel Rosenthal Centre for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University on 30-31 October 2005.

The conference was organized as a project of the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Philip Carl Salzman served as the academic organizer; Peter Haas served as the local organizer. Edward Beck, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, encouraged and supported the conference from its inception to the publication of these proceedings.

The conference was sponsored and funded by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the Rosenthal Centre for Judaic Studies, the Divine Family Foundation, the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, with further contributions from anonymous donors.

The editors thank all those who aided in the organization of the conference, and all the participants whose contributions made the conference a success and whose work appears in this collection.

The editors are grateful to Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller for encouragement in bringing this collection into print, and to David Estrin for his assistance in bringing the manuscript into publishable form.

Notes

1. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 'Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction', in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York, 1994, pp. 1-20. Williams and Chrisman offer a clear explanation of the relationship between Edward Said's Orientalism (Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978) and the development of postcolonial theorizing.

2. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London and New York, 1989; Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, New York, 2000.

3. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, London, 2006; Joshua Teitelbaum and Meir Litvak, 'Students, Teachers, and Edward Said: Taking Stock of Orientalism', Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2006), pp. 1-24; Mark F. Proudman, 'Disraeli As An Orientalist', Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2005), pp. 547-568; Elie Podeh, 'Demonizing The Other', ha-Mizrah he-Hadash, Vol. 45 (2005), pp. 151-214 (Hebrew).

4. Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2006) devotes its entire issue to the impact of Edward Said, noting with emphasis its influence on the study of the Middle East and on opening up the debate on Palestine. It reviews some of the articles published in the past in Social Text and asserts that this journal inserted the issue into leftist politics so that scholars on the cutting edge could simultaneously engage in research and in oppositional politics.

5. Yael S. Feldman, 'Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas's Arabesques Revisited', Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), Vol. 114, No. 3 (1999), pp. 373-389.

6. Dane Kennedy, 'Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, No. 24 (1996), pp. 345-363; Linda Colley, 'The Imperial Embrace', Yale Review, No. 81 (1993), pp. 92-98.

7. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York, 1994, pp. 80-97.

8. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, New York, 2005; Myra Jehlen, 'Why Did the Europeans Cross The Ocean', in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, NC, 1994, pp. 41-58; Paul A. Kramer, 'Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905', Radical History Review, No. 73 (1999), pp. 74-114; Paul A. Kramer, 'Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910', Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2002), pp. 3-31.

9. Joseph Massad, 'The Ends of Zionism Racism and The Palestinian Struggle', Interventions, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003), pp. 440-451; Joseph Massad, 'Palestinians and The Limits of Racialized Discourse', Social Text, No. 34 (1993), pp. 94-114; Joseph Massad, 'Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?', Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2000), pp. 52-67. Massad's observations about the overlap between Zionist ideology and some notions embedded in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the time are not new. The overlap was noted at the time and has been part of conventional scholarship on Zionism. However, Massad's conflation of Zionism and anti-Semitism fails to distinguish between what was part of Jewish enlightenment self-criticism, on the one hand, and a rhetoric urging discrimination and violence against Jews, on the other. Finally, part of the reason for Zionists to offer some deference to the arguments of anti-Semites stemmed from an effort to enlist allies in their attempts to convince Jews to leave the lands of their birth and emigrate to the land of Israel to build a Jewish National Home.

10. Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, Ithaca, NY and London, 2005, chapter 3.

11. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?' Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 336-357; Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization, Durham, NC, and London, 1998, see especially pp. 54-77.

12. Joseph Massad, 'The "Post-Colonial" Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel', in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds.), The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, Durham, NC and London, 2000, pp. 311-346.

13. Foremost among Said's Israeli followers is Ella Shohat. She describes herself as subscribing to Said's analyses and is critical of the approach of some postcolonial theorists, such as Homi Bhabha, who accords a measure of legitimacy to Zionism as an expression of Jewish nationalism. See Ella Shohat, 'The "Postcolonial" in Translation: Reading Said in Hebrew', Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2004), pp. 55-75; Ella Shohat, 'Sephardim in Israel: Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims', Social Text, Nos. 19-20 (1988), pp. 1-35; the Israeli journal, Teoria veBikoret devoted an entire issue in the summer of 1999 to Orientalism and its effect on the scholarly analysis of the Middle East and of Israel. Among the scholars listed by Shohat who subscribe to one or another version of the postcolonial perspective are Gabriel Piterbeg, Smadar Lavie, Dan Rabinowitz, and Oren Yiftachel.

14. Debates about the Labour Movement's values and policies took place before the movement achieved its dominance, and they never ceased. On the conflicts during the period of British rule, see Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, Princeton, NJ, 1998. If one examines the footnotes in Tom Segev's The First Israelis, New York and London, 1986, one can appreciate the criticisms raised early in the state's history about their policies with regard to immigrants from the Middle East. See also Anita Shapria and Derek J. Penslar, Israeli Revisionism: From Left to Right, London, 2003. Devorah Bernstein began publishing her studies of the lives of pioneer women in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Hebrew literature is filled with assessments of the cost of war and of achieving sovereignty. On this see Yizhar Smilansky, Yemei Ziklag (Days of Ziklag), considered the classic novel of Israel's War of Independence. This novel has never been translated into English, but some of his short stories, such as 'The Story of Hirbet Hiz'ah', can be found in translation.

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