The "project of Modernity," as Jurgen Habermas has termed it, came into its own as a distinctive discourse and mode of existing in the world in the eighteenth century. Conceived of as a "new order of things" or an "awakening of new life," modernity involved movement into a new episteme; political, cultural, and scientific elites developed a universal positivistic and technocratic science, morality, law, and rationality that could grasp and control a world in which change, rather than tradition, had become ubiquitous, and the past had become a burden from which men needed to be freed.

The ideology underlying this project-whether liberal or Marxist-was that the correct application of these new tools would lead to incredible and heretofore unheard of progress and freedom for humankind. But more than just calling for liberty, equality, and fraternity-the motto of the French Revolution-modernity represented a new, accelerated mode of existence caused by the new modes of industrial production, circulation, and consumption that resulted from the development and eventual universalization of the capitalist market.

It is important here to note two points: first, that underlying the notion of "progress" was a teleological view of history (common to both liberals and Marxists) in which capitalist modernity was considered an advance in human civilization that by definition began in Europe and would spread, one way or another, to the "backward" regions. Second, we must take note of the reality, pointed out in different ways by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Schumpeter, that the logic underlying Enlightenment rationality, and capitalism more specifically, was one of "creative destruction." This suggests that the only way progress could be achieved was by destroying the traditions and rationality that governed the "old" world. For most peoples, especially outside of the metropolitan countries, the creative destruction engendered by the growth of capitalist modernity meant imperial colonial domination and oppression by Europe, and the destruction of indigenous paradigms of modernity that accompanied this domination and oppression.

On the ideological level, the traditional Orientalist (and Zionist) historiography that developed alongside capitalist, imperialist modernity had as its starting point an ontological and epistemological duality between East and West, with the latter ushering in at the dawn of the "modern" era a period of immense progress, and the East continuing a pattern of decline or stagnation that began, by many accounts, sometime around the tenth century.

As a result of this supposed stagnation (attributed by Hegel and Marx to "Oriental despotism" and the "Asiatic mode of production," respectively), the Islamic world was thought to possess no internal motor for change; hence no change could occur until European penetration roused the East out of its long "stupor." Thus the histories written by the great Orientalists (such as Gibb, Lewis, von Grunebaum, Vatikiotis, Watt, and others) were by definition teleological, with the West having progressed to a cultural, political, and economic level that the East had no choice but to accept and attempt to replicate.

There are many reasons for the development of the ideology of separate and autonomous development by Europeans. One important factor was the transformation from competitive capitalism to imperial capitalism, a transition necessitated by the fact that no matter how efficient European capitalism became, it still could not compete with ability of the local producers to squeeze wages lower in order to keep prices competitive with Europe, Thus the only way for European capitalism to conquer foreign markets was to ,destroy the indigenous capitalist sector, which it did through a process of capitulations, commercial treaties, debt, and finally, military conquest and occupation.

But this commercial and military imperialism was not all. Postcolonial writers such as Edward Said, Samir Amin, and others have revealed the cultural component of European imperialism and colonialism, demonstrating how the "point of departure for the conquest of the world" by Europe was the universalization of both the economic and ideological aspects of modernity. By this we should understand, as Ella Shohat explains, that concomitant to the imposition of European economic superiority was an appropriation of "cultural and material" production which allowed Europeans to attribute the "failures" of the Middle East to internal causes, rather than seeing them as the result of a process in which the underdevelopment of the Third World was intertwined with European "progress."

How, then, does Zionism fit within this picture? The Zionist leadership felt that the mental and social chasm between them and the indigenous Arab population of Palestine was that between "a nation living in the twentieth century and one living in the fifteenth century, some of them in the seventh century." Early on they saw the native population (including native Jews) as "indolent and torpid," incapable of being productive partners in building up the country. As Ben-Gurion put it, "We do not recognize their right to rule the country to the extent that it has not been built up by them and is still awaiting its cultivators." This statement is reflective of a "modern," well-organized, and well-financed national movement, with a European-inspired paradigm of development and progress, looking down upon the indigenous agrarian, non-capitalist society with which it was competing for scarce land and natural resources.

As Michel Foucault demonstrated in The Order of Things, the development of the concept of "the economy" as based on circulation and exchange of value- i.e., capitalism-is a central component of modern epistemology. In their apologia the Zionist leadership utilized many of the central components of modern economic discourse, particularly those surrounding "modernization." In fact, as Baruch Kimmerling points out, reducing central political components of the conflict to "economic" problems was a central Zionist goal in the debate over Palestine, since doing so gave the Zionist leadership the opportunity to provide new formulas that would demonstrate the harmless, even beneficial, effects of their enterprise upon the Arabs.

From their first negotiations with the Arabs, Zionist leaders sought to emphasize the benefits of their colonization efforts. Chaim Weizmann, in his correspondence with Emir Feisal in 1918, explained how Zionist development would not be injurious to the indigenous population but rather would "revive" Palestine's long-suffering and moribund economy without encroaching on the ownership rights of the Arab peasantry. The underlying theme of the Zionist responsa was that, far from hindering the development of the Arab economy in Palestine, Jewish colonization would be the primary impetus for such development. Here we see how a development ethos was inherent in the Zionist enterprise, how developing Eretz Israel was an essential component of the Zionist mission and also one of its self-justifications.

The Zionists similarly claimed that before Jewish colonization the land was sterile, barren, and vacant, and that the cultivation that did take place was "primitive," utilizing traditional methods of cultivation that failed to bring out the productive potential of the land. As Moshe Smilansky wrote in 1930, "The only hope for future development and to return the land to its ancient level of fertility is the influx of new energy"-i.e., the "creative destruction" discussed above. The Arabs, fitting the general stereotype of the East, were thought to lack such "energy," as "the indolent spirit of the east seemed to diffuse its torpid influence throughout the country." Joseph Weitz, one of the architects of Zionist land policy, wrote that "formerly uninhabited or sparsely settled areas are flourishing after the soil has been reclaimed. The settlements prove that it is within the power of man to restore to a country its natural assets which may have been lost through centuries of neglect...to transform the very nature of the land through reclamation and development."

Just as important is a quote from a Britisher, Sir Martin Conway, used by the American Zionist and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in an influential Foreign Affairs article in 1931: "We who love the simple Oriental life in its beautiful setting may be pardoned if we regard with a sigh its pulverization beneath the wheels of progress, Change is inevitable. It's a mere accident that the Jews should happen to be its agents...Palestine is inexorably part of the modern world. No cordon sanitaire can protect her against the penetration of the forces behind Western ideas and technology." Similarly, Smilansky argued that "the fellah can thus be raised from the depths of his present misery and transformed into a prosperous modern farmer only with the aid of Jewish immigration and settlement."

Because Zionism was a colonization movement, key issues such as agricultural development and land purchases cannot be fully understood outside the context of European colonial discourse and practice, including models pro vided by other projects of European overseas settlement. These models were particularly influential, as many of the early Zionist leaders had extensive colonial agricultural experience or were influenced by the German land reform movement, and thus brought with them a strong interest in the economic development of the Middle East. Out of this symbiosis of science and political ideology, termed "technocracy" by Derick Penslar, emerged a political economic discourse in which science played a major role in both shaping and justifying the political-economic policies of the Zionist movement, and thus in the realization of Jewish national aspirations in Palestine.

Looking at the growth of Israeli cities is also crucial to an understanding of Zionist modernity, for two reasons. First, because modern society is largely constituted through the buildings and space that it creates, space, even more than time or history, becomes the dimension structuring peoples' existence in the modern world. Seen this way, the urban built environment can be understood as representing and helping to create econonmies, societies, and cultures. As Derrick Gregory and John Urry put it: "Spatial structure is not merely an arena in which social life unfolds, but rather a medium through which social relations are produced and reproduced." Second, the history of urbanism is intimately tied to both capitalism and imperialism/colonialism, meaning that political, economic, and cultural conditions of imperial dominance allowed Europe to enforce an entire system of "rational" planning in the building of new "European" cities in the colonies, ones in which the new modern designs were based on technologies of organizing space and categorizing, disciplining, and otherwise controlling local populations. The discourse surrounding the planning and building of Israeli cities provides us with another example of the exclusivist nature of the Zionist efforts to "redeem" Palestine.

Given the importance of urbanization within capitalist modernity, it should come as no surprise that "Zionist planners made the country a laboratory for urban design." There were competing socialist and capitalist visions, and each "envisioned [cities like] Tel. Aviv in terms of an integrated complex of values in which physical form not only reflected the city's social and political characteristics but contributed to shaping them." In general, the aim of such design was "to provide a total environment," a "cocoon," that would create and sustain collective values unpolluted by Arab influence. The specifically colonial/imperial influences are clear from the fact that Otto Warburg, one of the architects of Zionist settlement and agricultural policy, was also instrumental in the creation of Tel Aviv and "modern" Haifa. Moreover, the very concepts involved in building and designing the two cities, the Bauhaus or International Style and the "garden city;" were clear cases of 'cultural transfers" from British and German planning and design.

As I have explained in more detail elsewhere, the goal of the city planners of Tel Aviv was to separate the "clean, beautiful and healthy" city from Arab Jaffa, which was disordered, dirty, and backward. While explaining how "it seemed wrong to exchange the conditions of European ghetto for a Middle Eastern one;' the middle class, non-socialist Zionists who built Tel Aviv believed that the solution to the" Arab problem" would be to "channel resources as quickly as possible to build the economic infrastructure of a Jewish society, a rapidly developed, modern and efficient urban and industrial society."

The role of the state in Zionist and Israeli political discourse is also of fundamental importance to our discussion. Both conceptually and structurally, the state is one of the basic components of the modern social, political, and economic order; in the case of Israel, mamlachtiut, or statism, was the ideological expression of this dynamic. The term was coined by Ben-Gurion, who felt that the new institutions of the Yishuv and then the new Israeli state were the highest expression of Zionism, and that their relationship to the people was central to the development of the nation. In fact, the various international and local Zionist institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization, Zionist Executive, Histadrut, Jewish National Fund, and various political parties, all gave the impression of a "state within a state" even before the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.

In 1953 Ben-Gurion succinctly described this epistemological transformation when he labeled Israeli society am mamlakhti- a "statist nation"-as opposed to the earlier socialist conception of am oved, or "working nation." Thus, the nation-state stood above society, representing the universal interests of the nation, and took on the appearance, common to nmost modem centralized states, of being autonomous and independent from the rest of society. This forced the country's leadership to identify itself with the "state" rather than identifying its interests with those of the working class, the traditional base of the Labor party. The state became the embodiment of the nation, while socialism, along with the socialist institutions, became the handmaiden of the state, as mamlachtiut policies sought.

Moreover, as Shalev points out, the Histadrut and other key state structures, such as the army and the schools, also served as the means through which Arabs were first excluded from the Jewish economy and polity in the pre-state period. After 1948, these vehicles incorporated non-Jews within a framework of institutionalized dualism that was pro-Jewish and anti-Arab. The centrality of the state also affected the development of the army, the Histadrut, and the absorption of the wave of Arab Jewish immigrants that began in the 1950s, providing the necessary technologies and methods of control to socialize them, not into a socialist ideology, but rather into a culture in which the primary categories were the inherently exclusivist "nation" and "state." While it is taken for granted that Zionism was and is the nationalist movement of the Jewish people, what has not been sufficiently explored is how, qua nationalist movement, its various discourses were imbricated in the larger dynamic of capitalism: that is, how this "imagined community" created an identity that defined itself as an essentially autonomous, unitary historical subject and that labeled as "other" all who were not part of its self-identity (in this case both Palestinian Arabs and non-European Jews), and how the political and cultural technologies associated with capitalism played a crucial role in this dynamic. As Edward Said has pointed out, both in his seminal "Orientalism" and the more recent Culture and Imperialism, the construction of these Others is a central dynamic of the interrelated processes of capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In fact, if we look at the first two generations of Zionist/Israeli historiography, it is clear that scholars and official historians such as Arthur Ruppin, S. N. Eisenstaadt, and Dan Horowitz either ignored the Arabs altogether or conceived of them from within an "autonomous elite" paradigm in which the two peoples were seen as self-formed and independently developing. It was up to the post-Zionist writers to interrogate this assumption.

Fredric Jameson has examined how the transformation from the modern to postmodern world is centered around a "mutation in the sphere of culture," in which culture becomes a product or commodity fully incorporated into the dynamics of the market, in the process destroying old allegiances and producing new kinds of people capable of functioning in the new socioeconomic world. At the same time, the new postmodern attitude is characterized by a loss of faith in the emancipatory promises of modern politics and economics. This transformation-and the cultural and economic globalization that accompanies it poses a serious challenge to the centrality of the state in the formation of Jewish Israeli identity (particularly since the raison d'etre of the Zionist enterprise was the "emancipation" of the world's Jews and the concomitant benefits it would bring to the indigenous population of Palestine). It was out of this crisis in Zionist ideology that the movement toward post-Zionism was born.

One of the prerequisites for post-Zionist discourse was the development of political economy as an alternative method of historical research. First of all, political-economic historians have understood the ideological nature of traditional European historiography, particularly the construction of Islam as a complete sociopolitical blueprint for the life of Muslims which could thus be identified as the main cause of their "stagnation." In this way, they have shown us how Orientalist history was inextricably linked to the imperialist project. Thus the efforts of more contemporary historiography have been aimed at "decolonizing" Middle Eastern history while reexamining Western Christian history, removing both from under the Western self-image and placing them firmly in a comparative framework.

Moreover, political economy has demonstrated how Arab/Islamic societies possessed their own political economies, which were equally as "rational" as those of the West and attuned to those societies' "indigenous roots" for the development of capitalism, roots that Europe's imperial and colonial policies were specifically designed to destroy. Political-economic studies have revealed, for example, how the Ottoman governments and local rulers of the so-called period of "decline" were in fact much more involved in the daily lives of their populations, often with the goal of protecting the peasantry, the very group whom the Europeans-and Zionists-claimed to be liberating through imperialism and colonialism.

So far from being "stagnant," the changing patterns of land ownership and economic development in late nineteenth-century Palestine not only indicate the dynamic nature of the situation, but moreover present the clearest example of how Islamic patterns are intimately woven into the fabric of communal society, thus contradicting the Orientalist "stagnation" model that historically dominated Middle Eastern scholarship. As Ya'akov Firestone points out, the evolving land-owning patterns "smoothed [the] adjustment to final absorption into the world market centered on Western capitalism, [and were] an adaptation to deal with poor public security, benefits of scale operation, equalize economic opportunities...[all of which is] only natural in economies like the Middle East, where production is subject to such uncertainties."

While for the most part it was not until the mid-seventies at the earliest that so-called "revisionist," or post-Zionist, analyses of Palestinian society and its economy came to the fore, an extremely insightful early critique exists in the form of a 1925 article by Yitzhak Elazari-Volkani, titled "The Transition from Primitive to Modern Agriculture in Palestine." His analysis provides an alternative view to the traditional Zionist critique of Arab agriculture and attendant glorification of Zionist methods and ideology by illustrating how the profits extracted by Zionist intensive farming were in the end no greater than those extracted via the "primitive" methods employed by the fellah. While the Zionists might have earned more gross income, "having neither tradition nor science, [they] create[d] only defective farms, half modern intensive in expenditure and primitive in income." Of course, this view is at odds with the general Zionist belief that European techniques were superior to native ways; many early Jewish colonists refused to use local tools because they saw the Palestinians as "backward and decadent:"

Postmodernism as a critical methodology has both discerned and influenced these advances, grounded as it is in the "awareness of the value and significance of respecting difference and otherness." While there are numerous debates about the ultimate meaning of the term, and about whether postmodernity represents a radical departure from or just a heightened form of modernity, what concerns us here is the undebatable emphasis in all postmodernist critiques on 1) problematizing and deconstructing the effects of the univeralizing tendencies of modernism discussed above; and 2) replacing these with a more circumspect, localized discourse that accepts the absence of an ultimate center or truth, and not only embraces the previously demonized Others but understands that one's identity; ambivalent though it may be, is intimately tied to them. Finally, postmodern discourse seeks to break down the "effects" of structure and boundary that in the modernist paradigm allowed us to think in terms of the duality of state and society, Jew and Arab.

On the face of it, there is a strong link between the development of post-Zionist and postmodern discourses in Israel, since, as Anita Shapira points out, "post-Zionism was created in an associative context within the debate in the Israeli press on the issue of postmodernism." Thus, the main themes of traditional historiography that post-Zionist historians attack involve the following areas: the uncritical use of terms such as Eretz Israel and aliyah (without examining their ideological implications or the instability of the terms over time); the tendency toward a teleological reading of Jewish history, in which all the events of the past two thousand years, even the Holocaust, are conceived of as inevitably leading to the creation of the State of Israel; and the use of physical and ideological boundaries to separate out progressively "other" groups from the dominant Jewish-Zionist-Ashkenazi elite.

Given the tendency in traditional Zionist historiography to diminish the role of Palestinians in the formation of Zionist and Israeli identity and society, the most notable characteristic of the post-Zionist historians has been the reexamination of the myths of Israeli history from a more open and honest perspective, one that is willing to acknowledge the negative repercussions of Zionism and the creation of Israel on the indigenous inhabitants of the country, and that emphasizes the mutually formative relationship between Zionist/Israeli and Palestinian histories and identities. The pioneering studies of the "Oriental problem" by writers like Smooha and Swirski are part of this trend, as are the feminist writings of Ella Shohat and Simona Sharoni.

The idea of history and identity as narrative is important in this respect, and has been misunderstood by critics of post-Zionist/postmodern discourse such as Anita Shapira, who believes that the postmodern approach degrades history to a mere "story invented by historians out of their own need." In reality, history as narrative is one of the soundest insights of postmodernism, for as Uri Ram (one of the central post-Zionist figures) notes-picking up on the historian Eric Hobsbawm's theme: "In the act of constructing modern nationhood, cultural traditions and historical trajectories are invented." The challenge of the modern Jewish nationalist narrative was to weave the multifarious layers of memories and histories of a diverse group of cultures into a coherent story that could unite these people into a modern nation-state. The task of postmodernism and post-Zionism is to open up this narrative to those it formerly excluded.

I cannot agree with Shapira that the link between post-Zionism and postmodernism "is not evident. "It is clear that, methodologically, post-Zionism falls well within the parameters of postmodernism, since one of its central characteristics is an awareness and critique of the positivist ideology that has been central to traditional Zionist historiography (and politics and economics, as we have seen). Moreover, post-Zionism uses discourse analysis to demonstrate how Zionist/Israeli history was socially constructed and linked to institutionalized configurations of power.

But post-Zionism also has a religious component. Traditionally, Labor Zionism had little but contempt for religion and religious Jews. More recently, many (but not all) religious Zionists have blended Orthodox religious practices with xenophobic nationalism, to the point where a new type of Judaism has emerged, which Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, has termed "Settler Judaism." Its adherents believe that God gave "us" the West Bank as our eternal inheritance and that "we" have the right to do whatever is necessary to hold on to it-in the process redefining the religion and "who is a Jew." In response to this trend, Lerner, in his book Jewish Renewal, gives us a useful description of the relationship between post-Zionism and Jewish Renewal as essentially a "second birth" for Israel, a new state of mind "in which Jewish values could triumph over Jewish power, and Jewish compassion could replace Jewish rage." Lerner's view that mutual recognition has to be more than just a political concept, that "lasting peace is only possible when the pain and fear of both sides are recognized and legitimated," is central to any final reconciliation and accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Specifically, as Lerner describes it in The Politics of Meaning, a discourse of that name would understand the "spiritual and ethical impoverishment caused by the prevailing organization of society...the more people see one another in materialistic terms, the less they feel compelled by sentiments of sympathy and solidarity." Thus, a fully liberatory post-Zionist discourse, or a politics of meaning for that matter, would involve a radical break from the cynicism, materialism, and Othering that are the inevitable results of the dynamics of capitalist modernity, and would instead work toward the creation of a new ethical and spiritual connection between the two peoples, and through it, a different political and economic reality.

So on an experiential level, we see that a true post-Zionist discourse will create new relationships between community, state, and society, remold the spaces in which these groups and structures interact-and in the process reorder the space of Palestine/Israel, not just in terms of borders, but in terms of cities and neighborhoods, From this perspective, while many Israeli historians have embraced a postmodern or post-Zionist perspective, Israeli and Palestinian societies are still mired in a modernist weltanschauung and the national conflicts that this has spawned, A true post-Zionist discourse will strive to create the conditions in which the many sectors of Israeli society- Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Arab, Ethiopian-could live together in a sense of community as yet unattained. From the perspective of postmodern geography, such a community would, as Edward Soja described it, reflect a new spatiality and historicity that are "archetypes of vividness, simultaneity, and interconnection," rather than of myopia and exclusion.

David Ben-Gurion understood the exclusionary basis of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism all too well, as a revealing 1918 quote illustrates:

Thus, the emergence of Zionism as a European nationalist movement in a Middle Eastern country with a well-established indigenous population made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inevitable, However important and even beneficial a movement to the Jewish people, Zionism in fact fell far short of the ideals that lie at the heart of tikkun olam, the imperative to repair and transform the world. Yet this neither invalidates Israeli nationalism (for if it did, almost every country in the world would lose its claim to validity) nor should it come as any surprise, since no national movement has fared better in striving to live up to the religious or ethical vision of its founders.

Indeed, the same tensions and contradictions within "modernity" that led to our present "postmodern condition" have necessitated the development of a post-Zionist discourse. But as with postmodernism, the jury is still out on whether post-Zionism can succeed in supporting the fulfillment of both Palestinian and Israeli nationhood while at the same time working toward the creation of a post-national, and therefore truly postmodern, Israeli Palestinian identity.

*Please refer to the original for footnotes.