The Weakening of the Zionist Motif in "Ha'aretz," 1948-2002 / היחלשות המוטיב הציוני ב"הארץ" (1948-2002)

Post-Zionism, a widely used term nowadays, is difficult to define and few are willing to apply this label to themselves. Tom Segev believes that post-Zionism is not an ideology but rather a retreat from ideology and from the notion of the collective to the individual. Adi Ofir has written that Zionism is not only an ideology but also a utopian vision and a discipline of discourse, while post-Zionism is a critical reaction to Zionism. Dan Mekhman identifies six main components in post-Zionism: (1) Zionism, whose claim of unity and the existence of a Jewish people is disputable; an imagined community is closer to the truth. (2) Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, which is a mask for colonialist-imperialist nationalism, with the Palestinians as its victims. (3) The Holocaust, which was ignored by the Zionist movement at the time. (4) The founding of the state — not out of a humane concern for Jews but for nationalist Zionist aims; the Palestinian refugee problem resulted from flight and expulsion. (5) Contemporary Israeli society: The supra-Zionist narrative is breaking up and the separate narratives of the various Jewish groups, which have been ignored, are emerging. (6) The desired Israeli society: Israel should exist side by side with a Palestinian state, while the Arabs of Israel will have rights as a national minority. In an effort to explore the impact of post-Zionism on Israeli society, the author surveyed the editorials that appeared in the daily Ha'aretz at Israel Independence Day and Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen Soldiers from the founding of the state to the present — over 100 articles in all. The six components cited by Mekhman were used as the structural basis of the research. The survey revealed that signs of a post-Zionist perception gradually emerged with the passage of time. The memorialization of the fatalities of Israel's wars, which was a central motif in the first decades, gradually disappeared after the Lebanese War (1982), a sign that points to Baruch Kimmerling's proposal to change the definition of Memorial Day to a day of commemoration of all the victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The editorials no longer dealt with the Holocaust. Moreover, the festive celebratory tone disappeared, as did the use of the "we." With this, the editorials did not generally use the accepted post-Zionist jargon. The retreat from Zionism in Ha'aretz is attributable to two developments: (1) The decline of the status of the state, the diminishment of it