Israeli Society: A Counterview

It is worth mentioning these early sociological "revelations" in view of Moshe Lissak's essay which paints me as a devotee of an "a priori ideological position" and denies to "critical" or "engaged" sociologists in toto the "exciting experience" of an "intellectual adventure" or even the ability of possessing "intellectual purity [sic], honesty" or "a large measure of curiosity for its own sake." Ironically, it was the discovery of the obfuscation produced by the functionalist thinking of, what is rightly called, "establishment" sociology in Israel that afforded me for the first time the pleasure of seeking the adventure of new intellectual horizons. [Lissak] concedes the presence of "several symptoms of a colonial situation" in the Jewish settlement in Palestine, but goes on to argue that these did not evolve into a full-scale colonial situation for two reasons. First, Jewish immigrants to Palestine possessed a unique motivation -- one that set them apart from other movements of settlement. They sought "to return the Jewish people to history" even if that, in contradistinction from other national movements, required emigration from one territory to another. Second, the ideology and socio-economic policies of the Labor Movement prevented such development. Of the four alternative ways of forging a relationship with the Arab inhabitants that the Jewish immigrants encountered in Palestine -- "this upon that," "this instead of that," "this together with that," and "this alongside that" -- the mainstream of the Labor Movement chose the last, distinctly anti-colonial, option. This choice aimed at developing "a symmetrical situation" between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Lissak concludes, in view of these differences, that "the similarity" between Zionism and colonialism (at least until 1967) was "purely structural." This brings us to the topic of "reflexivity," one of the concepts on which Lissak heaps scorn, though it is necessary for understanding the evolution of any sociologist's work and identity. Bourdieu bemoans the fact that sociologists -- that is "people whose profession it is to objectivize the social world prove so rarely able to objectivize themselves..."(53) Sociologists of science also argue that, whereas "scientific and technical knowledge is not the rational/logical extrapolation from existing knowledge, but the contingent product of various social, cultural, and historical processes," this observation is usually kept at an arm's length by sociol