May 2, 2007
Project Report Summary
Senior Fellow Hassan Barari presented a critical assessment of the status of Israeli studies in the Arab world since the establishment of Israel in 1948. Despite the existence of a plethora of books and academic articles on Israel written in Arabic, Arab scholars have failed to produce sound, objective knowledge on Israel. To a great extent, Arab scholarship on Israel suffers from a lack of knowledge of Israeli politics and society, and a need to bolster the Arab side in the ongoing conflict. Instead, it is beset by subjective projections, ideological distortion, bias and the necessity to expose rather that to understand the ‘other.’ Arab scholars’ inability to distinguish between Israel as a state and Israel as a topic of study is the main obstacle to the production of objective Arab scholarly work on Israel.
Arab scholars' writing on Israel has been, to a great extent, informed by the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one that accentuates the role of ideologies in Israeli studies. Barari asserted that while he personally believes that the Palestinian cause is justified, the prolongation of the conflict has instilled in Arab scholarship a closed belief system that has not helped bring sound insights into Israeli studies. In effect, academic writing resembles a means of struggle against Israel rather than a tool for understanding.
Barari argued that there has been no debate in the Arab World on how to study Israel until recently. Researchers, on the whole, are prone to believe that Zionism is the key independent variable that explains everything that happens in Israel. Notwithstanding the recent emergence of some centers and programs devoted to studying Israel, Barari argued that there are few serious attempts on the part of Arab scholars to critically assess Arab scholarship on Israel. He suggested the term ‘Israelism’ refer to the mode and style of writing that Arab writers use whenever Israel is the topic.
According to Barari, the lack of development of Israel studies cannot be analyzed without an understanding of the nature of the Arab regimes that constrain political and academic freedom. Arab regimes use anti-Israeli rhetoric as a political tool to counter the opposition or to secure regime legitimacy. They keep archives closed to researchers. Thus, efforts to break with the status quo and examine Israeli society objectively meet great political challenges. These challenges are imposed from governments as well as the general public, which has been conditioned to see Israel through a distorted lens. Because, in this view, developments in Israeli domestic politics and society do not matter, the Arab world continually underestimates the importance of Israeli domestic politics. The incorrect assumptions that dominate Arab scholarship on Israel include the ideological illusion that Israel will eventually disappear, the belief that the social sciences are not relevant to study Israel due to the importance of Zionism, and the conviction that Israel owes its ability to continue existing solely to Western imperialism, and is, essentially, a pawn of the West.
Barari concluded by noting that his research aims to fill the sizable gap in Arab scholarship on Israel by addressing the obstacles that have impeded the development of sound knowledge on Israel in the Arab world, and called for the establishment of an Arab school for studying Israel based on the social sciences, thus equipping younger generations of scholars with tools for objective knowledge.
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