Israeli Cinema and Politics

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Israeli Cinema and Politics Yaron Peleg and Eran Kaplan This issue of Jewish Film & New Media holds the proceedings of the third scholars’ conference on Jewish and Israeli media, which met at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice in the spring of 2017. The conference centered on the political in Israeli cinema and television, or more precisely, the apparent disappearance of political consciousness from Israeli social and cultural life and the advent of a post-political age over the last three decades or so. This phenomenon is not unique to Israel, of course, and reflects wider trends globally. The waning of direct political engagement around the world began in the wake of the Second World War, not only as reaction to what can be called an excess of politics, exemplified by that war, but also because of the relative spread of prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century, the rise and then decline of the welfare state and the gradual domination of the market, which shaped these developments. Yet, because of Israel’s compressed history and the central role ideology played in its rapid political development, these trends have tended to stand out in it with perhaps greater visibility and resonance than elsewhere. In other words, against the ideological crucible in which Israel was created and which shaped much of its history, the declining role of political ideology in contemporary Israeli life is quite remarkable. The history of this change is fairly well known by now, although the current changes in the role of politics in Israeli culture is not often defined so clearly as a post-political age, as we speak of it here. We allude here to a period that begins by and large with the rise of Israel’s New Historians in the 1980s, the emergence of a critical school of thought that scrutinized the very ideological foundations [End Page 133] on which the state was founded, and which shaped not only its politics but the record of this politics, that is, its historiography. But while the political engagement of these historians, sociologists and cultural critics was evident by the very dialectics they set in motion, their critique marked a shift in the nature of political engagement or lack thereof in Israel that characterizes the postmodern era more generally. The chief focus of Israeli new historians has been the foundational myths of Zionism and the young state of Israel. These scholars and intellectuals sought to unmask the very mechanisms that regulated the lives of Israelis and set in motion processes that helped entrench power relations and the privileged position of certain elites in Israeli society, primarily Ashkenazi and secular. The gravamen of this critique was leveled at the Israeli labor movement and the political and administrative apparatus it created before and after the establishment of the state, whose involvement in so many aspects of life, from housing policies, to land regulation, to the development of the public educational sector, to the control of cultural institutions, has been described as the root cause of many of the political, social and cultural ills that continue to plague Israel to this very day. And while this all-encompassing political environment of the early years of Israeli statehood had engaged many Israelis in the past, either as part of the political machine itself, or as its fierce critics, the new critique that emerged in the late 1980s marked a backlash that resulted in a greater disengagement from politics on a personal level. So much so, that the allegedly hidden-hand of the market was preferred to the hand of the Big Brotherly state as an arbiter in the public domain. One of the most pronounced manifestations of this development has been the privatization of politics and the rise of identity as the basis for civic or collective action. Instead of the social, economic or other grand national issues, which stood at the center of “old” politics, the identity of various minority groups within the state became the new inspiration for public mobilization. In the age of globalization, which sought to erase all remnants of independent political entities, the “local” as the site of common customs and traditions has emerged as the...