Rebecca Stein

"Other Israels: Zionism, Historical Memory, and the Rhetoric of Colonialism"

Abstract:

Despite Edward Said’s founding imprint on the field of postcolonial studies, there has been relatively little conversation between postcolonial studies and Middle East and/or Israel Studies. Following Said’s lead, postcolonial studies of the 1990s often invoked Palestinian experience within its laundry lists of subalternity, yet failed to seriously investigate the Israeli/Palestinian case in any historical depth. This paper considers the purchase of postcolonial theory for the study of contemporary Israeli political culture. I am interested in the historic/political valence of postcoloniality in the Israeli context and the ways in which poststructual analytics might productively push at the epistemological limits of area studies' scholarship and methodology. This paper will also historicize the place of "colonialism" within Israel Studies scholarship of both the U.S. and Israeli academies, and the relationship between knowledge-production within the academy and popular struggles beyond it at particular historical moments. I will be particularly attentive to the ways in which questions of "colonialism" circulated through Israeli academic and popular discourses during the 1990s in the context of the Oslo Peace Process and the changing political economy of the Israeli occupation.