Peace as a Vanishing Mediator: Towards a Marxist History of Zionism and Israel

In this paper, I present a new way of understanding the rise and decline of post-Zionism as an intellectual and political project. I argue that post-Zionism, and the 90s peacemaking political project that it served, should be understood as a vanishing mediator—the latter being a term taken from the writing of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. The vanishing mediator schema allows us to see 90s peacemaking as helping bring about historical change, in the name of an old historical goal. In the case of Post-Zionism, I argue, the pursuit of old goal of peace is used to facilitate the transition to a neoliberal socio-economic system in Israel, echoing similar claims by scholars such as Daniel Gutwein and Eran Kaplan. As I hope to show, the vanishing mediator schema has the singular advantage of providing post-Zionism with historical agency (transition to neoliberalism), or emphasizing its historical necessity. At the same time, it provides us with an explanation for the contemporary decline of post-Zionism—the completion of the neoliberal restructuring of Israeli society makes the post-Zionist attack on the Israeli state no longer necessary. The decline of post-Zionism, I argue, makes it necessary for us to re-narrate the history of Zionism again, as demonstrated by what Assaf Likhoski and others call “post-post-Zionist” writing. Thus, I end the paper by briefly suggesting a new possibility for narrating the history of Zionism and Israel, one that do not conform to “post-post-Zionist” ethical ambivalence and retreat from politics.