Summary
Israeli sociologist (1953–) whose Imagined Peace, Discourse of War (2007) Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine uses for the “Security Myth”, the myth of “peace and security” and “Imagined Peace”, and for the three processes — military, economic and party-political — that contributed to the Oslo Peace Process (Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, PDF p.160-162, 180-181 / printed p.151-153, 171-172).
Details
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Grinberg defines the “security myth” as the belief that the new hostile relations with the Arab world are an incarnation of Jewish history conceived as a history of suffering and persecution, solidified in the founding period as a consequence of the Holocaust and the “War of Independence” of 1948 (PDF p.160).
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The myth of “peace and security”, propagated mostly by the Zionist Left, treats the occupation of the 1967 territories as only temporary, the areas merely a trump card or pawn for the desired peace, while its proponents still support Jewish settlement in them out of conviction (PDF p.161).
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Grinberg points to three processes behind Oslo: discontent in the military leadership at policing the Intifada, with Chief of General Staff Dan Shomron’s statement that there is no military solution for the Intifada shaking the security myth; the economic elite’s turn to globalization, with Shimon Peres as its political sponsor; and the Labor Party’s democratization and renewal under the slogan “Change in National Priorities” (PDF p.180-181).
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In the work’s final part, Grinberg is the cited authority for Peres’s post-assassination course: Peres construed Rabin’s murder and the peace process itself as a danger to the “unity of Israeli-Jewish society” and sought to appease Oslo’s opponents; Rabin had resolved to build a boundary wall along the “Green Line” of 1967, while business elites opposed separation of the two economic areas and the military leadership saw control over the Palestinians and isolation of their territories as a security-political priority; and Peres’s 1996 war policy is read as a failed attempt to imitate the ultimate “man of security”, Rabin (PDF p.189, 191-192).
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In his own Moments of Resistance, Grinberg presents thirty years of progressive research programs behind the concept of Political Space: the 1931 joint Jewish-Arab anti-colonial transport strike, the 1980 workers’ revolt and Split Corporatism, the 1960-1965 full-employment crisis and the Vicious Institutional Triangle of Histadrut, state and Mapai, and the Israeli-Palestinian program of triple democratization, Imagined Democracy and politics versus violence after 2000 (Moments of Resistance, PDF p.13, 21-37).
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In that work he defines Movements of Resistance (mo(ve)ments) as the attempt to open political space through physical presentation of power by subordinated social forces seeking recognition and representation, against the Symbolic Violence of non-recognition and misrecognition by the dominant (PDF p.40, 54-55).
Related pages
Security Myth, Imagined Peace, Political Space, Imagined Democracy, Movements of Resistance, Oslo Accords, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, Moments of Resistance