The political ideology underlying Israel’s national cultural heritage policy

ABSTRACT

This article explores the historical processes, socio-political contexts, and ideological tendencies that underlie the development of the Heritage Plan, Israel’s official cultural heritage policy. I argue that the Heritage Plan does not merely invest in the conservation of tangible and intangible Israeli national heritage assets; in addition, it employs cultural heritage as an educational tool for creating a ‘unifying national ethos’ to ensure the continuous existence of Zionism – in the eyes of the policy’s architects. To understand the concrete manifestations of this policy in relation to its ideological roots, I adopted a critical discourse analysis lens to examine various data materials, including official documents and interviews. My findings lead to a direct connection between the Heritage Plan and the rise of a specific ideological interpretation of Zionism, which combines Anglo-American conservative concepts with selected political-Zionist ideas. This study retraces how conservative-Zionism informed the decision-making process behind the Heritage Plan’s creation and demonstrates how this ideology continues to influence the policy’s current implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• Zionism
• cultural heritage
• conservatism
• discourse
• post-Zionism
• ideology

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Paul Zanazanian, Dr. Eric Caplan, and Dr. Claudia Mitchell for their generous feedback on previous versions of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor, Professor Oliver Bennett, for their comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All quotations taken from the Heritage Plan documents were translated verbatim from Hebrew by the author.

2. Due to ethical considerations, the interviews included in this article were anonymized. All interviews were conducted by the author.

3. Funded by American donors, The Shalem Center [Merkaz Shalem] – the journal’s sponsor – was Israel’s pioneer conservative institution.

4. The Shalem Center is responsible for an impressive translating project which includes these Western canonical texts.

5. Over the next twelve years, the Plan operated in different capacities and its budget was almost tripled.

6. Established in 2000, the Herzliya Conference convened by the Institute for Policy and Strategy became Israel’s exclusive annual gathering of the country’s elite.

7. The Jerusalem convoy memorial is an installation made out of several remnants of armored trucks located next to the road leading to the entry of Jerusalem. This memorial commemorates the Jewish efforts to break the Arab siege of Jerusalem by bringing supplies to the city’s Jewish community during the 1948 War.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rudy Kisler

Rudy Kisler is an educational researcher. His research interests lie at the intersection of history education, political ideology, and material culture. His research explores the manners in which historical knowledge is produced and disseminated in heritage contexts in Israel and beyond. Rudy has taught history in various secondary schools in Israel and Canada.