The Relations between Military Intelligence and Middle Eastern

Dangerous Liaisons between Military Intelligence and Middle Eastern Studies in IsraelDangerous Liaisons between Military Intelligence and Middle Eastern Studies in Israel Author(s): Gil Eyal Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Oct., 2002), pp. 653-693 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108544 . Accessed: 01/06/2011 19:05
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GIL EYAL Columbia University
It is a "well-known secret" in Israel that scholars of Middle Eastern studies are heavily involved with military intelligence: they serve their reserve duty there, provide research services for it, and when they are interviewed in the media, they speak with the authority of those "in the know." Thefact that such relations exist, therefore, is well known and in itself is not the problem this article sets out to investigate. My question is rather about the causes and significance of this phenomen- on: why did academics, who are supposedly committed to disinterested research, become involved in military intelligence work? And why did
military intelligence, this most hardheaded and secretive of govern- ment agencies, come to draw upon the expertise of historians and
philologists? Finally, what are the consequences of such "dangerous liaisons" between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies?
My answer is that the relations between Middle Eastern studies and
military intelligence are made possible by the construction of a liminal institutional setting, between academia and officialdom, and on the basis of a common form of expertise shared by both academics and
intelligence officers. I will call this form of expertise by the ungainly name of "commentary on contemporary Middle Eastern events" (henceforward abbreviated as "commentary"). The broader sociologi- cal issue addressed by this answer is the question of the relations between intellectuals and power. One approach to this question has been to affirm an antinomy between power and truth, the latter being the vocation of intellectuals. Thus, intellectuals who were employed by governmental agencies or business corporations were depicted as
expert "guns for hire," who have "sold out" because of their interest in
power, prestige or money. This was, for example, the implication of C. Wright Mills's chapter on "Brains Inc.," or Noam Chomsky's attack on the "new mandarins." I find this treatment, however, to be hope-
Theory and Society 31: 653-693, 2002. ? 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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lessly mired in "boundary work," i.e., rhetoric deployed by scientists in order to protect their terrain and draw a boundary between science and non-science.1
My disagreement is shared by another tradition in the sociology of intellectuals, which considers intellectuals to constitute a "new class" that is, in Gouldner's words, "elitist and self-seeking and uses its spe- cial knowledge to advance its own interests and power." Gouldner, as well as Konrad and Szelenyi, abandon the normative antinomy between truth and power in favor of an attempt to think of knowledge as the specific form of power wielded by intellectuals, whether they are employed in academia or outside it. Despite their attempts to renounce it, however, a trace of this antinomy is still preserved within their account of power itself. This is the clearest in Gouldner's discussion of "autonomy," which as he puts it "is not simply to be understood as a spiritual value important to intellectuals ... but as an expression of the social interests of the new class as a distinct group." It follows that when intellectuals are not autonomous, like those involved with military intelligence, they may not be betraying truth's vocation, but they do betray the interests of their own class. Put differently, the normative antinomy between truth and power has been translated into an argument about what turns knowledge into power, and this turns out to be a specific social relation - closure - that corresponds to the normative concept of truth as autonomy and self-groundedness. This is made clear by Gouldner's discussion of "cultural capital," which emphasizes the phenomena of professionalism and credentialing as forms by which access to collectively produced knowledge is restricted, leading to its private appropriation as capital.2
I find this to be a partial way of thinking about the relations between intellectuals and power. It is only half the story, albeit an important half. Its limitations could be demonstrated by comparing it with Weber's Sociology of Religion. The capacity of intellectuals to wield knowledge as power no doubt depends to some degree on their capacity to restrict access to it. This strategy of social closure has been analyzed by the sociology of the professions, and it corresponds in Weber's schema to the ideal typical figures of both magicians and priests. Both magicians and priests share the quality that their knowledge is esoteric, mysterious, known only to a select few. To enter their ranks one needs to undergo initiation rituals, and priests in particular strive to achieve a monopoly over the interpretation of the scriptures so as to endow their com- mands with divine authority. But for Weber, this is only half the story.
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The capacity of intellectuals to wield knowledge as power depends, to no less a degree, on their capacity to present it as useful, relevant, and accessible to others, and instruct them to use it themselves. To put it simply, a strategy of social closure and esoteric knowledge, by itself, will create an "ivory tower" intellectual, not an expert whose advice and intervention are sought. Closure must be balanced by what Niko- las Rose calls the "generous" quality of expert knowledge, i.e., by a certain degree of openness of social relations and discourse, so that expert knowledge is grafted onto the practices and discourses of its consumers. As Weber puts it, any priesthood, if it is to exercise long- term domination over the laity, has to balance continuously the contra- dictory imperatives of monopoly over the interpretation of the scriptures - so as to protect its authority against would-be prophets - with the need to engage in pastoral practice and instruct the laity - so as to combat the encroachments of magicians and elders. Indeed, the ideal typical figures of prophets and elders represent forms of knowledge that become powerful not to the extent that their spokespersons monopolize them, but on the contrary, to the extent that the prophet "reveals" the word of God to all, and elders "impart" wisdom and advice to those who seek it. 3
We can unpack the reasoning embodied in Weber's ideal types, as Bourdieu does, into a set of abstract relations constituting a field of expertise (see Figure 1). The main contradiction of such a field is along the horizontal axis between dependence and independence from the laity, from the consumers of expert services. Magicians, for example, are dependent on their clientele in the sense that they perform magic- for-pay, in response to a specific problem or request posed to them by their clientele, and they must provide proof of concrete results. Weber analyzes the differentiation of religion from magic as the development of independence from the clientele. Priests invent the idea of other- worldly salvation, and impose a new definition of religious service - the dispensation of "grace" free of pay. In this way, they no longer cater to the needs of their clientele, but define what those needs should be, and protect themselves from evaluation of their services. At the same time, however, as they gain independence from the laity, they also bring into being a realm of transcendence, which in its turn could become independent of their own persons, or even of the corporate priestly group as a whole. Expertise becomes distinct from the group of experts, and other actors - prophets, or even laypersons who apply it to themselves without the mediation of an expert - could take up its forms of discourse and authority. Hence, a field of expertise emerges,
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A
laity thelaity: other- worldly salvation
pE:LDER J: [:PROPHEt:r '
Professional generosity pastoral practice
Figure 1. The religious field as the prototype for other forms of expertise (adapted from Max Weber, Sociology of Religion. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964 [1922]); Pierre Bour-
dieu, 1987. "Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber's Sociology of Religion." Pp. 119-136 in Scott Lash and S. Whimster, eds., Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen & Unwin.
which is also structured by a secondary contradiction along the vertical axis between closed and open social relations.4
What do these considerations have to do with the question about the relations between intellectuals and power, or more specifically, between Middle Eastern studies and military intelligence? I think they suggest two corrections to the way these questions have been approached thus far. The first correction is to balance the emphasis on closure, which one finds in Gouldner or the sociology of professions, with an opposite stress on the social arrangements necessary for the "generous" quality of expert knowledge. The approach represented in
Figure 1 suggests that the power of experts is dependent on striking a balance between their capacity to present themselves as disinterested observers in search of the truth and their capacity to present themselves as relevant and useful; moreover, it is also dependent on striking a balance between closed and open social relations. The need for this balance is even more evident with respect to the status of a commentator, which is what this article analyzes: to be a commentator requires,
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on the one hand, the goal of being influential, which requires that one's discourse will be taken up and used on the policy market, but on the other hand, it also dictates the interest in maintaining control over the dissemination and attribution of one's discourse so that it will remain identified with the commentator, protected from appropriation by powerful others. It follows that neither purely open social relations nor strict closure could support the status of commentator, but rather a liminal institutional setting. By "liminal" I mean, that within this
setting, the boundary between the academy and officialdom is flexible and manipulable. One can suspend it in order to interact with policy- makers and append one's comments to their discourse in a way that they will find convincing and useful; but at the same time one could erect the boundary again and withdraw behind it, in order to control the dissemination and attribution of commentary, and identify it with the commentators as their private property.
5 With respect to experts of Middle Eastern studies, I will show that as long as they remained "autonomous" and protected by closure, they were also perceived as "ivory tower" academics and lacked influence. But by the same token, if they crossed the boundary-line and took positions within officialdom, they could not become "commentators" because their superiors appropriated their discourse. They became the most powerful, however, in terms of both political influence and academic prestige, when they constructed a liminal institutional setting wherein they associated on a more equal footing with state officials.
The second correction is that one should distinguish between the group of experts, on the one hand, and expertise, on the other. They require two different modes of analysis. Gouldner and the sociology of professions have focused on the group of experts. They analyzed "professionalization" as the process whereby a group of experts lays claim to jurisdiction over a certain area of human experience and legitimates this claim by means of some form of rational knowledge. The emergence of a form of expertise, on the other hand, requires an analysis of discourse. One cannot assume a preexisting area of human experience colonized by experts, but must show how discourse constitutes its own "domain of application." One cannot assume that a certain form of rational knowledge existed to provide experts with authority, because this would be to project backwards precisely what was fabricated by discursive practice. The proper analysis is a genealogy, which shows how a certain form of expertise, with its domain of application, with its objects and modes of observation, was strung together into what Latour calls an "actor-network," i.e., a network composed of both human and
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non-human agents, including instrumentation, concepts, financial resources, etc. In the case of commentary, such a genealogy would need to trace the emergence of a particular relation between a domain of application composed of contemporary events in the Middle East and a monitoring subject. This is the core of commentary as a form of expertise: the fact that contemporary events are monitored, accumulated, archived, combined into surveys and chronologies, and then serve as a basis for interpretation and commentary. This may seem like a fairly simple relation, but in fact took a long time to put together. The main obstacle was the fact that originally, as I show below, neither academic orientalists nor intelligence officers considered the textual and audible utterances emitted by "orientals" to be significant in and of themselves, i.e., they considered it neither possible nor worthwhile to monitor them and interpret what one hears or reads. These utterances were rather perceived as repetitions of the immutable essence of the orient, or as elaborate dissimulation, and thus could not constitute interpretable "events." As I show below, for such a domain of application to be constituted with respect to a monitoring subject, for commentary to appear as a form of expertise (before it was appropriated by a group of would-be commentators), an "actor-network" had to be constructed by military intelligence officers stringing together philological textual analysis, an administrative division between "research" and "information-gathering," financial resources and support by the army top brass, and the concept of "intentions." Only after this form of expertise was well entrenched in military intelligence could it migrate back into the academy, appropriated by academic orientalists in their liminal institutional setting.6
So the process by which commentary emerged involved the construction of a network across manipulable boundaries between the academy and the army. Some academic orientalists were quite willing to breach these boundaries and forgo some measure of "autonomy." To explain their action, I argue, it is not enough to say that they were interested in obtaining the power, prestige, or money that such connections may secure. No less important was the fact that they were able to perceive and establish a homology between the separate domains of academic research and military intelligence work, and thus construe their action as the pursuit of truth, as they were trained to recognize it. This capacity to perceive and establish homologies across different domains is what Bourdieu calls "habitus." My argument below is that commentary resulted from the application to military intelligence work of an academic philological habitus, i.e., a set of internalized pre-disposi-
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tions that involved at one and the same time the habitual modus operandi by which truth was pursued, as well as how one construed one's interests and what one was conditioned to desire.7
The remainder of this article is divided chronologically into three parts. The first part deals with the pre-state period, roughly from 1936 to 1948. I argue that commentary did not exist in this period, and show that its construction was blocked by two obstacles: first, the fact that paramilitary intelligence was dominated by a competing form of expertise, represented by a group of field officers known as "Arabists," who resisted the construction of the necessary ties and relations for the actor-network of commentary; second, orientalists were also incapable of balancing the imperatives of closure and generosity because of the split nature of the pre-state field of orientalist expertise. While the sphere of influence of orientalists-qua-academics was rather limited, orientalists-qua-paramilitary intelligence officers were more influential, but could not protect their assessments from appropriation by their superiors. The second part deals with the first decade after the formation of the State of Israel, roughly from 1948 to 1957. I argue that, in these years, academics working in military intelligence managed to overcome the first obstacle. They subordinated the Arabists and constructed the actor-network of commentary, wherein they occu- pied a strategic position. I show that these officers were guided in their actions by homologies produced by a philological habitus, inculcated during their academic studies, and giving rise to the administrative division of military intelligence into "research" and "information-gathering" branches. The third part deals with the period roughly from 1964 to 1977 when, I argue, the second obstacle was overcome through the establishment of the "Shiloh institute" at Tel-Aviv University. I show below that this institute was constructed as a liminal institutional setting, wherein controlled forms of association with the men of power were practiced and the balance between closure and generosity was struck.
"Tempting voices beckon beyond the borders of science": Intelligence and orientalism in the pre-state period
The clearest evidence that commentary did not exist during the pre-state period is the fact that, at the time, as is represented in Figure 2, the production of orientalist knowledge was strictly split between academics and non-academics. These two groups did not communicate with one
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.ACADEMIC |Pedant :ORIENTALIST | I
Dependence on Independence from superiors and superiors and decision-makers decision-makers
l
another, and the principles that legitimated their authority were dia-
metrically opposed. Additionally, while academics and non-academics differed in most respects, both did not accord the domain of contem-
porary events much significance.
The non-academic experts, on the bottom left of Figure 2, were em-
ployees of the paramilitary intelligence services. They were called "Arabists," and the name signified the principle legitimating their
authority. The Arabists were Jews born in Palestine, who grew up among Palestinian Arabs, and had absorbed from early childhood the local dialect and customs. Thus, they were employed in intelligence work because they could behave and speak as Palestinian Arabs do, and because they claimed that they knew how to think as they think, i.e., that they understood "Arab mentality." Their authority was legitimated, therefore, by proximity and imitation. The academics, on the upper right hand side of Figure 2, were Jews of German origins, who were trained in philology and oriental studies in German universities, immigrated to Palestine, and in 1926 became the first professors of the Institute for Oriental Studies in the Hebrew University. Their authority was legitimated in precisely the opposite way from the Arabists - by distance and erudition. The distance was intm they specialized in early Islam and considered the study of later history to be alized in early Islam and considered the study of later history to be
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either derivative or non-scientific - and also as distance from the "Orientals" themselves, because scientific study was to be conducted in the archive, not by talking to the "natives." Thus, I represent the two groups on opposite poles of the pre-state field, because the academics were typically independent of political decision-makers and were protected by academic closure, while the Arabists, as employees of paramilitary organizations, were dependent on their superiors, and entry into their ranks was fairly open once one had accumulated the requisite experience. The split nature of the field precluded the possibility that either group could strike a balance between closure and generosity, and thus establish themselves as an influential group of commentators. While the academics could maintain strict control over the dissemination and attribution of their discourse, they were not particularly influential. Not that they did not seek to become influential and to translate their academic expertise into political currency, but their only way to do so was to speak as public intellectuals, and they were easily dismissed, not least by the Arabists themselves, as lacking the expertise or experience to deal with practical affairs. The Arabists, by contrast, were more influential and nobody could question their practical know-how, but they could not control the attribution of their discourse, because they were subordinated to their superiors in the paramilitary hierarchy. 8
While the two groups differed radically in their social origins and the principles legitimating their expertise, they shared one thing: neither considered contemporary events to be a significant domain of application, worthy of commentary. To begin with the Arabists, the principle of proximity and imitation meant that when they applied themselves to intelligence work, most of what they did was to recruit and employ informers. In a sense, it is anachronistic to characterize this activity as "intelligence," as we today understand the term. In their own eyes, the Arabists were mediators between Jewish and Palestinian communities. They were typically merchants, farmers or guards of Jewish settlements, who were in regular contacts with Palestinian Arabs due to their work, and thus functioned as local "notables" mediating neighborly relations in frontier areas, distant from the central British colonial authority. They thus understood the task of intelligence and collecting information as subordinated to the larger task of preventing conflicts between Jewish and Palestinian settlements, conflicts that they attributed in part to lack of understanding of "Arab mentality." Indeed, it was difficult to distinguish, in their negotiations with informers (many of whom were notables of adjacent Palestinian communities), what ex-
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actly belonged to intelligence-gathering and what to mediation, since informers typically supplied information on the condition that it will be used to avert conflicts between Jews and Palestinians, but not to harm the general Palestinian interest. Thus, employing informers was an "art," both in the sense that it was practical, embodied knowledge, and in the sense that it was a blend of skilled mediation and bargaining with the additional purpose of collecting intelligence. It is precisely this art of operating informers that explains why the Arabists displayed no interest in commentary on contemporary events, and found it neither
possible nor useful. The informers could supply all one needed to know, provided that one knew how to make them talk:
Having lived for hundreds of years under foreign domination, the Arabs have learned that the truth is dangerous.... You see this in their answers to a simple question, in their public announcements or in the explanations they give to foreigners. You can never take these on face value. You always have to check what they hold back from you, what is the implicit intention of what they say... any contact with a foreigner is always a bargaining session, and any bargaining is "shtara" (a masterful performance, a "man's job") without any logic or limit to what can be achieved through it. So one needs experience in order to understand what their words do and do not mean.9
This is a common orientalist stereotype, which depicts Arabs as liars and untrustworthy, but there are also two points to be made about it: first, this image derives directly from the practice of working with informers. Good intelligence officers would never trust their informers, whatever their ethnicity, and the informers, for their part, will tend to
keep their cards close to their chest. So this is not simply a prejudiced person; the prejudice is embedded in a certain practice, and is validated by the conditions of a particular type of encounter. The second
point is that this embedded image stands in the way of commentary; it
totally denies that it could have any validity or significance. There is no
point in commenting on what Arabs say or write, if one is not able to
bargain with them. Truth does not reside in interpretation, but in a
"manly" contestation of wills. From this point of view, the idea that one would record, archive, and interpret events seemed nonsensical, because, as the Arabists put it, "it is in the nature of Arab society that
nothing remains permanent, everything changes - hence written facts do not adequately represent the Arab truth."10
The academics also rejected the possibility of commentary, but for somewhat different reasons. They were "orientalists" in the sense that Said uses the term. For them, contemporary events were meaningless, because they were merely repetitions, echoes of the "ancient orient,"
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which even later influences "have not managed to extract from its oriental identity." Only the study of this ancient essence, for example in ancient Arab poetry, was "scientific," while they considered commentary on contemporary events to be non-scientific and useless.11
Thus, neither the Arabists nor the academics recognized the domain of contemporary events as significant. Nonetheless, there was an incipient group that did attempt to become commentators. This group was composed of young doctoral students in the Institute of Oriental Studies. Alongside their studies they joined either the paramilitary intelligence service, or the political intelligence service of the Jewish Agency. Within these organizations, they tried to introduce a new method of intelligence work that focused on the collection and interpretation of contemporary events. But they failed. They were unable to shape intelligence work in the direction they wanted; they did not become particularly influential; and those who remained in academia did not manage to break the boundary-work between the "scientific" study of the ancient orient and the "non-scientific" practical interest in contemporary events. Thus, they provide us with a negative case: we can learn from their failure about the conditions required for the practice of commentary. To do this, we need to answer three questions: a) Why did they join the intelligence services? b) Why did they introduce there the collection and interpretation of contemporary events? c) Why did they fail?
Regarding the first question, the answer is, in a nutshell, blocked mobility. My calculations show that the average time from MA to Ph.D. in the Institute of Oriental Studies was 9 years, and that 5 more years were needed, on the average, to gain the position of a non- tenured lecturer, if at all. The significance of these numbers must be appreciated in historical context. This was a time when many of their peers were taking influential positions in the institutions of the state- in-the-making. It was a period of accelerated mobility, and the longer they waited, the greater the pressure they experienced to bypass the barriers created by their professors.12 The professors controlled their students' pace by reference to the idea of "philological precocity." Philology, they claimed, was not simply a disciplinary technique, but also an internal disposition, a "gift," an interest formed at a very early age. Since this "precocity" was innate, it was impossible for the student to acquire it, and he or she had to wait till the professor "recognized" it in them, as something that was always (already) there. This anxious waiting, under the discerning eye of the professor, served to instill the
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philological ethos in the students, i.e., not simply the method of philological research, but the devotion peculiar to it, the "sanctity of the text." By its very nature, this was a long process. Thus, under the
supervision of the first director of the Institute, students were engaged in preparing a concordance of ancient Arab poetry, a Herculean task that even to this day, 70 years later, has not yet been completed. The concordance was a sort of "purgatory" through which the students had to pass, and in which they learned to obey their professors, and ac-
quired the emotional skills required to reproduce the philological world. 13
The answer to the second question is, paradoxically, that the doctoral students introduced the collection and interpretation of contemporary events into intelligence work because of the philological habitus, which
they internalized in the course of their studies. Put differently, the
young doctoral students may have rebelled against the boundary-work of their teachers, but in doing so they also transposed into intelligence work the modus operandi, ethos, and even the social relations that they have internalized in the philological purgatory. The working assumption of philology, after all, is that one studies a distant reality, which is
impossible to know firsthand, much less to talk to informers. This
assumption was embedded in the skills acquired by the doctoral students in the course of their studies, and they applied it to intelligence work. It was actually an archeologist, head of paramilitary intelligence in Haifa, who most clearly formulated this assumption, but whatever he said about archeology, held just as well for philology:
Archeology, in general, has served, and is serving, as an excellent preparation for intelligence work, because at the core it is similar to such work. In both archeology and intelligence, the researcher has to acquire an image of a distant reality, by piecing together patiently and slowly bits of information and hints, classifying and sifting them, and trying to bring them into an orderly system. 14
When applied to intelligence work, this assumption means that one is abstracting from the negotiations reported by the arabists, and codify- ing them as something else: pieces of "information," events, signs that can be compared and contrasted, archived, and recorded in a chronology. Another assumption embedded in the philological training of the doctoral students was that it was possible to know this distant reality through language and texts. This is, after all, what philologists do. They compare texts, and trace the meaning and origins of words, in order to learn about the people who used them. Again, this was exactly what
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the doctoral students begun to do: they created intelligence archives - either a running chronology in which field reports and newspaper clips were collected, or an alphabetical card index of enemy personnel, villages and organizations. They wrote indexes to facilitate access to the archives. They also attempted to impose standardized rules of reporting and transliteration of Arab names. All of this was meant to recreate the conditions for the philological method of textual analysis and comparison, so field reports could be verified by cross-referencing, or field officers could be instructed what information was missing and needed to be obtained. 15
To the contemporary reader all this may seem self-evident, the only rational way to organize intelligence work. To overcome the anachronistic fallacy, we need to recognize that the philological modus operandi is not only a "method," easily transposable from one field to the other, but also a certain hierarchical structure of the social relations of knowledge production, and that in order to employ it in intelligence work, one had to recreate this hierarchy, something that required a fundamental change in the status of Arabist expertise. As represented in Figure 2, the relations of knowledge production in the Institute of Oriental Studies were organized in a hierarchy. At the bottom were apprentices, students whose status was to collect the raw materials for the archive and, in the process, to acquire the skills necessary to read ancient texts. Directly above them was a social type that could be described as the pedant: a professor who organized the work of the apprentices and made sure that the texts were accurately dated, referenced, and indexed. The pedant embodied, in his personality and style of work, the values of rigor, precision, objectivity, modesty (in the sense of avoiding speculative interpretation), and reliability. He usually wrote long surveys based directly on the archive. At the apex of the philological hierarchy was the speculative interpreter, famous for in- sight, empathy, and synthetic powers. He no longer dealt with the archive directly, but on the basis of his known erudition wrote mono- graphs penetrating into the collective psyche of a people through the exegesis of a few words. If the pedant created the objective infrastruc- ture, the role of the speculative interpreter was to use it to reconstruct the subject behind the original language. When the young doctoral students internalized the philological modus operandi, they also internalized this hierarchy - apprentice, pedant, and interpreter - in the form of a ladder along which one climbs. In this way they were fore- ordained, even as they tried to bypass their teachers' authority, to recreate in another field the hierarchy of the archive.16
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The young doctoral students attempted to recreate this hierarchy in intelligence work. In particular, they tried to usurp for themselves the role of pedants, and to turn the Arabists into their apprentices. They lobbied to create a "central office," which they would occupy, and to which the Arabists, whom they depicted as "primitives" would be subordinated as "field officers." The main problem of the paramilitary intelligence service, they argued, was that the Arabists did not observe the correct standards of reporting. They did not check properly the information given to them by their informers; they tended to report rumors as facts; and they added their own interpretations to the reported facts so that it was impossible to separate "information" from "assessment." The only way to overcome these problems, they argued, was to create a strict division of labor between field officers, whose role would be to "collect the data in a dry and precise way," to "convey only the naked information," and a "central office" that would "classify and sift the material, draw the conclusions, and write the summary." 17
This distinction between "center" and "field" was homologous to the distinction between pedant and apprentice. To apply the philological modus operandi to intelligence work required, thus, that the reports of the Arabists would be transformed into "naked" information, events, but this, of course, could not happen without the Arabists being redefined as "field officers" subordinate to a central office. One way the doctoral students tried to achieve this transformation was by requiring the Arabists to follow a questionnaire as they composed their reports. Standardization meant that the reports could become units of information and then plugged into the philological method of cross-referencing. Standardization was meant to accomplish a symbolic reversal: the proximity of the Arabists, which previously legitimated their authority, was redefined as a source of bias. The distance of the central office was redefined as the source of its epistemological superiority. 18
There were three reasons why the doctoral students failed in this endeavor. The first was the resistance of the Arabists, who were closer to the political decision-makers and more influential. They refused to become apprentices, and continued to send "juicy" non-standardized reports, full of what the students considered unchecked rumors and private opinions. This was not simply amateurism on their part. As we saw, their self-understanding was not as intelligence officers gathering information, but as mediators between Jews and Arabs. When they reported on their negotiations, they did not convey "information." Their reports were part of a totally different semiotic economy. For
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example, they frequently complained that the central office did not "react" to their reports, and that they saw no action as a result of what they reported. This means that they did not understand their reporting as "information," a piece of the philological puzzle, but as a dialogue with the political center, toward which they directed complaints and warnings. They also did not have much respect for the doctoral students, who knew literary but not vernacular Arabic and could speak with only the most educated of Palestinian Arabs. They argued that intelligence officers should not compile written, scientific, dead facts, but participate in "lively debates" with "living people," making decisions in accordance with the changing needs of "reality."19
The second reason for the doctoral students' failure was that as officials in paramilitary organizations and the Jewish Agency they had no control over the reports and assessments they produced, and their superiors appropriated these. They could not establish the necessary balance between closure and generosity. The doctoral students working in the Jewish agency reported directly to the head of the Arab branch, who monopolized the only channel of communication to the political leadership, and those working in paramilitary intelligence were overshadowed by the Arabists. In both cases, their reports were appropriated:
I found out, that every time I tried to explain to him the situation based on the information I had, and to formulate my own assessment, Eliahu Golomb [commander of the paramilitary operations branch, G.E.] always pretended to know more and better than my colleagues and me.20
The third and final reason for their failure was the opposition of their professors. The professors did not necessarily object to the fact that their students were employed in intelligence work, but they refused to see any scientific value in it. If their students wanted to return and take positions in the university, they had to reorient themselves to the study of much earlier history. As one of the professors put it: "there is education for an orientalist ... and there is education for a man who wants to act in the orient," and the two are not compatible. So the professors imposed on their students a choice: either continue in intelligence work or return to the university. Without a synthesis between the two, the balance requisite for the status of commentators was unattainable. Indeed, after the formation of the state roughly half of the doctoral students remained as state employees, and roughly the other half came back, finished their studies, and in due course became professors in the Hebrew University. In their turn, however, they repli-
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cated the boundary-work of their mentors, only shifted a little in time. They created a department for the study of "the modern middle east," but modern history as they defined it stopped with the Ottoman Empire and went no further. The study of the Ottoman period was "scientific," because the relevant state archives have been opened. But the Ottoman period was also perceived as a period of "decline," and hence the new department did not seriously challenge the boundary-work between the ancient essence of the orient and its pale modern reflections. Addi- tionally, the new department could only grant BA degrees, and if one wanted to obtain a Ph.D., one needed to study ancient Islamic history. As their professors before them, they too warned their own students against seeking the halfway status of commentators:
Tempting voices beckon to the historian of modern times from beyond the borders of science, and he must use all his powers to overcome his instinct... the instinct of hasty assessment ... the instinct of easy synthesis and super- ficial generalization.21
To summarize, the failure of the young doctoral students demonstrates that there were two obstacles to the emergence of commentary. As a form of expertise, commentary required that contemporary events become a significant domain of application, but such semiotic transformation depended on the subordination of the Arabists to a central office. Hence, the resistance of the Arabists constituted the first obstacle. The second obstacle was inherent in the split nature of the pre- state orientalist field, and the inadequacy of the position attained by merely crossing the boundary, from one side of the field to the other. As a social status, a commentator is one who can balance closure with generosity; control over discourse with proximity to decision-makers. This balance could not be attained; neither in academia, where the professors prohibited research on contemporary issues, and one was isolated from decision-makers, nor in military intelligence, where decision-makers appropriated one's assessments. The split nature of the field mandated a choice between either anonymous influence or impo- tent distinction.
"An ideal accomplishment": The philological habitus in military intelligence
These obstacles were overcome in two stages. In the first stage, roughly from 1948 to 1957, the field had remained split, but the actor-network of commentary developed within military intelligence. In the second
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stage, roughly from 1965 to 1977, the structure of the field changed, with the formation of a liminal institutional setting in Tel-Aviv Univer- sity, where the necessary balance between closure and proximity was struck. The crucial development in the first stage, to be discussed in this section, was the administrative division of military intelligence, in the early 1950s, into two separate branches, one engaged solely in "research," and the other dedicated to "information-gathering." This division, which mimicked the philological hierarchy of "pedant" and "apprentice," meant that the Arabists were defeated and turned into mere gatherers of information for a central office. From this moment onwards, the research branch of military intelligence became the most prestigious and influential intelligence assessment agency in Israel, though the research officers themselves were still unable to control the dissemination and attribution of their discourse. To understand how this form of expertise emerged, I need to address three questions: a) How were the Arabists defeated? b) Why was military intelligence divided into research and information gathering? c) What were the causes for the spectacular rise in the prestige and influence of the new research branch?
Regarding the first question, my answer is that the Arabists were increasingly excluded from intelligence assessment because the upper echelons of the military and political establishment began to perceive them as irrelevant, even injurious, to the state-building project. The marginalization of the Arabists is noted by all historians of the period, but they usually attribute it to "objective" changes in the context and needs of intelligence work during the 1948 war: first, they argue that the Arabists' networks of informers collapsed because of the massive expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, and they were left without reliable sources of information; second, they argue that the information supplied by informers was no longer valuable once skirmishes between neighboring communities were replaced by war between organized armies; finally, they note the rapid development of electronic intelligence, and argue that it proved a superior means of gaining information on Arab armies.22
Thus, the Arabists' decline is presented as an inevitable result of the 1948 war. The war separated Jews and Palestinians and drew impenetrable borders between them. In this way, it distanced the object of intelligence knowledge, and rendered Arabist expertise obsolete. I would like to challenge this explanation. It was not the war, per se, that separated Jews from Palestinians, but the post-war state-building project. Arabist
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expertise was not obsolete; it was actively marginalized, because it did not accord with this project. The expertise of the Arabists, as we saw, consisted in operating informers and mediating neighborly relations in frontier areas distant from central authority. The 1948 war did not eliminate such frontiers altogether. At least for the first decade after the war, the area on both sides of the armistice lines was a relatively fluid frontier, with continuous waves of Palestinian "infiltration" (as it was called at the time) back into the Jewish state. This situation was not altogether different from the problems with which the Arabists dealt before the formation of the state. Consequently, they were still operating informers on the other side of the border, to whom they promised, as in the past, that the information they supplied would be used to calm tensions and create good neighborly relations. They even negotiated truces between Jewish and Arab communities across the armistice lines. 23
But their activities increasingly came in conflict with the project of the political and military authorities of the new state, who set out to impose the logic of sovereignty on the frontier area, to draw a state
boundary between Jews and Arabs. Hence, against the express advice of the arabists, the military defined all people who crossed the armistice lines as "infiltrators," who were to be shot or arrested, regardless of the fact that many of them did so not in order to attack Israelis (although some certainly did), but to rejoin families from which they were separated by the war, to harvest fields sown before the war, to search for food, or to steal. The effect of this decision was to render irrelevant Arabist expertise, which could have been used to distinguish among different types of "border-crossers." Apart from shooting infiltrators, the new military administration of the border area also erased Palestinian settlements that were "too close" to the border, and strictly forbade any acts of "private" revenge by Jewish settlers in the border communities. The military and political elites, however, listened to the academic intelligence officers and promoted them, because their form of expertise corresponded much better to the logic of sovereignty and state-building. For example, academic intelligence officers compiled statistics of infiltration cases and tried to plot them on a graph to figure out their "rhythm," when and where did they increase or subside. They thus constructed infiltration as a distant and inscrutable object, ame- nable to prediction and control, maybe, but not to discussion and negotiation.24
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A similar development took place with respect to retaliatory attacks across the border. During the pre-state period, the Arabists had advised the paramilitary forces on how, when, and against whom to conduct retaliatory attacks, and had perfected a complex logic that combined and balanced considerations of revenge (i.e., Arab tradition), punishment (i.e., a semi-legal logic of "justice") and deterrence (i.e., a strictly military logic of "security"). This logic continued to guide Israeli retaliatory attacks for the first 4 years after the formation of the state (1948-1952). In 1953, however, the general staff decided to switch to "pure deterrence," and to attack only military and police units and compounds, regardless of responsibility for attacks. There were two reasons for this change: first, attacks on Palestinian settlements caused a large number of civilian causalities and were condemned by the international community; second, "pure deterrence" accorded with the logic of sovereignty and rationalized these attacks as exerting pressure on Arab states to supervise better their "own" side of the border. The Arabists were further marginalized. From the point of view of pure deterrence, it was not important to distinguish among different types of infiltration, or to know to which kinship unit infiltrators belonged. Pure deterrence was guided by purely military considerations: tactical surprise (which by its very nature led to choosing targets contrary to the logic of punishment), terrain, and behaviorist deterrent effect (speed of reaction, extent of damage, etc.). Academic expertise suited the logic of pure deterrence much better. As we shall see below, academic research officers sought to collate information in order to interpret the "intention" behind it (much as the philological speculative interpreter did). In this way, they produced the image of strategic decision-maker responsible for diverse local acts, and reinforced a retaliatory logic, which sought to produce effects on this decision-maker, rather than deal with the "messy" realities of border communities. 25 Thus, the Arabists' increasing marginalization was not due to the needs imposed by a new objective reality, but to the attempt to shape this reality in accordance with a new grid of perception. Arabist expertise was marginalized in military intelligence, because the frontier experience to which it was adapted, the mixing of Jews and Palestinians, began to be perceived as a scandal that had to be suppressed, rather than a reality to which the state should adapt.
The growing marginalization of the Arabists created the conditions for subordinating them to a central office. This was accomplished by the division of the new intelligence corps, in 1953, into two branches, research and information gathering. Why was the intelligence service
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organized in this way? My answer is that this reorganization was reflective of the philological habitus possessed by a group of academic officers within military intelligence. But isn't there a simpler, more
straightforward explanation? Wasn't the reorganization of military intelligence necessitated by the professionalization of the army, itself
part of state-building? This is a reasonable hypothesis, considering that by now most intelligence services are organized in a similar fashion, but it is also post-hoc and projects backwards precisely what was not taken-for-granted in the past. In fact, Israeli military intelli-
gence was reorganized twice, first in 1949 and then again in 1953. The first reorganization was conducted, indeed, by former British
military officers who sought to "professionalize" the intelligence service. In accordance, however, with what they learned in the British
military, they did not separate research from information-gathering, but created a central "combat" branch, which was entrusted with both
gathering and evaluating information on Arab armies, and surrounded it with several auxiliary branches each dealing with a distinct topic -
topography, the Arab press, embassies, etc. Research and information
gathering were not strictly separated, therefore, not because of a lack of "professionalism," but because of a different understanding of what
"professionalism" meant. The architects of the 1949 service were con- cerned, first and foremost, with limiting the freedom of intelligence officers to evaluate and interpret information. By "professionalism" they understood the requirement that the intelligence officer would concentrate on strictly military technical detail, and would avoid inter-
pretation, particularly the assessment of political factors, which should be left to military and political decision-makers. Since research was defined so narrowly, its separation from information gathering did not loom large in their minds. 26
Israeli military intelligence, however, was organized a second time in 1953. This second reorganization was masterminded by the deputy chief of the service, Yehoshafat Harkabi, who indeed served in the British army in the past, but as an education officer. Much more important for our purposes, and the reason why he was appointed as
deputy chief, was the fact that he held a Master's degree in oriental studies from the Hebrew University. In his memoirs, he reports that informally the intelligence service personnel began to be divided into research and information gathering already before 1953, and that this division was based on social origins and social status; it reflected the division between Arabists and academics:
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The two major branches of intelligence, information-gathering and research, differed in their personnel. Information-gathering attracted practical people ... who knew how to operate agents and make things work. Research, on the other hand, employed more academically oriented personnel. ... This difference was originally expressed by the difference between the commander of the intelligence service and myself. He was a practical type, an organizer, determined. I tended to think more. He was therefore more popular among the more practical intelligence officers, while the academically inclined officers became my followers.27
Since military intelligence tends to keep secret the names of its officers, it is difficult to prove this point, but there is some scattered evidence about the existence of a group of European-born, academically-trained officers, who eventually became the core of the new research branch. The first head of the research branch, Mordechai Gihon, emigrated from Germany and studied Near Eastern Archeology at the Hebrew University; another research officer, Aluph Hareven, emigrated from Britain, where he graduated from the London School of Economics; a third, Zeev Bar-Lavi, head of the Jordanian desk at the new research branch, also emigrated from Germany. A journalist who was given access to classified files in order to write the official history of the intelligence corps reports that "most of the research officers came from the academic world, and among the first group of researchers there was a large number of West-European-born and especially Ger- man Jews."28
Harkabi's first step, when he was appointed deputy chief of the service, was to initiate work on a voluminous compilation and assessment of all data on Arab armies, termed "all contingencies" (mikre ha-kol), in anticipation of an all-Arab war against Israel. I take this to be a good example of the workings of the philological habitus. "All contingencies" was the equivalent of the concordance of ancient Arab poetry, produced in the Institute of Oriental Studies: it was an authoritative document, which summarized all the known data, indexed and cross- referenced, so they were easily accessible. It was similar to the concordance in yet another respect: it was meant to provide an "objective" foundation for subjective interpretation. Harkabi reports that it in- cluded not only analyses of various contingencies, but also "political background and the first rudiments of strategic assessment." Thus, "all contingencies" was not merely a document. Like the concordance of ancient Arab poetry, it was the philological modus operandi in objectified form, and tended to reproduce the full philological hierarchy of apprentice, pedant and interpreter. In initiating work on it,
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Harkabi and his group of European-born officers placed themselves in the position of "pedants," with their domain of application being constituted by the events and information collected and reported by their apprentices, the field officers. When military intelligence was reorganized in 1953, the division between research and information gathering merely consecrated and reinforced the hierarchical division of labor embodied in "all contingencies."29
In short order after its inception in 1953, the research branch of military intelligence became the most influential and prestigious of the intelligence branches in Israel, and in 1957 was entrusted with formulating the annual national intelligence assessment. What were the causes of its meteoric rise? In answering this question, it will not do to refer to the "success" of the research branch in predicting Arab moves. First, the years from 1953 to 1973 were full of intelligence blunders, many of them directly attributable to mistaken research branch assessments; second, whatever intelligence successes there were in this period, these were equally attributable to the ingenuity and efficiency of the different information-gathering branches, in particular electronic eavesdropping, or to the military successes through which a wealth of Arab classified documents were seized.30 I would suggest, rather, that the rise of the research branch was due to two features of the actor- network forged by its officers. First, through the administrative division between research and information gathering, research officers were able to position themselves at an "obligatory point of passage" within this network, through which all information and resources had to flow. The research branch became the "central office" to which flowed information from all the other units of military intelligence - electronic eavesdropping, the Arab press, secret agents, aerial photos, field intelligence, etc. This information was collected at the research branch, archived, and digested into summaries and assessments, which were then disseminated to decision-makers. Hence, the research branch became the crucial node in the network, the conduit through which all information flowed upward and all directives and resources flowed downward. In this way, all the accomplishments of the information-gathering agencies were appropriated and contributed to the prestige of research.31
The second feature of this actor-network was the alliance forged between the research officers and a group of politically influential officers from the operations branch of the General Staff. These officers were typically "parachuted" to top positions in military intelligence as part
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of their career, and after a few years moved back to even higher positions in the defense establishment.32 They were responsible for the fact that in 1957 the research branch won the sole right to formulate the "national intelligence assessment." Now, its position as obligatory point of passage was further reinforced, as all other intelligence agencies - the "Mosad," the Foreign Office research department, the General Security Service (GSS), the police - were additionally connected into the network forged by research officers, but in a subordinate position, obliged to pass the information they collected to the research branch, and to receive from it specifications as to the information it needed.33 This alliance was crucial for the rise of the research branch also because of the pattern of "generosity" it established. Research assessments were not formulated in autonomous closure, but through ex- change with this group of important decision-makers. They were adapted so they could be grafted directly onto the operational and strategic discourse of the defense establishment, and in this way enjoyed wide circulation and increasing influence.
Both these network features came together in the particular form that research officers gave to their assessments, namely the claim to interpret the "intentions" of Arab leaders. Harkabi enjoined research officers to "not only count how many tanks the enemy possesses ... but also to understand his way of thinking, so as to accurately anticipate its actions."34 This form of discourse - in which the research officer undertook to represent a certain enemy leader in simulations and staff meetings, to clarify that leader's way of thinking, the considerations he faced, and the way he was likely to act - involved at one and the same time an appropriation of the work of information-gathering, and a means of connecting with the operational and strategic thinking of their allies. As the former commander of an electronic eavesdropping unit complained, when research officers produced assessments that were not restricted to the analysis of capabilities, but involved the interpretation of "intentions" - "this ludicrous word," as he put it -
they minimized their dependence on the information supplied to them. The interpretation of intentions permitted them to ignore various items of information, or to interpret them idiosyncratically, and to increase the perceived "surplus value" of research. Not being bound to any single item of information, but claiming to grasp the hidden purpose that was lurking behind the details, research officers increased their prestige by appropriating and obscuring the work of information gathering:
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The information, which constitutes the intelligence service's sole right for existence, is captive to the choices, instincts and whims of the evaluators, who are the sole spokespersons for the whole elaborate intelligence system.35
I do not think, however, that this was simply a cynical, interested
strategy. Rather, the claim to interpret "intentions" originated from the encounter between the philological habitus, as it was enshrined in the division between gathering and research, and the need to connect with the operational-strategic thinking of their allies. Strategic think-
ing demanded that someone will be able to represent the enemy leader in simulations, while the internalized philological habitus allowed the research officers to identify this demand as the ascent to the next level of the philological hierarchy, i.e., the position of the speculative inter-
preter. They were conditioned to desire the attributes of this position, the "brilliance" that marked the speculative interpreter's advantage over the pedant, and which, by the same token, meant an even greater capacity to obscure the reliance on the work of the apprentices:
An intelligent evaluator is not interested in merely reporting or summarizing information.... He exists to apply his creative analytical powers ... to build a conceptual architecture - an integrated, almost global assessment.36
This claim to interpret "intentions" was not immediately recognized. After all, particularly because they excluded the Arabists, the research officers were vulnerable to the accusation that they did not comprehend the "mentality" of Arab leaders. Over time, however, the actor-network that they forged reinforced their claim. As part of the reorganization of
military intelligence, the new research branch was divided into "desks," each specializing in a particular Arab country, and each led by a career research officer who has spent many years in this job. Simply by force of his position and tenure in office, the desk officer became identified with a certain Arab leader. He became the obligatory point of passage for all information about the leader and for interpreting his intentions.
Moreover, because of his tenure in office, the desk officer accumulated
"experience," long hours spent in virtual proximity to "his" leader, learning the smallest details of his court. He thus could use the marginalized principles of Arabist expertise, proximity and imitation, as
auxiliary mechanisms assimilated to the research network and reinforc-
ing his claim to interpret intentions. It is told about the officer in charge of the Jordanian desk that he knew the coming-and-goings of King Hussein's court by heart, even though he never visited it; that he used to fly the Jordanian flag on his desk and to celebrate King Hussein's
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birthday every year; and that he was so identified with the King as to be "personally angry" at him for joining the 1967 war.37
Even more important for validating the claim to interpret intentions were the network ties with the general staff officers and the fact that the research branch was entrusted with formulating the annual national intelligence assessment. This assessment is not simply the opinion of the intelligence community about what is likely to take place in the Middle East. It is a political speech act, one that is central to the Israeli political system. For this reason, precisely because of its heteronomy, it is not as vulnerable as a prediction made by more autonomous experts. The public and official status of the annual assessment means that inevitably it is read not merely as an assessment, but also as a message, directed at the enemy, the press, the Israeli public, political opponents, etc. At the same time, because the research branch possesses a monopoly over the supply of assessments, it means that political and military decision-makers are forced to avoid, as much as possible, overt conflict with the research branch, even if they are interested in the supply of different recommendations - supply and demand must coincide. The result is a process of negotiation, in which official policy and intelligence assessment are slowly adjusted to one another, facilitated by the social proximity between the commanders of military intelligence and the political hierarchy. The coincidence achieved between the intelligence assessment and policy means that it is almost impossible to refute it, because it is at one and the same time the lens through which the enemy's actions are viewed as indicating certain "intentions," and the strategy aimed at countering these "intentions." Raymond Cohen demonstrated how this mechanism worked during 1986, when tensions between Israel and Syria escalated to the brink of war: the research branch assessed that the Syrian maneuvers indicated aggressive intentions. This assessment was leaked to the press, so as to warn the Syrians that the game was up. The Syrians, however, understood these leaks as a different kind of message, a threat that might indicate an Israeli intention to attack. As a result, they mobilized their forces. Israel responded in kind, and the resulting dynamic of escalation validated the original assessment and with it the prestige of the research branch.38
This, however, meant that while the actor-network forged by research officers gave rise to commentary, as a new and powerful form of expertise, they themselves were unable to attain the status of commentators. The requisite balance between generosity and closure was not
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possible. The mutual adjustment of intelligence assessment to policy, and the alliance with the General Staff officers, both of which made them influential, also meant that the main power wielded by research officers was not in the capacity to create a monopoly over their discourse, but rather the opposite, in "generosity," in the capacity of such discourse to insinuate itself into the judgment of their superiors without notice. It meant that they could not protect their assessments from
being appropriated by their superiors, not the least because such
appropriation was the very mechanism of their own power, the very way in which their assessments became influential. As one veteran instructed younger officers:
If you were right in your assessment and your clients adopted it, very often they will turn it into their own property, as if it derived from their own logic, and your part in it will be forgotten. You should consider precisely this situation to be an ideal accomplishment.39
Not only were they unable to control the dissemination and attribution of their commentary, they were also vulnerable to the accusation that their assessments were politically motivated, because they were
closely associated with certain factions within the political and mili-
tary hierarchy. 40
Dodging Damocles' sword: The protected space of the Shiloh Institute
In this section, I show how the problem of controlling the attribution and dissemination of commentary was solved, and the status of commentators attained. The key development was the annexation of the Shiloh Institute by Tel-Aviv University in the early 1960s, and its shaping as a liminal institutional setting, wherein the balance between closure and generosity could be struck. The Shiloh institute was established in 1959, as a joint endeavor of the Foreign and Defense ministries, the military, the Hebrew University and the Israeli Oriental Society. It was originally envisioned to be a research arm of the Foreign Office and other state agencies, and was staffed by career officials and some doctoral students from Hebrew University. Owing to the monopoly enjoyed by military intelligence, however, the institute was under- funded and never quite took off. A young non-tenured lecturer at the Hebrew university - Shimon Shamir - came up with the idea to annex the institute to the university. After the Hebrew University declined his
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initiative, he wrote a memo in 1964 to the administration of Tel-Aviv University, formed just a few years earlier, and recommended that it absorb the ailing Shiloh institute. He emphasized that the institute possessed "a large archive ... and was guaranteed the support and
cooperation of the state in the professional sphere, as well as in funding, and in collecting materials to be used in research." Tel-Aviv University seized the opportunity, agreed to absorb the institute, and appointed Shamir as its director and as Chair of a new department for the history of the modern Middle East. He brought with him a few other young doctoral students and non-tenured lecturers from the Hebrew Univer- sity. Thus, the social actors responsible for the annexation and redesign of the Shiloh institute were, as in the pre-state period, a group of young scholars who encountered mobility barriers in the Hebrew university. Unlike the older generation, however, this group no longer faced a strictly split field. First, the administration of the newly created Tel- Aviv University, intent on recruiting allies to support it in its struggle against the more established Hebrew University, was already modify- ing the accepted boundaries. Its strategy was to strike alliances with powerful state agencies, by offering them departments and programs tailor-made to their needs - such as a department of labor studies to secure the support of the General Federation of Trade Unions; or a department for military history with support from the army. The Shiloh Institute fit within this strategy, and indeed secured the continuing support of the foreign ministry and other state agencies in the form of funds, personnel, and archival materials. The other cause of change in the structure of the field, as represented in Figure 3, was the actor- network developed by research officers, which could now be extended to bridge the chasm between practical and academic research. At least one research officer - Itamar Rabinovich - having obtained a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies from UCLA, now joined Tel-Aviv University and became Shamir's second-in-command. Another former officer - Yitzhak Oron - having served as director of the Institute before it was annexed to Tel-Aviv University remained on board for the first few years to assist in the transition.41
Once in Tel-Aviv University, Shamir and his colleagues shaped the Shiloh institute as a liminal institutional setting between the academy and officialdom, by institutionalizing four forms of intellectual association between academics and officials. First, they invited military intelligence officers and state officials to become guest researchers, who reside for a year at the institute, and make use of its research facilities. The guest researchers were asked to participate in the institute's regular
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. ......... Dept. of Islami ' -: :
" - : - : : IHistory 1 ' X
/.....:::: ..... :- -.:\: - ..:::::-::::: ORIENTALISTS: Dependence on / : ranch I nstitute
| Independence from
:: INTELLIGENCE :::::::::: :::: ::: :::::::::::::::
Figure 3. The contemporary field of orientalist expertise.
teamwork, preparing the annual publication Middle East Contempo- rary Survey (MECS). They also published their independent research in the Institute's monograph series.42 Second, they appointed military intelligence officers and state officials to serve on the permanent research committee of the institute, responsible for approving research grants, selecting guest researchers, deciding on team projects, etc.43 Third, they organized conferences and panel discussions on topical issues of the day, to which they invited military intelligence officers, state officials, and high-ranking politicians as speakers, commentators, or honorary guests.44 Finally, they also published edited volumes comprising articles written by academics, military intelligence officers, state officials, journalists, and politicians.45 These forms of association constructed the institute at once as a protected space, within which it was possible to protect commentary from appropriation by powerful interlocutors, and as an interface with the official world, allowing the academics to create a "fellowship of discourse" with officials. Thus, these forms of association were doubly advantageous, in comparison with the situation of the doctoral students in the pre-state period: neither were the academics confined to an "ivory tower," as they could enjoy all the benefits accruing from proximity to officials and politicians (influence, prestige, resources, classified materials), nor were they exposed to the dangers of "crossing over" to the official world and losing control over their discourse.
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The protected and liminal nature of the institute, and the fact that many of its employees had formerly served in military intelligence, now permitted the form of expertise developed in military intelligence to migrate to it. Accordingly, the internal organization of the new institute mimicked quite closely the organization of military intelligence. First, an "information center" was created within the institute as the functional equivalent of the administrative separation and subordination of information gathering to research. A non-faculty full- time staff member was appointed to run this center, whose task was to organize the work of research assistants in collecting and archiving information (in 1972 alone, they produced 25,000 cards cataloguing new items of information), as well as making it available to the senior researchers by sending them daily updates of the new items of information catalogued.46 The format of the institute's publications reflected this hierarchical structure. Research assistants compiled a series of "research and teaching aids," such as bibliographies, abstracts of journal articles, and "basic facts about the Arab press." The senior researchers, in their role as pedants, wrote surveys, the most important being the MECS, which summarizes the major events in a given year. They also published shorter summaries in the "survey series" of the institute. Finally, the senior and guest researchers wrote more interpre- tative studies, citing the MECS profusely, and published in the institute's monograph series. This hierarchical structure was reproduced through differential patterns of employment. The information center employed a large number of research assistants, twice the number of junior staff employed by the department of Middle Eastern studies. Many of them were students who, as "apprentices," also worked on their MA or Ph.D. theses and eventually were promoted. But at least half, most of them women, never advanced beyond the MA phase, and remained employed in the institute for many years as non-faculty research staff. They were sometimes promoted, within the institute, from junior to senior researchers, but typically they left after an average period of 9 years. In this way, the institute created two gendered "occupational blocks," the movement between which was fairly difficult. This hierarchical division of labor allowed the senior researchers to appropriate the work of the assistants, and to generate the symbolic "surplus value" of commentary.47 To the vertical organization was added also a horizontal pattern similarly inherited from military intelligence. The institute was divided into "desks," each dedicated to an Arab state or group of states, and headed by a senior researcher who specialized in it. As in military intelligence, the work of the desks and the information and analyses they produced was to be coordinated
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through regular meetings of the senior researchers. The final product of this teamwork was the annual publication of the institute, the MECS, which embodied the goal of full coverage of Middle Eastern events. It was organized in two parts, mimicking the structure established by "all contingencies" for the annual national intelligence assessment: the first part was composed of country surveys, and the second of several synthetic treatises on "inter-Arab relations," "the Israeli- Arab conflict," etc.48
The institute was not only homologous to military intelligence; it was also connected directly with the actor-network established by research officers. As if it were an auxiliary arm of the research branch, the institute benefited directly from classified and non-classified information collected by the various information-gathering units of military and civilian intelligence, including archival materials, Arab newspapers, monitors of the Arab media, etc. Classified information was made available to institute researchers in various ways: the information center received "a large collection of middle eastern newspapers and archival material from the archives of several agencies." It also absorbed Syrian, Egyptian, and Jordanian documents captured in Israel's wars, and intercepted communications.49 Additionally, institute researchers were able to "pump" classified information from intelligence personnel, who were visiting the institute or working there as guest researchers.50 Finally, many of the senior researchers served their reserve duty in military intelligence and were able to use some of the classified information they encountered there in their academic publications.51
As a liminal protected sphere, the Shiloh institute guaranteed that the commentary formulated within its walls enjoyed a unique status: on the one hand, it was validated by reliance on classified sources and by social proximity to decision-makers. On the other hand, it was protected from appropriation, and the commentators could accumulate it as their private property. From the moment it left the walls of this protected space, however, and circulated in the public sphere, their commentary was still vulnerable to attack. In order to establish their credentials as commentators, the members of the Shiloh Institute had to contend with such attacks in the public sphere. Such a confronta- tion, termed "the orientalists debate," erupted after the 1973 war, with the publication of the report of a committee appointed to investigate the intelligence blunder preceding the war. On the one hand, this was a time of opportunity for the commentators, because the committee
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faulted the research branch of military intelligence and called for the creation of alternative assessment agencies in the academy. On the other hand, this was also a time of danger, because the researchers of the Shiloh institute were accused, by a no lesser figure than Harkabi, the former commander of military intelligence and now a professor at the Hebrew University, that they too were responsible for the blunder, because they lulled the Israeli establishment into false security by focusing on the opinions of Arab moderates. Not only did he argue that they were wrong in their assessments, Harkabi also suggested that the commentators should not be exempted from the fate that befell the military intelligence officers responsible for the blunder, who were demoted or asked to resign. The commentators were incensed and replied in a newspaper interview. They were not so much worried by the unlikely prospect of being summoned before the committee, than by Harkabi's utter disregard for what they attempted to create in the protected space of the institute, i.e., the liminal status of commentators who were not part of the official hierarchy, and whose discourse could not be evaluated by external criteria. The attack threatened to bring down the walls of the Shiloh institute, which they erected precisely so they could control their commentary. Hence, the main thrust of their response was to define the proper rules of use of commentary: what is permissible to do with it? Who, when and in what context, can repeat it, add to it, or dispute it?
Our academic role is to analyze processes and provide the most complete picture. Afterwards, it is possible to use this for better or worse - depending on the user's intent. The easiest thing, and probably the most malicious, is to take things that were said before the war and to say after it that they caused the blunder... This form of critique will hang as Damocles' sword over serious academic activity in this field. If we will not be able to analyze things as they are, and worry whether individuals may use them as they please - this is the beginning of the degeneration of the profession. ... After all, anything I may say about Syrian policy from 1967 to 1973 could be diverted to political purposes by somebody. 52
This was boundary-work attempting to separate the "academic role" of the commentators, from political "uses" of their commentary, as well as an attempt to shape the mode of consumption of commentary in the public sphere. It was also a fairly obvious message to their competitor that he was undercutting his own status as well. Harkabi's next article, two weeks later, was much more conciliatory, and he admitted that "a balanced consideration will show that the direct influence on decision-making by those called orientalists in this country was minimal. This holds both for me and for my opponents." From this followed an
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implicit conclusion, which both sides seemed to share - that their influence should be greater. The commentators emerged victorious from this debate, and began taking advantage of the new situation. In September 1976, the commander of military intelligence approached them to formulate "indicators" to determine whether the Arab states were heading for peace or not. Together with officers from the research branch, the staff of the Shiloh Institute worked on two questions: "Is there a change in the public Arab declarations regarding Israel? Is there a normative change in the underlying Arab attitude with respect to peace with Israel?" By October 1977 they arrived at the conclusion that no significant change in the underlying Arab position was pending. Six weeks later, Egypt's president arrived at Jerusalem for a dramatic visit, which initiated the peace process between Israel and Egypt. As his plane was entering Israel's airspace, the army's chief of staff, armed with the assessments of military intelligence, still argued that this was a "trap."53
I have recounted this story not in order to poke fun at the commentators' blindness. This story is important because it demonstrates two points: first, that the academics in the Shiloh Institute had finally attained the status of "commentators," whom even the research branch of military intelligence now consulted. The second point is that this status, as in military intelligence, was shaped in accordance with the internalized predispositions of the philological habitus. The "indicators" developed by the commentators were composed of two stages - information and assessment, pedant and interpreter, overt declarations and the underlying intention behind them. Three years earlier, at the time of the "orientalists debate," there was already one observer, who noted this modus operandi from the sidelines, and exposed the arbitrariness of the claim to reconstruct intentions from textual fragments:
Harkabi analyzes the data at his disposal, in the form of Arab newspapers, literature, reports, political declarations, decisions of certain conventions, etc. His assumption is that one should accept what is said as concrete intentions and not entertain illusions, based on a gap between declarations and intentions. Shamir, on the other hand, assumes a gap between two levels: the declarative-ideological level and the concrete-operative level.... The problem is that there are no parameters with which to measure the gaps between words and intentions and deeds, but the lack of such parameters should not lead us as well to ignore the existence of such gaps.... Words and ideas on one level, deeds and reality on another. Indeed, there is no measur- ing rod with which to measure the gaps. Maybe intuition and practical experience could supply what is lacking. But in order to get these, theoretical research will not suffice. Maybe these scholars need to descend from the
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heights and move among the Arab population. Then they will acquire experience and sharpen their intuition through direct contact with the members of this society. 54
The reader will probably not be surprised to learn that the writer was a veteran Arabist. Precisely because the commentators' claim relied on the exclusion of Arabist expertise, he could identify what was common to the two rival commentators and point out what was arbitrary about their claims. Hence also his ironic recommendation, that they should descend among the common people and develop their senses there.
But this was not to be the future of the commentators. Within the walls of their protected space the alchemy took place, which evaded their predecessors. Because they wer

The Relations between Military Intelligence and Middle Eastern

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