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
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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.
654
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 be- tween 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
mili- tary 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 argu- ment 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.
655
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 scrip- tures - 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,
656
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
verti- cal 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,
be- tween Middle Eastern studies and military intelligence? I think
they suggest two corrections to the way these questions have been
ap- proached 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 them- selves 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 commenta- tor, which is what this
article analyzes: to be a commentator requires,
657
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 official- dom, they could
not become "commentators" because their superiors appropriated
their discourse. They became the most powerful, how- ever, 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 "pro- fessionalization" 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 emer- gence 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
658
non-human agents, including instrumentation, concepts, financial
re- sources, 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,
accumu- lated, 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 utter- ances 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 applica- tion to be constituted with respect to a
monitoring subject, for com- mentary 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 philo- logical 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 construc-
tion 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 commen- tary resulted
from the application to military intelligence work of an academic
philological habitus, i.e., a set of internalized
pre-disposi-
659
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 ex- pertise, 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
influen- tial, 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 man- aged 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-gath- ering"
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
660
/'I IIII:I III I ::: Interpreter
.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
legiti- mated, 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 speci- alized 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
661
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 pro- tected by academic closure, while the
Arabists, as employees of para- military organizations, were
dependent on their superiors, and entry into their ranks was fairly
open once one had accumulated the requi- site 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 dissemina-
tion 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 prac- tical 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 applica- tion, 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 informa- tion 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-
662
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 vali- dated 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,"
663
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 com- mentary 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 inter- pretation 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 intro- duce 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
664
philological ethos in the students, i.e., not simply the method of
philo- logical 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 assump- tion 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 stu-
dents 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 chronol- ogy. 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
665
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
anachron- istic 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,
refer- enced, 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 inter- nalized 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
666
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 sub- ordinated 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 re- ported 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 re- defined 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 informa- tion 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
667
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 stu- dents, 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 deci- sions in
accordance with the changing needs of "reality."19
The second reason for the doctoral students' failure was that as
offi- cials 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 work- ing 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 in- telligence 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-
668
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 trans- formation depended on the subordination of the
Arabists to a central office. Hence, the resistance of the Arabists
constituted the first ob- stacle. 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 de- cision-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
669
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 sup- plied 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
intelli- gence, and argue that it proved a superior means of
gaining informa- tion 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 intelli- gence 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
670
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
armi- stice 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 infil-
trators, 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
671
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 tradi- tion), 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 infiltra- tors belonged. Pure
deterrence was guided by purely military consid- erations: 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 rein- forced 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
672
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:
673
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 offi- cers 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 contingen- cies" 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 con- cordance 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 hier- archy of apprentice, pedant
and interpreter. In initiating work on it,
674
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
mili- tary intelligence became the most influential and prestigious
of the intelligence branches in Israel, and in 1957 was entrusted
with formu- lating 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 assess- ments; 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 divi- sion 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 informa- tion-gathering agencies were
appropriated and contributed to the pres- tige of research.31
The second feature of this actor-network was the alliance forged
be- tween 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
675
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
assess- ments 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 en- joyed 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 inter- pret the "intentions" of Arab leaders. Harkabi enjoined
research offi- cers 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:
676
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 margi- nalized 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
677
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 intelli- gence
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
intelli- gence 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 inten- tions. 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
re- search 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 commen- tators. The requisite balance between generosity and
closure was not
678
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 dis- course, but rather the opposite, in "generosity,"
in the capacity of such discourse to insinuate itself into the
judgment of their superiors with- out 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 attribu-
tion 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 com- mentators 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 associa- tion between academics and officials. First,
they invited military intel- ligence 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
680
. ......... 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 re- search 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, commenta- tors, 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 politi- cians
(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.
681
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 intelli- gence. First, an "information
center" was created within the institute as the functional
equivalent of the administrative separation and sub- ordination 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 infor- mation 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 jour- nal articles, and "basic
facts about the Arab press." The senior re- searchers, 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 insti- tute'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 aver- age period of 9
years. In this way, the institute created two gendered
"occupational blocks," the movement between which was fairly diffi-
cult. 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 in- telligence. 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
682
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 estab- lished by "all contingencies" for the annual
national intelligence assess- ment: 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 informa- tion collected by the various
information-gathering units of military and civilian intelligence,
including archival materials, Arab newspa- pers, 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
ab- sorbed Syrian, Egyptian, and Jordanian documents captured in
Israel's wars, and intercepted communications.49 Additionally,
institute re- searchers 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 publi- cations.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 pro- tected 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 deci- sion-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
commenta- tors' 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 - infor- mation 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
expe- rience 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