Baruch Kimmerling

Kimmerling was born in 1939 in Torda, also spelled Turda, a Transylvanian town on the Romanian side of the Romanian-Hungarian border; his mother was Hungarian Jewish and his father Romanian Jewish.[1][3] During World War II, his family fled their home and wandered before returning after the war.[3] He later recalled the establishment of Communist rule in Romania.[3]

He immigrated to Israel with his parents and younger brother in 1952.[3] The family initially lived in a ma'abara, or immigrant tent camp, in Gan Yavne, moved to Netanya in 1954, and later settled in Ramat Gan.[1] Remembering his arrival in Israel, Kimmerling described being marked out both by disability and by his Romanian origins, and recalled prejudice toward Romanian immigrants at school and university.[3] He came to identify with the position of an immigrant and refugee who experienced Israeli society simultaneously from within and from its margins.[3]

Kimmerling described a physical impairment present from birth that was later identified as cerebral palsy.[3] His childhood in Romania involved numerous diagnoses and treatments, some of which he remembered as violent; he said that he gained greater control of his body as he grew older, but that his physical condition began deteriorating in 1984.[3]

He began studying sociology and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963 and received his bachelor's degree in 1965.[1] His master's research concerned Uganda and formed part of a departmental project on modernization and development in Africa.[1] In 1975 he completed a doctorate on territorial factors in Israeli nation-building, research that became the foundation of his book Zionism and Territory.[1]

Kimmerling taught in the sociology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, became a full professor, and retired in 2006.[1][3] In 2004 he was on an intellectual sabbatical at the University of Toronto, following years of teaching, research, and committee service.[3] His academic work developed alongside a public writing career: his commentaries in Ha'aretz had brought him to a wider readership from 1968.[1]

Territory and the relationship between Jewish and Arab communities were central to his early publications.[1] His 1982 article “Change and Continuity in Zionist Territorial Orientations and Politics” appeared in Comparative Politics, and his 1983 study “A Model for the Analysis of Reciprocal Relations Between the Jewish and Arab Communities in Mandatory Palestine” appeared in Plural Societies.[4] Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, published in 1983 by the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, developed his doctoral research into a book-length study.[1][5] The English-language volume comprised 289 pages and included an index and bibliography.[5]

In his treatment of the British Mandate, Kimmerling argued that the land laws of 1940 prohibited Jewish acquisition of 65 percent of the land and restricted acquisition in another 30 percent.[6] His broader approach treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as an external pressure on an otherwise separate Israeli society, but as integral to its institutions, culture, economy, ethnic stratification, and ideology.[1] He helped introduce a colonial paradigm into the field, interpreting Zionism as a colonization project and Israeli society as an immigrant-settler society, with comparisons to the United States, Australia, French Algeria, and South Africa.[1]

His research on war and society included Social Interruption and Besieged Societies (The Case of Israel) in 1975 and The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times in 1985.[7] In this work he developed an account of Israel as a “besieged society,” examining how military crises interrupted social life and contributed to an offensive ethos.[7] The Interrupted System also addressed uneasy relations between the Jewish majority and Arab minorities within Israel's sphere of control.[7]

Kimmerling's 1993 article “Patterns of Militarism in Israel,” published in the European Journal of Sociology, distinguished political, cultural, and cognitive dimensions of militarism.[8] Political militarism concerned military rule or influence grounded in force and loyalty to military leadership, while cultural militarism concerned the army's central place in collective identity and experience.[8] Cognitive militarism described the priority given to military or national-security considerations over political, economic, or ideological concerns; he considered all three dimensions present in Israel in differing forms.[8]

His related concept of “civilian militarism” described civilian institutions and public life absorbing military outlooks without requiring the military itself to occupy the center of political power.[9] He regarded security as an organizing principle of Israeli politics and society, and used “routinization of war” to describe institutions and practices that prepared society to mobilize from one conflict to the next.[9] In this account, war could remain a persistent feature of social life even when it receded from immediate view during periods called peace.[9] His work on these subjects also included “The Social Construction of Israel's National Security” in 2001.[8]

Religion and national belonging formed another major strand of his scholarship.[1] His 1984 article “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions of the Collective Identity: The State of Israel or Eretz Israel” distinguished two ideal types of inclusion in Israeli society and explored tensions between Zionism's secular-nationalist character and its religious foundations.[1] In his analysis of the pre-state Yishuv, elections and electoral institutions helped legitimize communal rules, a system he termed “processual democracy.”[9] He understood its protections and rights as grounded in membership of the Jewish community rather than universal civil membership.[9]

Kimmerling used the term “Jewish Code” for a cultural framework that, in his analysis, linked the religious and national dimensions of Jewish identity.[9] He argued that Zionist ideology defined Israel as a state of the Jewish people rather than a state of its citizens, calling the resulting order a “theo-democracy” or “Jewish democracy.”[9] His historical account also examined the religious-status-quo agreement between the Jewish Agency and Agudat Israel as part of the relationship between religious and national elements at the state's establishment.[9]

In The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military, published by the University of California Press in 2001, Kimmerling argued that the monocultural regime constructed in the 1950s had ended and that Israeli society had developed into seven major cultures.[10] These comprised secular Ashkenazi upper-middle-class Israelis, national religious Israelis, traditionalist Mizrahim, Orthodox religious Israelis, Arabs, new Russian immigrants, and Ethiopians.[2] He contrasted this diversity with an earlier Zionist image of a unified, self-sacrificing society working the land.[2] He also characterized security as a civil religion and distinguished securitist, conflict-oriented, and compromise- or peace-oriented approaches toward Arabs and Muslims.[2]

His book The End of Ahusalim Rule examined the decline of the hegemony of a particular social group.[3] “Ahusalim” was his acronym for Ashkenazi, secular, veteran, socialist, and nationalist or Zionist Israelis.[3] Immigrants, Settlers, Natives, published in 2004, explored changes involving Arab citizens of Israel, Russian immigrants, Haredim, Mizrahim, and women within a broader discussion of multiculturalism and cultural conflict.[3]

Kimmerling argued that understanding Israel required a parallel study of Palestinians.[1] With American political scientist Joel S. Migdal, he published Palestinians: The Making of a People in 1993, a comprehensive sociohistorical account of the emergence of Palestinians as a national community.[1] The authors revisited documentary evidence and combined secondary sources with field research conducted over two decades among Palestinians in villages in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[7] Their account emphasized Palestinians as active participants in a gradual and painful process of national formation, rather than merely passive victims of events.[7]

The book treated the 1936–39 Arab revolt as bringing shared national feelings to the fore while exposing internal divisions.[7] Kimmerling and Migdal connected subsequent Palestinian vulnerability in 1948 to internal strife, the destruction of Arab civil institutions, and the decimation of leadership.[7] Their discussion of the First Intifada situated it within longer-term changes that included worker unionization, universities, women's expanding social role, and leaders' use of mass media.[7]

A Hebrew-language edition of Palestinians: The Making of a People appeared through Keter Books in 1999.[11] An expanded treatment, The Palestinian People: A History, was published by Harvard University Press in 2003.[12] It traced Palestinian peoplehood from the 1834 Arab revolt through the British Mandate, Zionism, and Israel's establishment, and extended the discussion to Oslo and the effects of the Second Intifada on political institutions and social cohesion.[12]

Kimmerling interpreted the Oslo process as a relinquishment of responsibility for densely Arab-populated areas while Israel retained overall security responsibility.[9] He linked this approach to Israeli elites' conclusion that no acceptable military solution existed for the Palestinian issue.[9] In his public writing, he called for ending Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and was among the early public figures advocating withdrawal from south Lebanon.[1] During the 1999 debate over restructuring the Israel Defense Forces, he argued that the army should adapt to changing demographics, values, and social conditions, and advocated a professional volunteer force in place of universal conscription.[13]

His political writing included Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, issued by Verso in a 2006 edition.[14] He defined “politicide” as the systematic destruction of a society's material and human foundations until it could no longer function as a political society entitled to self-determination.[3] In his formulation, the process could employ military, political, economic, diplomatic, and psychological means, and could sometimes include partial or complete ethnic cleansing.[3] He applied this concept to Ariel Sharon's policies toward Palestinians and distinguished the book's provocative political purpose from his scientific writing.[3]

Kimmerling died on May 20, 2007, in Jerusalem.[1][15] His scholarly output included more than a dozen authored, coauthored, or edited books and more than forty academic articles.[1][16] His work was translated into nine languages and appeared on hundreds of university course syllabi in Israel, the United States, and Europe.[1] His distinction between primordial and civil definitions of collective identity became an influential analytical tool for studying Israeli society.[1]

His frameworks also reached school education.[17] An Israeli high-school history textbook drew on his work to identify six major subgroups: secular Ashkenazi, traditional Mizrahi, national-religious, ultra-Orthodox, Russian immigrants, and Arabs.[17] The textbook additionally discussed sectors including Ethiopian immigrants, Bedouins, and economic migrants.[17]

Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies appeared posthumously from Columbia University Press in 2008.[18] The collection examined reciprocal influences between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian societies, with chapters on collective identity, Palestinian identity formation, militarism, national security, citizenship, and Oslo.[18] It included “The Formation Process of Palestinian Collective Identities: The Ottoman and Colonial Periods.”[18]

Two contributions also appeared in the 2008 Rutgers University Press collection Postzionism: A Reader: “Introduction to The Palestinian People: A History,” coauthored with Migdal, and “Academic History Caught in the Cross-Fire: A Case of Israeli-Jewish Historiography.”[19] The Association for Israel Studies established a prize in his memory recognizing the best paper presented by a graduate student at its annual meeting.[16]

Kimmerling's colonial framework, descriptions of militarism, and interpretations of Jewish identity and democracy were contested readings of Israeli history and society rather than politically neutral classifications.[1][9] He questioned whether mainstream Israeli historians and social scientists could free their research from Zionist ideology and Jewish ethnocentrism, a stance that delayed his promotion to full professor.[1] A discussion by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs places him among critical sociologists and new historians, presenting his argument that research choices and intellectual activity help construct political reality and hegemony rather than simply reflect them.[20]

His criticism of the Law of Return drew a direct response from Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein.[21] Kimmerling argued that reforming immigration laws was important for democratization and civil equality; they countered that the law regulated immigration from abroad and did not render non-Jewish citizens inferior.[21] His characterization of ethnic cleansing as embedded in the partition plan and Jewish settlement, and his application of “politicide” to Sharon, likewise belonged to his politically contested interpretations.[3]

His positions also drew criticism from the left.[1] Although he sympathized with Palestinian experiences of exile and expulsion and described Israel as “born in sin,” he did not consider full implementation of Palestinian refugees' right of return a practical solution and opposed boycotts of Israeli universities.[1] Some left-wing critics argued that his position as an Israeli Jew prevented him from following his scholarship to its political conclusions.[1]