Visitors to Hezbollah’s ma’lam mlītā lis-siyāḥa al-jihādiya (Mleeta Landmark for Jihadist Tourism) will encounter a curious panorama entitled al-hāwiya (the abyss), composed entirely of military hardware left behind by the Israel Defense Forces: Designed to celebrate the militia’s guerrilla warfare against Israel’s military presence in Southern Lebanon, the panorama stands out for its prominent inscriptions in Hebrew – ha-botz ha-levanoni (the Lebanese mud) and ha-tehom (the abyss). While few of the visitors might be able to decipher the Hebrew letters, in terms of psychological warfare the panorama sends out a clear message to the distant Israeli audience: We speak your language. This paradigm of ‘know your enemy’ remains prominent in Lebanon as the last Arab frontline state – but in fact the country represents a microcosm of the multi-faceted field of Israel Studies in the Arab world: Lebanon is not only home to Hezbollah’s Iranian-trained Israel-watching department, the country also hosts institutions of higher learning once decidedly sympathetic to the Zionist cause (the Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik), Western universities teaching biblical Hebrew (the American University of Beirut), Arab universities teaching Hebrew literature (the Lebanese University) as well as research centers and publishing houses with a special focus on Israel (like the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Center for Arab Unity Studies). Based on expert interviews and archival research, this paper surveys the academic field of Israel Studies in Lebanon with a special emphasis on the paradox of ‘enemy studies’: While on the one hand the immediacy of geopolitical conflict results in strong forms of epistemological ‘othering’ (frequently according to the paradigm of Occidentalism), on the other hand Lebanon might be the Arab state with the highest density of experienced and knowledgeable Israel-watchers outside of the Palestinian territories.

While Arab universities usually have no specific area studies department that focuses on Israel, scholars have produced argumentative literature based on linguistic, literary, religious, and historical studies. This paper aims at demonstrating that within this field of Israel Studies in the Arab world (nurtured mainly by Hebrew and Judaic sources), the Israeli-Arab conflict has dominated the scholarly production, resulting in a problematic fluctuation between a neutral focus on the study of Israel and the concentration on polemical issues. This problematique can be described as follows: Whenever there is a political improvement of the conflict, researchers get more attracted to exploring Israel’s essence and its unique features. By contrast, when the situation worsens, a tendency prevails which perceives Israel as an expansionist state in the heart of the Arab world that has no keen intentions for permanent peace in the region. In addition, this paper examines the motivation behind studying Israel in Egypt and in the Arab world. Discussing this point will demonstrate that even though Arab scholars of Israel Studies have based their research interest on an array of reasons (ideological, economic, or cultural), the impact of their scholarly output is governed by two factors: the first is the decisions issued by policy makers, and the second is the acceptance of this academic discipline by the broader public. In other words, the desire of scholars of Israel Studies in the Arab world to neutrally study Israel and share their findings with their societies is blocked by factors which they cannot influence. Their willingness to publicly discuss scholarly insights (particularly those which might challenge the mainstream understanding of the essence of Israel and Zionism), is challenged by a variety of generalizations and misconceptions spread among the broader public and top-level political decision makers alike. Since the historiography of Israel Studies in the Arab world is overlooked and scarcely examined, the sources on which this paper shall draw vary from scholarly production of Egyptian and Arab scholars and interviews with professionals in the field. In sum, the Egyptian academic discourse on Israel is highly dominated by the Arab-Israeli conflict; whenever political attempts to solve the conflict seem to succeed, scholars are encouraged to find out how to benefit from Israeli culture. On the contrary, when circumstances on the political level worsen, voices call for breaking off any ties with Israel and exhort the intelligentsia to highlight the insincerity of Israel’s political agenda.

Israel has posed a great challenge to the Arab state system in the post-colonial Middle East. Hence, Israel occupies a central space in the daily debate that has been taking place in the region, which has grappled over the decade with how to respond to this challenge. For decades, ideological discourses have dominated the Arab World. Inevitably, this has had a profound impact on the mindset of many Arab scholars. In my book, “Israelism: Arab Scholarship on Israel, a Critical Assessment,” I assess the status of Israeli studies in the Arab World. Indeed, scholars’ incompetence and their lack of significant areas studies skills have contributed to the underdevelopment of Israeli studies in most Arab countries. However, the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the injustice that has befallen the Palestinians and the hegemonic ideological discourse have also greatly informed the epistemology and ontology of Arab scholarship on Israel. With a few exceptions, and despite the existence of a multitude of books, articles and studies that have tackled Israel, Israeli studies in the Arab World remains, by and large, weighed down by one-sided projections, ideological spin, prejudice and a necessity to expose rather than to understand the other. If anything, my book has demonstrated how many of scholarly works have been marred by the inability, or worse the unwillingness, of writers and authors to go beyond the hegemonic and ideological discourses. Israelism is the resultant mode of writing and scholarship, writing which has, to a great extent, suffered from an inherent bias in Arab scholars’ study of Israel. Much of their understanding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict has been rigidly tied to a framework that is highly informed by two components: the hegemonic discourse and the conflict prism. The outcome has been the underdevelopment of Israeli studies in the Meshreq Arab countries. Of great importance, Arab scholars have failed to match their Israeli counterparts in challenging the official and ideological narrative of their own state as the Israeli New Historians did in Israel. But, it would not be possible to account for the underdevelopment of Israeli studies without placing this in a wider perspective. A lack of academic freedom and political freedom had had enormous impact on the status and quality of social sciences in the Arab World. In addition to that, this book sets out the political, intellectual and historical contexts that have helped crate such a mindset of scholars.

Paper Abstract: Egyptian Israelists: The View from Israel Arab Spring revolutions have introduced the Israeli public to a frequently ignored reality: Hebrew-speaking Egyptians. The existence of Egyptians who learned the language and were educated in Israel and Jewish studies in their homeland,or “Egyptian Israelists,” remained generally unknown to the Israeli public that was surprised to have Egyptian Israelists being hosted in Israeli radio and TV stations and expressing their views in fluent Hebrew. This surprise is an anomaly for a society that has established a reputation in the extensive knowledge of its Arab neighbors. The goal of this paper, therefore,is to map and analyze this phenomenon by answering the following questions: What does the Israeli public know, as a background, about Egyptian Israelists? Why was the Israeli public mostly surprised of Egyptian Israelists? How does the Israeli public explain the reality of Egyptian Israelists? Given the exploratory nature of this research, this paper will employ the methods of field research and unstructured interviews. Field research, including description of the relevant attitudes inIsraeli society and informal interviews, will be used to induce explanatory propositions informed by field observations. Unstructured interviews will be conducted with members of the small community of Israelis, e.g., scholars and diplomats, who worked in Egypt after the 1979 peace treaty. The interviewees' unique perspective -- in that they have for long been familiar with Egyptian Israelists -- will be used to learn more about what the average Israelis think of the phenomenon as well as to learn more about why they think as they do. My preliminary research indicates that the Israeli public perspective is governed by a standard view of the "anti-Israel Arab authoritarian regimes" which prevented people-to-people interaction, and therefore Egyptian Israelists were never known to the average Israeli. From the same view, the Israeli public tends to explain the existence of Israelists in Egypt as part of the security establishment. Little importance, nevertheless, is assigned to the tendency of Israeli scholarship and media to ignore the reality of Israel Studies in the Arab World. These, however, remain preliminary findings and until they are adequately tested to answer the above research questions, a gap in our understanding of Israel Studies in the Arab world, that is, how these Studies are perceived in Israel itself – the equivalent of asking how Orientalism is perceived in the Arab Middle East – will remain.