The Israeli academic elite and the 1977 upheaval: from political criticism to counter-hegemonic identity

This article analyses the reactions of Israel’s academic elite to the 1977 political upheaval. Some of Israel’s leading scholars in humanities and social sciences framed the new political situation as a grave ideological and moral crisis, reflecting the triumph of fundamentalist, nationalist, emotional and messianic trends over the rational, moderate, responsible political tradition that they had favoured and claimed to represent. The political change triggered a heated debate about the role of intellectuals in the ideological rehabilitation of the Labour party, as well as on the critical function of universities in the political arena. In the wake of what it perceived as a sharp deviation from the proper development of the traditional Zionist programme, the academic elite came to be perceived, in its own eyes as well as those of the public, as a faithful representative of the ‘old regime’, as an opponent to the new governmental elite and, for the first time, as an ideological opposition to Israel’s political hegemony.