Affect and Popular Zionism in the British Jewish community after 1967

Lawrence Grossberg: affect and the popular

The reason for using Grossberg’s theoretical framework is because of the unique way it intervenes into one of British cultural studies central problematics: the attempt to account for the popularity, or hegemony in a Gramscian register, of particular political ideologies in certain social formations at given historical moments. Stuart Hall’s work on Thatcherism is exemplary of this (Hall, 1979, 1988). The dominant tendency of this work has been to approach the popularity of ideologies as a question of meaning. It argues that an ideology becomes popular because it most persuasively makes sense of a particular set of historical circumstances. Grossberg (1992, 1997, 2005, 2010a, 2010b), however, understands popularity in terms of affect, arguing that an ideology becomes popular because it most successfully makes people care about issues they may not even fully be able to make sense of. Grossberg makes this argument by bringing a range of Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts, most crucially their notion of affect, to bear on perspectives developed within British cultural studies.

By reading British cultural studies through Deleuze and Guattari, Grossberg’s conceptualisation of affect is notably different from the dominant way it has been theorised within the Deleuzian trajectory within the so-called affective turn (Blackman and Venn, 2010; Gorton, 2007). This trajectory, based primarily on Brian Massumi’s ground-breaking work (Massumi, 1996), makes a sharp distinction between affect and emotion. For Massumi, affect is pre-conscious, a-signifying, non-individualised intensity experienced at the level of the body. Emotion, however, is the ‘socio-linguistic fixing’ of affect (Massumi, 1996: 221) or the subject (as constructed in language) making sense of affect. Affect is therefore ontologically autonomous from the socio-linguistic structures used to make sense of it. Grossberg does not fundamentally contest the distinction between emotion and affect. He does, however, argue against Massumi’s claim that affect’s difference from emotion necessarily makes it autonomous from it or indeed any other part of the social formation through which it circulates (Grossberg, 2010b: 314).

This position emerges out of Grossberg’s (2010b) commitment to what he claims is cultural studies’ defining property, its ‘radical contextualism’ (p. 20). Developed out of insights made by Raymond Williams (1973), radical contextualism argues against ‘mainstream Marxism’s’ (p. 3) claim that the base determines the superstructure. Instead both have equal capacity to determine each other in complex and unpredictable ways. Social formations therefore need to be analysed in terms of all the relations that exist between the base and the superstructure. Grossberg (1992) uses the Deleuzo–Guattarian term ‘planes’ to describe the different levels of the base and the superstructure (the political plane, the economic plane, etc.) and, in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, adds to them realms of experience often overlooked by mainstream Marxism, for example, the planes of pleasure, desire, fantasy, everyday life, effectivity, signification and affect.

For Grossberg, then, affect can only ever be organised on a plane that is not autonomous but always somehow determined by its complex interrelationships with other planes. This leads to a more expansive definition of affect than Massumi’s with his harder distinction between emotion and affect. At various points throughout his work, Grossberg (1992, 2010b) relates affect to will, mood, passion, attention, volition, investment, commitment, desire and emotion (pp. 82, 195, 397). These, he argues, are different ‘modalities’ (Grossberg, 2010b: 195) of affect that emerge at different intersections of the different planes. ³ Expressed in simple terms, affect is what we feel, whilst mood, will, passion, emotion and so on are different ways of feeling it. As will become clear, Grossberg’s understanding of the different modalities of affect has proven especially useful in analysing the various affective expressions of, what I am calling, Popular Zionism.

Similarly, the role that he argues that affect plays in the becoming popular of discursive formations (not only, but including, political ideologies) helps illuminate the particular way that Zionism has been popular within the British Jewish community since 1967. Grossberg begins with the Grasmcian argument developed within British cultural studies that claims that an ideology becomes popular once it becomes the common sense of a social formation, with common sense meaning the inchoate and contradictory forms of knowledge groups of people use to make sense of their life-worlds. In Grossberg’s terminology, it is when an ideology territorialises ⁴ the plane of signification. Grossberg then builds on this and argues that a discursive formation becomes popular, not only when it becomes common sense, but when enough people are made to affectively invest in its common sense form with sufficient intensity. An ideology must matter to people; they need to care about and feel moved by it for that ideology to be popular in any meaningful sense of the word. The ideology must also territorialise the plane of affect. As Grossberg (2010b) summarises, ‘the affectivity of discursive formations constitutes the ground of the popular’ (p. 195).

Grossberg (1992) has been more specific than this, when he describes what parts of a social formation an ideology must territorialise in order for it to become popular and uses the Reaganite Popular Conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s as his example:

This project works at the intersection of politics, everyday life and popular culture. The question is how people’s affect – their attention, volition, mood, passion – is organized, disciplined and mobilized and ultimately put in the service of specific political agendas … It operates on the very ground on which affect and politics are linked together, rather than on the terrain of ideology … (p. 255)

Zionism, in its common sense/popular form, has existed at a similar location within the British Jewish social formation since 1967 – where the planes of affect, politics, everyday life and popular culture intersect. We might usefully compare post-1967 Popular Zionism to Classical Zionism (Shimoni, 1995) to have a more concrete sense of what being located here means. Classical Zionism is a political ideology adhered to by dedicated activists and political groups and institutions like the Zionist federation and who are regularly engaged in political activity such as disseminating propaganda and fundraising. Classical Zionism, therefore, sits at the intersection of the institutional, ideological and political planes of the British Jewish social formation. On the other hand, as the empirical research I have conducted demonstrates, Popular Zionism is a common sense version of Zionist ideology defined almost exclusively by the affective investments the majority of Jews in Britain have made in it since 1967. In fact, Popular Zionism has minimal ideological content and is almost entirely comprised of affect, hence the decision to identify it as an affective disposition as opposed to an ideology. Unlike their classical counterparts, Popular Zionists do not live out these investments by joining political organisations and groups or by engaging in conventionally political activity, but instead in their everyday lives and through their pop cultural consumption – most notably consuming Zionist pop cultural products and visiting the State of Israel as tourists.

Note on method

In order to support this ‘Grossberg-ian’ argument, I have used evidence gathered deploying two methods of data collection: semi-structured, in-depth interviews and archival research, all conducted between 2008 and 2011. The rationale behind adopting these methods is as follows. The primary focus of this project was to understand the role that affect has played in maintaining the hegemony of Zionism in British Jewry since the June 1967 war. Therefore, the main methodological issue raised is how best to empirically observe and analyse affect.

The most common solution to this problem within the empirical strand of the affective turn has been participant observation (Crociani-Windland, 2011; Henriques, 2010; Saldanha, 2007). Given the historical focus of this project, this was not a viable solution. Walkerdine (2010), in her study of the effects of the closure of a steelworks on a community in South Wales that had happened in the recent past, attempted to surmount this issue by using ‘long, unstructured, narrative-based interviews, which aimed at engaging with feelings and experiences associated with the aftermath of the steelworks closure’ (p. 92). This solution, however, raises another issue: if affect is ontologically distinct from language, how can a ‘language-based’ (Walkerdine, 2010) method of data collection accurately grasp an affective state? Walkerdine (2010) notes the limitations of using interviews to access affect and suggests supplementing interviews with ‘data of a more embodied kind’ (p. 92). In an attempt to capture as comprehensively as possible the affective disposition that is Popular Zionism, I followed this suggestion and noted the affective responses of my participants during the interviews. For instance, one cried when recounting the Israeli capturing of Jewish religious sites in Western Jerusalem. These embodied data were particularly helpful in identifying what parts of Zionism were invested in with most affective intensity.

Whether this adequately addresses the problems raised vis-à-vis affect and language is debatable. All data collection methods have their limitations, and all we can do is attempt to account for their limitations in our findings. Despite these limitations, Walkerdine has produced a highly persuasive analysis using interviews to access affect so I have adopted her approach. ⁵ Bearing all of this in mind, one of my main sources of evidence are interview quotes which not only contain emotive language, but also language that explicitly describes affect (in all of its modalities) triggered by Zionism and/or events relating to Palestine/Israel.

Conducting interviews about a conjuncture that began 40 years prior to the interviews taking place also raises issues of memory. This issue becomes more acute when British Jewish collective memory has the potential to be shaped by Zionist propaganda. How could I be sure that what my interviewees have remembered from the earlier part of this 40-year conjuncture is accurate? Again, there is no perfect solution to this, but I attempted to minimise these potential distortions by cross-referencing their interviews with archival material gathered in between 2008 and 2011 from a number of different archives. The material used here is from the Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem. ⁶ I not only used this material to check for accuracy but also to use it in a similar way to the interview quotes, that is, to find representations of affective states triggered by Zionism and/or events in Palestine/Israel.

Note on sample

I interviewed 12 British Jews who were in Britain during the 1967 war, in line with Arber’s (2008) claim that relatively small sample sizes ensure ‘maximum theoretical understanding’ (p. 68). Despite the size of my sample, I wanted my findings to be, if not representative of the community, then at least illustrative in some meaningful sense. I, therefore, tried to build a demographic sketch of the British Jewish community and the socio-cultural changes it went through from 1945 to 2011 that I could map my sample onto. I built this sketch using sociological research (Gould, 1984; Krausz, 1964, 1969a, 1969b; Prais and Schmool, 1968, 1975) and secondary historical literature (Alderman, 1992; Bentwich, 1960; Endelman, 2002). This sketch included factors such as socio-economic status, family background, religious practice, geographical location and attitudes to Zionism. As much as possible, my recruitment process (snowballing from personal contacts, advertising in a British Jewish newspaper and contacting Zionist organisations) was guided by attempting to achieve a spread of participants that were illustrative of the heterogeneity of the British Jewish community and this was largely successful.

Of the 12 interviewees, seven were men and five were women. Two were anti-Zionist, but most self-identified as pro-Israeli. Each had roots in at least one of the three major waves of Jewish migration to the United Kingdom since the late 19th century: nine from the emigration from Tzarist Russia’s Pale of the Settlement between 1880 and 1914, two from the emigration from Central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s and one from the post-colonial migration in the 1950s and 1960s (Egypt). All, except the two anti-Zionists, had always lived in typically Jewish areas of the United Kingdom, including London’s East End, Stamford Hill, London suburbs such as Edgware, Redbridge and Radlett and in Manchester. All but two were born into working-class families with 10 of those having experienced the significant social mobility enjoyed by the Jewish community in the post-war years as a result of the redistributive policies of the welfare state, so that at the time of interview they were identified as middle class. Nine identified as what might be called ‘High Holy Days’ Jews in that their engagement with Judaism was in attending synagogue 2 to 3 days a year on the Jewish High Holy Days. Nevertheless each, except one of the anti-Zionists, had retained a strong sense of Jewish cultural identity – a contradiction typical of Jews in the Western diaspora. Three were more traditionally religious.

Popular Zionism

The remainder of the article will provide empirical evidence to support the formulation of Popular Zionism being presented here. It will begin by demonstrating how Zionism shapes British Jewish common sense, gesturing to the affective intensity with which this common sense is invested. It will then develop this argument and demonstrate how Popular Zionism is primarily experienced as affect with minimal ideological content. It will finally demonstrate how Zionist commitment in the British Jewish community is experienced through different forms of pop cultural consumption as opposed to more classically political endeavours.

Zionism as British Jewish common sense

One of the most significant ways that Popular Zionism emerged in my research is in the way that Zionist ideology shaped the common sense understanding that the majority of the interviewees had of events in Palestine/Israel. This is most neatly illustrated in Zionist statements made by interviewees who explicitly refused to identify as Zionist.

All the interviewees were asked a question along the lines of, ‘do you consider yourself a Zionist’? Interviewees Harvey, Vivien, Zena and Stephen ⁷ all answered negatively:

I’m not and never was a Zionist and I’m not now.

Zionists are people who I think would like to go and live there. No I wouldn’t’.

Do you feel you can partially identify with being a Zionist?

I don’t think so. I don’t think so’.

No I’m not a Zionist.

Despite answering negatively, these interviewees (along with those who answered positively) continuously reproduced Zionist ideology throughout their interviews, having clearly naturalised Zionism into their common sense understanding of the history of Palestine/Israel. What follows are only brief examples. Interviewee Zena reproduces the Revisionist Zionist claim that Zionism transforms passive Diasporic Jewish victims into Zionist warriors immediately after she claims she is not a Zionist:

I wouldn’t call myself a Zionist but my love for Israel is next to none. […] [Israelis are] not the Jewry of Europe who went to the slaughter. These now, are the Jews from Israel from David and Jonathan’s time […] Israel are warriors and you can’t take that away from them.

Stephen reproduces an iconic phrase of Zionist ideology:

I think that Israel has tried to build an oasis in the desert and […] they’ve worked an absolute miracle there.

Harvey reproduces what Yehouda Shenhav has called Zionism’s lachrymose version of Jewish history (Shenhav, 2006) in the following claim:

Jews had been kicked out of Arab countries. Which was part of the [inaudible]. Even then I was conscious of ¾ million Arabs who got displaced but easily ¾ million Jews got displaced.

One of the key traits of Gramscian common sense is the way it ‘spontaneously’ appears in the thoughts of the social group who hold it in common (Hall et al., 1978). This is precisely what is happening in the above quotes – British Jews who explicitly dis-identify as Zionist spontaneously reproducing Zionism in their contradictory and inchoate understandings of the history of Palestine/Israel. We can also see evidence of Grossberg’s approach to common sense in the affective force with which it is invested in by the interviewees. The clearest example of this is when I asked interviewee Jeremy a question that queried his belief that the State of Israel made him feel more proud to be a Jew in Britain. He responded with a distinct sense of menace in his tone, ‘It has to mate. Listen: there would be very few Jews in the world without an Israel, in my opinion’. The idea that the mere existence of the State of Israel guarantees the safety of Jewish life globally is a key element of Zionist ideology and one that Jeremy not only had accepted as part of his common sense understanding of Palestine/Israel but also affectively invested in with a remarkable degree of force. The affective investments that Popular Zionism elicits are explored in greater detail below.

Popular Zionism not Classical Zionism

Precisely because Zionism becomes common sense in post-1967 British Jewry, its content differs from its classical form. According to the Gramscian British cultural studies tradition that Grossberg builds on, if an ideology is to become popular in wider society, it must make concessions to the different social groups with whom it wishes to become popular. Zionism makes two concessions to British Jews: (a) it loses its central imperative for all Jews in the Diaspora to make aliyah (to emigrate or, literally, ascend to Eretz Israel) and (b) it does not require British Jews to engage in Zionist political activity or join Zionist groups or institutions. In Grossberg’s terms, this means that after 1967, classical Zionist ideology fails to successfully articulate the political and institutional planes to the planes of everyday life or, in other words, make Zionist political activity or belonging to a Zionist institution matter in the everyday lives of the majority of British Jews.

This failure is notable considering how many British Jews were involved in exactly this sort of activity during the war itself. I have detailed this activity elsewhere (Hakim, 2014) but in short this included political meetings, letter-writing campaigns, protests, a fundraising effort that raised £14,638,000 and, most significantly perhaps, 1904 British Jews volunteering to go to Israel during the war. Despite some new Zionist organisations forming in the immediate aftermath of the war – the Volunteers Union in 1967 ⁸ and the British Aliyah Movement in 1968 ⁹ – the long-term effect on the institutional plane was minimal. In a survey conducted within the Redbridge Jewish community in 1978, 89.7 percent of participants did not belong to a Zionist group (Kosmin and Levy, 1983: 26). This figure is probably best represented in the following statement by my interviewee Harvey:

So there’s always a sense of that there is a connection between Jewishness and Israel.

Yes, yes … having said that it hasn’t made them do an awful lot except maybe give a £100 here and there. People haven’t done an awful lot. At least I haven’t done an awful lot.

Similarly, there has been very little increase in the number of British Jews who have made aliyah in the post-1967 conjuncture. In the immediate aftermath of the war, aliyah was seen as Zionism’s primary objective as expressed in the reformulated Jerusalem Program of 1951, which was announced by the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) during the 27th Zionist Congress of June 1968:

The major change in the new program places the centrality of Israel and future of the Jewish people at the forefront of Zionist aims and tasks and unequivocally stresses immigration from all countries as the supreme command for the Zionist movement as a whole and each Zionist as well. ¹⁰

In line with this injunction, the WZO redoubled its worldwide efforts to capitalise on the overwhelming Diasporic support of Israel during the war in an attempt to convert it into aliyah. For example, in November 1967, the Zionist Federation in Britain ran ‘The Aliyah Campaign’. These efforts on the institutional plane did not successfully territorialise either of the planes of popular culture or everyday life throughout the post-1967 conjuncture, meaning very few Jews have made aliyah, or consider it an important part of either their Jewish or even Zionist identities. For example, in a report written in February 1968 on university meetings organised as part of the Aliyah Campaign in November 1967, Zvi Jagendorf writes the following:

Aliyah was not a subject of immediate concern for the majority of those who came to the meetings […] However recent events, by posing the question of Israel’s very existence, had disturbed the equilibrium. […] Young people previously passive had become aware that the existence of Israel was important to them personally. They were therefore ready to make a personal contribution. Leaving aside the question of aliyah, there seemed to be little disagreement on the desirability of all who could take physical part in the work going on in Israel. ¹¹

Here, we get a sense of the shifts in the affectivity that Israel generates and its renewed position in the identity of the university students – ‘young people previously passive had become aware that the existence of Israel was important to them personally’. However, just 5 months after the war, and among a cohort who Kosmin and Levy (1983) argue are the most likely of the British Jewish community to make aliyah, the largest Zionist institution in Britain is only able to stimulate an interest in volunteering, not immigration in any permanent sense.

Aliyah from Britain remains low throughout the post-1967 conjuncture. Its peak was in 1969 with 1763 British Jews making aliyah, approximately 0.5 percent of the community (Della Pergola et al., 2000: 19). Throughout the 1970s, British olim ¹² average around 1000 a year (Kosmin and Levy, 1983: 26) and fluctuated between 500 and 1000 olim throughout the 1980s (Alderman, 1992: 342). Nor are British Jews ideologically committed to the idea of aliyah. Of Redbridge Jews, 71.2 percent had never thought about making aliyah, with as many as 53 percent of members of Zionist organisations never considering it (Kosmin and Levy, 1983: 26) – a striking figure in a conjuncture where the WZO has re-insisted on the ‘supreme’ centrality of aliyah for all Zionists. Aliyah remains a low priority into the late 2000s with 70 percent of British Jews saying it was either ‘not at all likely’, or ‘not very likely’ that they would live in Israel in the future (Graham and Boyd, 2010: 18).

Popular Zionism as affect

After 1967, Zionism may not have territorialised the institutional and political planes of the British Jewish social formation, but there is strong evidence in the interviews that it was successful in territorialising the plane of affect. I would contend that this is the primary way that Zionism becomes hegemonic within British Jewry and that therefore Popular Zionism is better understood as an affective disposition as opposed to an ideology or a political movement. Zionism as primarily affective manifests itself in a number of ways and in various modalities. Some of my interviewees describe emotional responses in relation to Zionism, but most of them often used the more generic term ‘feeling’, which has both bodily and psychological connotations.

One of the most interesting of these is in how some of the interviewees defined Zionism. Three of them defined it almost exclusively in affective terms, with very minimal ideological content.

A Zionist, very simply, is someone who is devoted to Israel.

‘What does being a Zionist mean?

Love of Israel, for Zion. There must be an Israel.

‘What makes you a Zionist?

Love of Israel? Love of the fact that we have Israel. Love of the importance of Israel. I don’t know.

Others claimed they were not Zionist but qualified that statement with a demonstration of how intensely affectively invested they were in some part of Zionist discourse:

What does it mean being a Zionist? [she laughs] [Long pause]. I don’t probably do enough. I feel very strongly … I belong to B’nai Brith but I don’t … it’s a failing on my part that I don’t do as much as I can. I buy Israeli goods when I can, I do that sort of thing, I don’t say that I want to be a Zionist and live there.

So is that for you the defining, kind of definition.

I think so, I think a true Zionist wants to live there and be part of the society.

Arguably, the most interesting example of this is in a short exchange between Harry and Zena who were interviewed together:

Zionists are like, it’s upper, it’s a very high way of communism and things like that. Their belief …

They’re very ideological.

Zena: Yeah. A proper Zionist is [to herself] is probably not a farmer. [Back to me] … When they went over and they were given the land, the schnooks, as they call them, if you ever saw General Marcus.

No.

You never saw Cast A Giant Shadow?

Oh yes! I did.

Now that was Israel, how those schnooks built a road with their bare hands. You wouldn’t get that here. They worked day night, they were being killed left, right and centre, enemies were shooting them. Because those schnooks made that mountain and that’s how Jerusalem became free. Not because of darling England or any other countries but because of the Israelis themselves. […] To be a true Zionist, is a thing going. If I went to Israel and I lived in Israel, I’d be there because I wanted to be there. I like the people, I like the weather, I love the beaches… ah dear (sighs)… I like the honey cake, I like everything about Israel.

In this exchange, Harry is defining Zionism, using the definition of Popular Zionism set out here, that is, Zionism as primarily affective and practised in popular culture. Zena, on the other hand, is defining it in accordance with some parts of the classical definition: it is a political ideology, ‘a very high way of communism’ and is practised by warrior/farmer Jews up building the land in acts of Jewish national autonomy – ‘because those schnooks made that mountain and that’s how Jerusalem became free. Not because of darling England or any other countries but because of the Israelis themselves’. Zena is not one of ‘those schnooks’ so insistently refuses to call herself Zionist. Looking at the sum of her interview, however, it is possible to argue that Zena is the most Zionist of the interviewees. Not only is her transcript full of Zionist common sense, but the degree of commitment she claims to have towards Israel is extraordinary. She, paradoxically, reveals this degree of commitment in refusing to define as a Zionist and in doing so offers a more appropriate definition for Zionism in Britain in the post-1967 conjuncture. This is a Zionism which is primarily affective as opposed to ideological – ‘I feel for Israel, I’ve got compassion for Israel’ – and one that is practised in popular culture and the every day as opposed to politically or institutionally – ‘I like the people, I like the weather, I love the beaches … ah dear (sighs) … I like the honey cake, I like everything about Israel’. (Even the act of talking about Israel in the interview causes an affective response in Zena – ‘ah dear (sighs)’.) Harry is correct in this exchange: Zena is, arguably, an ideal subject of Popular Zionism.

Another aspect of Popular Zionism’s primarily affective qualities is the many descriptions the interviewees gave of their intense affective response of physically being in Israel. Rose talked about an ‘amazing feeling’ as soon as she gets off the plane in Israel:

And we visit very often and we love everything about it when we’re there […] Every time I get off the plane […] You can never go to Israel for the first time more than once. So when I went in 1967 that was the first time I went and that was an amazing, amazing feeling that I’m actually here.

Zena talked about the intense affectivity of her experience of being in Israel for the State of Israel’s 60th birthday, so specifically in relation to Zionism, and does so in a way where language cannot adequately represent the intensity of affect she feels being there:

A whole coach load of us were there for their sixtieth, which was their diamond anniversary, which was absolutely magnificent. And unless you were there you cannot … even I talked to you for hours … to be there … and that’s it.

Jeremy talks about his intensely affective response in relation to physically being by the Western Wall, a place that matters as much in the discursive formations of religious Judaism as in those of modern Zionism.

… as I walk up to the wall, that last metre or so, the emotion comes over me, I see their faces and I just break up. I don’t get that anywhere else.

Oh really, but you define…

I’m not religious. […]

So what is it about the wall that makes you emotional if you’re not religious?

I don’t know

Is it religious do you think?

No. It can’t be. It’s a place for me to release my feelings. It just triggers it. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe they’re in there anyway, my emotions. And this is somebody saying you can do it here, you’re allowed. Maybe I keep it bottled up, I don’t know.

And there you…

And there I feel it’s the right to place to feel it’. (Jeremy)

Jeremy’s affective response to the wall is particularly interesting, because he claims not to be religious (Jeremy questions the existence of God in an earlier part of his interview) and he defines as a Zionist but in non-classical terms. The Western Wall can only produce the intense affective response that it does in Jeremy if he subscribes in some way to either Jewish religious or modern Zionist discourses. Jews who do not subscribe to these discourses do not have this sort of reaction. From Jeremy’s affective responses to being in the presence of the wall, it is clear that whether he realises it or not, he has been territorialised by either religious Judaism or the parts of it which modern Zionism has secularised. Having been territorialised by Zionism in a way that produces an intensely affective response he, like Zena, becomes an ideal subject of Popular Zionism, as defined using Grossberg’s theoretical approach.

Popular Zionism and popular culture

If, for Grossberg, popular variants of ideologies primarily territorialise the plane of affect, the practice they mobilise happens at its intersection with the planes of everyday life and popular culture. This is true of Popular Zionism. In the most general terms, Graham and Boyd (2010) found that 76 percent of the British Jews they surveyed in 2010 felt that Israel was relevant to their day-to-day lives (p. 10). According to my interviews, this everyday Zionist practice manifested itself most commonly, not in belonging to Zionist organisations (although some do) or in making aliyah, but in their media and pop cultural consumption and the consumer decisions they made, most significantly as tourists.

One of the key ways Popular Zionism is practised is in relation to the consumption of Hollywood feature films. Exodus (1960), one of Hollywood’s most successful Zionist feature films, is mentioned by an interviewee as having a definitive effect on their relatives’ becoming-Zionist.

He wasn’t a Zionist that was the strangest thing … we were Zionists and he wasn’t a Zionist, his wife wasn’t a Zionist. She saw the film Exodus …

and she suddenly said, “we’re all going to Israel”, and she took her whole family.

Zena was the participant whose interview suggested she practised Zionism as cultural consumption most strongly. In it she mentions Exodus, Cast A Giant Shadow (1966), Raid on Entebbe (1976), Evergreen (1985), Schindler’s List (1993), Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus (captured by the Israelis in the 1967 war), Israeli singer Dudi Fischer, a Yedhiot Arahanot commemorative book of Israeli history and her own amateur journalistic practice in the service of Zionism. In her interview, she told an interesting story which articulates pop cultural consumption, tourism and the Zionisation of the Holocaust: Julie:

Did you tell them we went to Schindler’s grave?

She did, yeah. [Laughs]

She said.

As Popular Zionist tourists in Israel, Zena and her friends feel moved to visit Oskar Schindler’s grave because, one can safely presume, of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. In the above retelling of the story, a Hollywood narrative of the Holocaust becomes articulated to classical Zionism – ‘he’s buried near Herzl’ – partly because post-1967, Zionism becomes fused with the Holocaust in Western culture and partly because Spielberg interweaves the Holocaust with Zionism in Schindler’s List (Loshitzky, 1997). The excerpt above provides a neat example of Popular Zionist praxis: the articulation of the Holocaust and Zionism, producing an affective ritual (visiting a grave) at the intersection of two pop cultural practices (Hollywood cinema and tourism).

One of the most significant cultural activities through which Popular Zionism is practised is tourism to Israel, more generally. A brief statistical snapshot indicates the steady and substantial growth in numbers of British Jews who have visited Israel during the post-1967 conjuncture. In 1968, 16 percent had visited (Krausz, 1969b). By 1978, 26 percent had visited (Kosmin and Levy, 1983). By 1995, 78 percent had visited (Kosmin et al., 1997). By 2004, 91 percent had visited (Cohen and Kahn-Harris, 2004) and 95 percent had visited by 2010 (Graham and Boyd, 2010). Two of my interviewees locate the origins of the growth in the war itself:

It bought it to their attention … “this is something I can be proud of and I’m going to Israel. I’m going on holiday.”

I think that that had an effect… Like I said before, it really woke people up to that fact about Israel and from then onwards, people started to actually go a lot more. People started to actually go on their holidays.

This sentiment is reinforced in the existing academic literature: ‘the Six Day War played a particularly significant role with regard to tourism, by making Israel definitely better known and visible on the international scene’ (Della Pergola et al., 2000: 30). There has been little research on why British Jews have continued to visit Israel throughout this period. Most research on tourism from the Jewish Diaspora to Israel has focused on American Jewry, and most of this on tourism in which the Israeli State has played an organisational role, for example, the Birthright experience (Ioannides and Cohen-Ioannides, 2004) with an attempt to inculcate some form of Zionism into these tourists. Three of my interviewees explain why they have visited Israel as independent tourists during this period – as a way to support the Israeli economy.

I thought that if I was spending any money I might as well have given it to Israel.

Oh no, say it, say it…

It is here we can see tourism as a form of Popular Zionist praxis. These interviewees who do not self-define as Zionist, who do not belong to Zionist organisations and who do not want to make aliyah act in support of the State of Israel on the plane of popular culture. To be clear, this is not to argue that all British Jews who consume Zionist films or travel to Israel are Popular Zionists; rather that those who are Popular Zionists (have naturalised some negotiated form of Zionist ideology into their common sense understanding of Palestine/Israel, and experience Zionism as an affective disposition) are far more pre-disposed to living out Popular Zionism where the affective planes intersect with the planes of popular culture and everyday life.

Conclusion

This article has tried to make sense of what happened to Zionism in Britain’s Jewish community after the 1967 war. It has done this using the theoretical perspective developed by Lawrence Grossberg in bringing the thought of Deleuze and Guattari’s to bear on British cultural studies. It argues that the effect of the war was that Zionism became the hegemonic way that British Jews made sense of events in Palestine/Israel. This is most clearly demonstrated in the way that fragments of Zionist ideology appear in the common sense of British Jews, particularly in those who explicitly refuse to identify as Zionist. The Zionism that becomes hegemonic in the post-1967 conjuncture, however, is not Zionism in the classical sense. First, it omits one of Classical Zionism’s defining ideological components – the imperative to make aliyah. Similarly, it does not inspire Classical Zionist praxis: actually making aliyah or joining a Zionist organisation. In Grossberg’s terms, Zionist ideology does not territorialise the institutional or political planes. It does, however, territorialise the affective plane of the British Jewish social formation. This can be seen in (a) the way Zionism is defined by some of the interviewees as ‘love of Israel’, (b) the intense affective engagement British Jews have with (parts of) Zionist ideology and (c) the intense affectivity triggered by physically being in Israel. Most importantly, it can be seen in the way that Zionism exists in the post-1967 British Jewish social formation more as an affective disposition towards Israel than as an ideology. The practice this sort of Zionism mobilises occurs largely on the planes of everyday life and popular culture – primarily media consumption and tourism. For all these reasons, it is more accurate to call the Zionism that dominates British Jewry in the post-1967 conjuncture Popular Zionism.

The empirical research used in this article has limited its reach to the British Jewish context. There has been research on the effect of the June 1967 war on different communities in the British Jewish diaspora, most notably Eli Lederhendler’s edited collection The Six Day War and World Jewry (which curiously omits the British Jewish community). Using a more classically social and political sciences approach, its authors have largely focused on the institutional and political planes of the various social formations they have investigated. It would be interesting to see what their analyses would have yielded had they explored the planes of affect, popular culture and everyday life. Such is the depth of feeling for Israel across the Jewish Diaspora, at least anecdotally, that it is unlikely that Popular Zionism is an exclusively British phenomenon and that some sort of local variation would appear in the Diaspora too. This is only something that further empirical research will uncover.