Nostalgia and political analysis: A perspective from the Israeli case
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221098028 |
| Author | Yaacov Yadgar |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221098028
Politics
2025, Vol. 45(1) 3 –18
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221098028
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Nostalgia and political
analysis: A perspective
from the Israeli case
Yaacov Yadgar
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
I argue here for the relevance and importance of the study of nostalgia for political analysis.
Focusing on the case of Israel, I propose that a study of nostalgia can yield, at least in the case at
hand, insightful views of political reality that other approaches to the study of politics may fail to
expose. Specifically, I focus on a nostalgia prevalent among the dominant Ashkenazi ethno-class,
accompanied by a Mizrahi ‘counter’ nostalgia. I argue that these nostalgias tell us volumes – like
other nostalgias can do – about the ways people and their socio-political groups understand their
world and their place within it in the present and formulate their hopes for the future. In this,
nostalgia proves to be an important part of the toolkit of the study of politics, alongside the study
of political myth and symbols.
Keywords
interpretive politics, nostalgia, Israel, Palestine, Zionism
Received: 9th November 2021; Revised version received: 4th April 2022; Accepted: 6th April 2022
Introduction
Allow me to ‘reverse’ what has become a traditional structure of social-scientific articles
and open with the concrete before considering its more general reasoning:
Reflecting on the ethics of memory, Avishai Margalit (2011: 271–5) turns naturally to
discuss the political significance of nostalgia. Noting that as a ‘moral sentiment’ nostalgia
can become dangerous, he explains that nostalgia ‘tends to distort the reality of the time
past [. . .] in a morally disturbing way’. Nostalgia ‘idealizes its object [. . .] and locates it
in a time of great purity and innocence, thus the object [. . .] is enshrined with purity and
innocence’. More immediately socio-politically relevant are instances where nostalgia
becomes ‘vicarious memory’, as one’s memory is ‘plugged’ by memories of others.
Corresponding author:
Yaacov Yadgar, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Oxford St. Anne’s College, Oxford OX2 6HS, UK.
Email: yaacov.yadgar@area.ox.ac.uk
1098028POL0010.1177/02633957221098028PoliticsYadgar
research-article2022
Article
4 Politics 45(1)
A ‘manifestation of moral failure’, the ‘nostalgic kitsch’, thus carries obvious political
imports: ‘Memory, like any other form of knowledge, is power. Whoever controls mem-
ory and forgetting gains in power’. Nostalgia ‘can easily be put in service of brutality’
justifying acts (such, for example, that would aim to restore the presumed purity of the
past) that would otherwise be indefensible. More specifically, there is the matter of the
‘politics of memory, namely, the means and the ways in which memory – especially col-
lective memory – is shaped and manipulated by political agencies, for political gains’.
Importantly, ‘the politics of memory is also the politics of forgetting; creating and main-
taining social amnesia by political agencies’.
Margalit offers two corresponding examples of nostalgia, which he suggests are equiv-
alent in their ‘systematic distortion’ and ‘idealizing [of] the past’, their promotion of
‘sentimentality’ and ‘kitsch morality’. His examples are taken from the Israeli scene, and
they have to do with ‘the conflict in our contested debatable land Israel/Palestine’.
Identifying all main actors in this conflict as ‘saturated with vicarious nostalgia’, Margalit
ties together, and in effect equates (in terms of their ethical insidiousness) two memories
of the past, which he sees as exemplifying the ‘pernicious nostalgia in our promised/
punished land’:
On one hand, some people of my generation and upbringing nourish Ashkenazi nostalgia for the
pristine society of the Yishuv (the pre-state Hebrew community in Palestine) and to the early
days of Israel, before the invasion of immigrants from Islamic countries. On the other hand,
there is the counter nostalgia of some immigrants from Islamic countries, saying, we lived
happily in our innocent and pure communities in Marrakesh, and Bagdad, based on respect for
parents and elders, till you soulless Ashkenazi transposed us to your state and ruined, beyond
repair, our innocence and beautiful form of life. (Margalit, 2011: 274)
Yet, contrary to Margalit’s bundling together of the two cases (I will dub these, for the
sake of simplicity, respectively as the Ashkenazi and the Mizrahi nostalgias) as exempli-
fying the same ethical–political import of nostalgia, it is not hard to see that there are
some obvious, politically crucial differences between the two. The two nostalgias are held
and propagated by groups that occupy different social classes and have distinctly different
access to power and privilege. To put it simply, one is the nostalgia of the dominant, the
other the nostalgia of the dominated (at least as far as we focus solely on the Jewish-
Israeli majority; as I will mention shortly, the Palestinian minority’s presence also looms
large here, but rather implicitly so).
Needless to say, the two nostalgias both remember and forget (rather: silence) ele-
ments of the past they valorise. Yet looked at politically, that is: with a consideration of
the political, power-related implications of this remembering/forgetting they clearly
differ from each other: While the Ashkenazi nostalgia forcefully erases or silences the
Palestinian presence in the ‘purity’ of the ‘pristine’ Good Old Land of Israel (it is interest-
ing to note that Margalit himself, while immediately situating this nostalgia in the ‘con-
tested debatable land Israel/Palestine’ leaves this silencing out of the story, making it
primarily about the relation between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel), the Mizrahi
nostalgia, at best, silences chapters of discord between a Muslim majority and a Jewish
minority in Arab and Muslim lands.
Each of the two nostalgias also offers a rather radically different political horizon
(even if not a political programme per-se) than the other. They each offer, in other words,
a view into motivations for political action, allow us an understanding of how the political
agents involved view themselves and their political counterparts and teach us something
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