The central symbol of Jewish identity today is the nation of Israel, the magnet of international Jewish loyalty and allegiance, an obsessive attraction that is difficult for most non-Jews to fathom. Ironically, even relatively few Jews living out of Israel know many details about the Jewish state; large numbers of diaspora Jews know only the religious or Zionist legends about the place, both views grounded in the myths of  Jewish martyrology and redemption. "The vast majority of Jews have no familiarity with the currents of Israeli cultural and even political life," notes Charles Liebman, ".... Those that are devoted to Israel generally focus on the external threat [by non-Jewish nations against Israel] rather than the internal features of Israeli society." [LIEBMAN, Rel Trends, p. 306] "American Jews ... are not interested or knowledgeable [about Israel] as is frequently assumed," says Chaim Waxman, "... In a number of surveys of American Jewish attitudes toward Israel, most of them are quite ignorant not only of Hebrew but of the basic aspects of Israeli society and culture. In a 1986 national sample, only one-third of American Jews were aware of such elementary facts as that Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres are not from the same political party, that Conservative and Reform rabbis cannot officiate weddings in Israel, and that Arab Israeli and Jewish Israeli children do not generally go to the same schools." [WAXMAN, p. 136] Ze'ev Chafets, an American Jew who moved to live permanently in Israel in 1967, notes that

 

       "During the first few months in Jerusalem, I found I knew very little

        about Arabs -- and not much more about Jews ... In the states I had

        been considered pretty Jewish by my friends ... but in Israel I suddenly

        found myself little more than a tourist in what I increasingly wanted to

        see as my own country." [CHAFETS, p. 15-16]

 

    An "age-old ritual" for American Jews who visit Israel is to pay the Jewish National Fund $10 and plant a tree in honor or memory of a friend or relative.  Preying on diaspora sentiment, it is a $50 million-per year business. In 2000 it was discovered by the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv that workers at the popular Jerusalem planting site "cynically uproot the saplings planted by tourists to make way for the new day's busloads." [SONTAG, D., 7-3-2000, p. A4]

 

    "Many American Jews," says Charles Liebman, a professor in Israel, "... have created their own conception of Israel. This is the chunk of Israel that they see and/or imagine they see or they are shown when they visit Israel. Even when they stay for an extended period of time. I am impressed by how vivid this partial image remains. It is not an Israel of self-serving and inept leaders, of a rude populace, and ... an xenophobic culture. Rather, it is a society that excludes universalist sentiment wrapped in symbols of Jewish particularism." [LIEBMAN, p. 309] For most Jews, notes Adam Garfinkle, "Israel is more of an icon than a real place [GARFINKEL, p. 144] ... The Jewish sensibility and the Israeli sensibility is suffused with metaphors of chosenness, slavery, exile (galut), wandering in the wilderness, liberation, a covenant over the land of Israel, and the redemption of it, that resound from Biblical narratives." [GARFINKEL, p. 22]

 

     Many prominent Zionists have restrained, or hidden, fundamental Jewish ethnocentric sentiments to declare pan-human messianic statements about the Jewish state that are, in historical context, as we shall soon see, ludicrous. "Zionism," insisted Solomon Goldman, president of the Zionist Organization of America, "... became a demonstration without parallel of the creative power of justice and democracy." [GAL, A., 1986, p. 381]

 

    Over time, notes Jonathan Sarna, "the Zion [Israel] of the American Jewish imagination, in short, became something of a fantasy land: a seductive heaven-on-earth, where enemies were vanquished, guilt assuaged, hopes realized, and deeply felt longings satisfied." [SARNA, A Proj, p. 41-42]  Marc Ellis, in discussing the work of Israeli author Avishai Margalit, notes that

 

     "In the Jewish context a glimpse of Masada, or the Wall, or the

     Temple Mount is enough to move the 'Jewish heart,' and the

     marketing of Israel takes full advantages of these images. Kitsch

     can also be politicized and become, in Margalit's terms, part of

     state ideology whose 'emblem is total innocence.'" [ELLIS, M., 1990,

     p. 34]

 

     Colin Shindler notes the widespread Jewish American efforts to mythify the Jewish homeland and control its depiction in the world mass media:

 

      "The 'Israel' that was promoted [after 1967] tended to be one of unreal,

      utopian dimensions, where public relations had replaced reality ...

      Obsession with the media spawned new organizations, expensive

      consultants and vigilante journalists to cope with real and imaginary

      anti-Israel bias in the press." [SHINDLER, p. 96-97]

    In 2001, during an extended Palestinian uprising against Israel occupation, when Israeli brutality against Palestinians was becoming difficult to veil, the Jewish state hired a New York public relations company -- Rubenstein Associates -- to control popular perceptions about the place. To improve israel's image, Rubenstein suggested less security guards around prime minister Ariel Sharon and painting Israeli weapons used on Palestinian rioters orange "to make it clear to television viewers that solders are firing nonlethal rounds." Cleaning up after Arab riots was also thought to make for a better image on TV. "But Palestinian officials and young boys interviewed at the Ayosh junction in the West Bank town of Ramallah," noted the Baltimore Sun, "one place singled out by Rubenstein as a problem area, say the proposals prove Israel would rather save face than save lives." [HERMANN, P., 6-29-01]

 

     An Israeli scholar, Boaz Evron, notes that many American Jews "feel ... an obligation toward Israel ... Israel, for them, is not ... a political space devoted to the continuation of a normal national life, but a historical revenge ... [EVRON, p. 110-112] ... Perhaps a main factor in Israel's psychological hold on the Jewish Diaspora is that part of the Diaspora that has lost its religious framework but has remained locked within the Jewish caste and uses Israel as a means of venting its complexes by proxy. These Jews imagine themselves to be part of the Israeli people, while maintaining their own comfortable existence in the Diaspora ... thus Israel deliberately helps Diaspora Jews maintain an illusory existent identity. It is in the obvious interests of the Israeli leadership to prevent such an honest self-appraisal which might lead to a different, genuine Jewish identity." [EVRON, p. 112]

 

     Jewish American commentator Joyce Starr notes that

 

     "American Jews may talk about Israel extensively, petition on the nation's

     behalf, and give generously from their bank accounts, but this does

     not mean they 'know' Israel. American Jews read voraciously about

     the country and are familiar with the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, and the Green

     Line [that separates Israel from the West Bank]. Yet the human

     perspective is all but out of reach." [STARR, 1990, p. 147]    

 

     In paraphrasing the comments of the chairman of the North American Jewish Forum, Starr also asserts that the American Jewish-Israel relationship

 

      "was built with the consent of the leadership in both places for their

      own convenience. Israel needed emigration, as well as political and 

      financial support, whereas American Jewry was engrossed in establishing

      the infrastructure of a burgeoning Jewish community in the United States.

      The way to accomplish both objectives was to build a black-and-white

      stereotype of Israel as either an idealized society or as a society with

      security problems. These stereotypes, in turn, stimulated philanthropy

      and political action." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 151]

 

     In 1998, Rabbi Marvin Hier (of Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance fame) censored an in-house movie at his Moriah Films center. Entitled "A Dream No More," the film was scheduled to be shown at various sites on the occasion of Israel's fiftieth anniversary celebration. Hier scrapped the project because it wasn't flattering enough to the Jewish state. To the film's directors (Mark Harris and Stuart Schoffman), noted the Jerusalem Post, "the demise of Dream reflects, at bottom, the unwillingness of American Jews to face the realities of Israeli life and history as a mixture of light and shadow." [TUGEND, T., 11-16-98, p. 7]

 

     "Zionism conjured up a grand vision of ardent young men and women earnestly engaged in the selfless task of creating and new and better humanity," says Jonathan Sarna, "This utopian view of Zionism, linked as it was both to the self-image of American Jews and to their highest religious aspirations, had less and less to do with the realities of the Middle East ... All of the historic American Jewish images of Israel -- from the early image of agrarian pioneers, to the twentieth-century image of the 'model state' -- spoke to the needs of American Jews and reflected their ideals and fantasies, rather than the contemporary realities of Jewish life in the land of Israel." [SARNA, J., p. 58]

 

      "Israel became a wellspring for a variety of enriching experiences and myths," says Sylvia Barack-Fishman, "-- paradoxically, making American Jews feel both more Jewish and more physically empowered in the western world." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 277]  "If American Jews were denied  ... opportunities to act out vigilance for Israel," wonders Israeli Bernard Avishai, "what would be left of their Judaism? ... Is it possible that American Jews now need to invent anti-Semites to feel like Jews?" [AVISHAI, B., p. 353]

 

     As Israeli Boas Evron observes:

 

     "When you try to explain to American Jews that we [Israelis] are not,

     in fact, in danger of annihilation [from Arabs], that for many years to

     come we will be stronger than any possible combination, that Israel

     has not, in fact, been in danger of physical annihilation since the first

     cease-fire of the War of Independence in 1948, and that the average

     human and cultural level of Israeli society, even in its current

     deteriorated state, is still much higher than that of the surrounding

     Arab society, and that this level rather than the quantity and

     sophistication of our arms constitutes our military advantage --

     you face resistance and outrage. And then you realize another

     fact: this image is needed by many American Jews in order for

     them to free themselves of their guilt regarding the Holocaust.

     Moreover, supporting Israel is necessary because of the loss of

     another focal point to their Jewish identity ... They need to

     feel needed. They also need the 'Israeli hero' as a social and

     emotional compensation in a society in which the Jew is

     not usually perceived as embodying the characteristics of

     the tough, manly fighter. Thus, the Israeli provides the

     American Jew with a double, contradictory image -- the

     virile superman, and the potential Holocaust victim -- both of

     whose components are far from reality." [ELLIS, M., 1990,

     p. 37]

 

     "American Jews aren't usually aware of their ignorance about us," an Israeli "intellectual" told (new Jewish American immigrant to Israel) Wendy Orange on her sixth night in the Jewish state, "Why do you people always superimpose your fantasies on our reality?" [original author's emphases: ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 25]  Jewish American Joyce Starr recalls addressing  an audience of "major donors of one of the largest American Jewish organizations" and making the mistake of mentioning some problems in Israel. "The hostess of the event," notes Starr, "became visibly furious ... So glacial was the reception [to me] ... An elderly grandmother-type finally took pity on my shock and confusion. 'Darling, you must understand,' she comforted. 'Everything you said is true, but you never should have said it here.'" [STARR, J., 1990, p. 140]

 

      "I used to conduct a program involving UJA-Federation young leadership types, called 'Images of Israel,'" says Jonathan Woocher, "It was kind of a Thematic Apperception Test, using photographs to elicit responses regarding attitudes towards Israel. What has always astounded me was the enormous range of values, attitudes, and emotions that American Jews were projecting onto Israel -- Israel the heroic, Israel the threatened, Israel the bearer of ancient traditions, and so on. To be sure, those are pieces of the reality, but the responses were more interesting for what they revealed of the respondents: indeed, Israel was being used to help American Jews make sense of their own identity. To me that is clearly something which is not a basis for a healthy relationship." [WOOCHER, 1990, p. 33]

 

    The large numbers of Jews from Israel living in the United States are even a source of aggravation for some American Jews, whose myths prefer that the emigrants remain happy in the Jewish homeland as role-model Zionists. "American Jews," says Israeli Moshe Shokeid, "... are bewildered by the presence of Israelis in their midst ... American Jews who want to restore the categories and definitions which constitute the order and values of the respective Israeli, Jewish, and Zionist identities, employ a subtle strategy: they ignore the yordim [Israelis in America], they avoid associating with them, and express that disdain and resentment as much as their code of civility allows." Some American Jews refer to Israelis in America as "Fish," "the abbreviations stand for 'fucking Israeli shithead.'" [SHOKEID, 1998, p. 507] By 1981, the World Jewish Congress estimated the number of yordim in the U.S. to be between 300,000 and 500,000 -- "perhaps one for every six Israelis living in Israel. They create a difficult situation for Diaspora Jews, partly because of the yordim's own sense of embarrassment, and partly because Israel denigrates them and is embarrassed by the undiagnosed phenomenon they represent." [WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 67]

 

     Among the most important nationalist legends in the modern state of Israel (and for many in the international Jewish community) has been the story of Masada. In Israeli/Jewish lore, 900 Jewish zealots nobly defended themselves for months against attack and then committed mass suicide at a remote desert fortress near the Dead Sea in 73 AD rather than surrender to besieging Roman legions. The Masada tale of desperate Jewish warriors has popularly been regarded as historical fact and has served as heroic symbol -- a "last stand" in Jewish collective consciousness, a story where Jews who were revolting against Roman domination chose to die for their Jewish heritage rather than suffer oppression at the hands of Gentiles. Masada has embodied a range of traditional Jewish beliefs:  Jewry as a "nation apart" against all others, the few against the many, Jewish heroism against Gentile hordes, and dedication to each other to the point of death as itself a noble endeavor. Masada story has long been a source of Jewish and Israeli pride, especially since the founding of modern Israel in 1948. "Masada is not just a story," notes Israeli historian Nachum Ben-Yehuda, "Masada provides, certainly for my generation of Israelis, an important ingredient in the very definition of our Jewishness and Israeli 'identity.'" [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 5]  "Masada," writes Yitzhak Landau in his famous patriotic poem to Israel and Jewish solidarity, "shall not fall again." [BENVENISTI, p. 35]

 

     Astoundingly, however, the Masada legend of courageous Jewish defenders is false. Its historical basis was distorted and embellished to serve the propagandistic needs of early Israeli nation-building. Nachum Ben-Yehuda wrote an entire volume in 1995 that catalogues, not only that the heroic version of the Masada story is not true, but that it was consciously fabricated to serve Israeli propaganda about Jewish identity, especially in the early post-Holocaust period when the Jews of Europe were perceived to have so passively met their fate at the hands of Hitler.

 

     Virtually everything modern scholarship knows about Masada comes from the writings of Flavius Josephus, a man -- who born a Jew -- joined the Romans and is generally considered in Jewish circles to be a traitor to his people (an odd source for heroizing ancient Jewry). A close reading of him, notes Ben-Yehuda, reveals that the "zealots" of Masada were actually Sicarri -- "assassins," of both Romans and Jews. The reason they fled to Masada was, not because they were fighting Roman domination, but that they were driven out of Jerusalem by fellow Jews. The Sicarri then "raided nearby Jewish villages, killed the inhabitants, and took their food." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 9] They killed about 700 Jews in Ein Gedi alone, "mostly women and children." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 36]

 

     From this core of information about Masada's dubious "defenders" provided by Josephus, Israeli propagandists "socially constructed a shrine for Jewish martyrdom and heroism" [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 190] whereby the entire nation of modern Israel was itself conceived as a Masada, isolated defenders against gentile hostility towards Jews everywhere, "a symbol of the heroism of Israel for all generations ...  [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 87] ... Masada was not destroyed. It became a symbol of the Jewish will to live as a nation, of refusal to surrender to the forces threatening its extinction." [ BEN-YEHUDA, p. 123] "In the late fifties and early sixties," says Meron Benvenisti, "Masada became a national shrine." [BENVENISIT, p. 38]

 

     Yet, "the Masada mythical narratives," adds Ben-Yehuda, "was consciously invented, fabricated, and supported by key moral entrepreneurs and organizations in the Yishuv [Israeli community] ... [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 307] ... [While Masada's defenders were really] "thieves and assassins who robbed and killed other Jews." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 300] For years, Israeli army recruits were taken to the ruins of the Masada fortress to swear allegiance to the Jewish state, ritually stating "endless devotion" to Israel at this "place of splendor, glory and majesty." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 147] And Israeli newspaper in 1964 called Masada Israel's "most cherished national asset" and the "mausoleum of the saints of the nation." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 185] A popular patriotic slogan became "Masada shall not fall again." The Mossad's assassination division was even called "Masada."

 

     Home of a band of fleeing Jewish murderers or not, the Masada story has not been without its Jewish critics on other terms. The idea of Israel itself as a veritable Masada country, a garrison state with a desperate back-to-the-wall "we against them" worldview (sometimes described as the "Masada complex") has worried some Israeli commentators. Is collective suicide an appropriate role model for any people? How would this affect Israeli self-conception and behavior in the nuclear bomb world? Is an alienated "last stand" psychology a healthy premise to interact with the rest of the world?  Seymour Hersh quotes the comments of an 'expert who has been involved in government studies on the nuclear issue in the Middle East for two decades: "Israel has a well thought-out nuclear strategy and, if sufficiently threatened, they will use it." [HERSH, S., p. 92]  "Many senior nonproliferation officials in the American government," adds Hersh, "were convinced by the early 1990s that the Middle East remained the one place where nuclear weapons might be used [i.e., no other Middle Eastern country has nuclear weapons except Israel]." [HERSH, p. 92]

 

      "Our nationalists are leading us to Masada," once complained famed tank commander Yitzhak Ben-Ari, "in the sense that 'all the world is against us. We shall fight, and if we have a nuclear bomb, we shall use it.' And what will remain for us? Nothing." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 157]  "It is unavoidable," worried Israeli historian Benyamin Kedar, "that [nationalist] behavior influenced by identification with Masada will indeed resuscitate it. If the entire world is against us, then one begins to behave as if we are against the entire world and such behavior is bound to lead to ever-increasing isolation." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 246]

 

     It is clear that this Masada model is, of course, merely a secular, militant expression of the traditional religious "nation apart" syndrome itself, Jewish enclaves throughout history self-ghettoized against the non-Jewish Other. And as for the Masada myth itself, "time after time," notes Ben-Yehuda, Jews who are told that the Masada story of heroism is fake "elicit expressions ranging from mild discomfort to (much more frequently) anger and open hostility. My worse encounters have typically been with [Israeli] history teachers ... Obviously, the realization that a major element of one's personal and national identity was based on a biased and falsified myth is not an easy thing to deal with." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 311]

 

     Among the many forms of Masada mythologizing, in this case for American popular consumption, was a 1970 "historical novel," Masada, subtitled A Novel of Love, Courage, and the Triumph of the Human Spirit, by Ernest Ganz, described by a Kirkus Reviews reviewer as "a return to the days of heroes larger than life."  It was also the subject of an "8-hour TV epic from ABC-TV and Universal." [GANN, back cover and opening page] The Masada myth also saw American expression in 1987 when Jewish American Marvin David Levy, recently released after a two year prison term for his role in a drug smuggling ring, watched the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform his "dramatic oratorio, Masada, in its newly expanded version." The work, noted the Chicago Tribune, "emphasizes the triumph and tragedy of a heroic band that chose individual liberty at great personal cost." [VON RHEIM, J., p. 26]

 

     In 1971 Michael Rosenberg summarized American Jewry's irrational views of Israel succinctly:

 

     "Israel is the ultimate reality in the life of every living Jew today. I believe

     that Israel surpasses in importance Jewish ritual. It is more than the

     Jewish tradition; and, in fact, it is more than the Mosaic law itself. The

     anti-religious Jew who supports Israel is welcomed as a Jew and as

     an integral part of the community. The observant Jew who does not

     accept the centrality of Israel is not accepted and is rarely even

     tolerated. In dealing with those who oppose Israel, we are not

     reasonable and we are not rational. Nor should we be." [ROSENBERG,

     M., p. 82]

 

                                    ****************************

 

     While Jews have a deeply internalized millennium-old mythology about the place, a crucial instrument in formulating a more broadly favorable opinion about Israel in America among non-Jews is the mass media. In the 1950s the New York public relations company of Edward Gottleib commissioned a Jewish author, Leon Uris, to write a novel "to create a more sympathetic attitude towards Israel." [FINDLEY, p. xxv] This novel, Exodus, published in 1958, "did more to popularize Israel with the American public," says public relations expert Art Stevens, "than any other single presentation in the media." [FINDLEY, p. xxvi] Until Exodus, most Americans knew nothing about Zionism or the new nation of Israel. Most still have the same essential ignorance, but Uris's novel became number one on the New York Times best seller list for nineteen weeks and became, notes Edward Tivnan, "the primary source of knowledge about Jews and Americans that most Americans had." [TIVNAN, P. 51] The New York Times described the book when it first came out as "a passionate summary of the inhuman treatment of the Jewish people in Europe, the exodus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to Palestine, and the triumphant founding of the new Israel." [TIVNAN, p. 51]  This "new Israel" was founded out of a victorious war against Arab armies in 1948. "In books, movies, and TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s," says Stephen Green, "the Jewish state was depicted as having defeated the Arabs against overwhelming odds, contrary to virtually every professional strength estimate of the opposing forces that were made at the time of the war itself." [GREEN, S, p. 75] "Shortly before the outbreak of [the 1967] war in June, President Lyndon Johnson's intelligence experts debated whether it would take a week or ten days for Israel to demolish its enemies." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 148]

 

     The hardcover Exodus edition was still in print in the 1990s; a paperback edition was still going strong at its sixty-third printing. Uris, a high school drop-out who flunked three English classes and joined the marines at the age of seventeen, is boldly self-referential in a later novel, Mitla Pass (1988). Here an Israeli official says to the novel's main character, a Jewish author, that "this would be the first American novel about Israel. It could be valuable in gaining favorable world opinion." [URIS, L., Mitla, p. 304] In real life, even David Ben Gurion, one of Israel's most revered prime ministers, said that "as a piece of propaganda [Exodus] is still the greatest thing ever written about Israel." [WHITFIELD, p. 77] "Although propaganda novels have occasionally punctuated the history of United States mass taste," writes Stephen Whitfield, "Exodus was unprecedented." [WHITFIELD, p. 77] The prominent Jewish novelist, Saul Bellow, observed that "admittedly, some people say Exodus was not much of a novel, but it was extraordinarily effective as a document and we need such documents now. We do not need stories like those of [fellow Jewish novelist] Philip Roth which expose unpleasant Jewish traits." [WHITFIELD, p. 79]

 

      Then came the Hollywood film based on the novel.  "Uris had the blessings of Hollywood before he wrote the book," notes Stephen Whitfield, "MGM had commissioned a novel about the birth of the Third Jewish Commonwealth [modern Israel] because it expected that a best seller would lengthen the lines at the box office." [WHITFIELD, p. 164] Pat Boone sang, "This land is mine, God gave it to me" in the Exodus sound track and there was such media-enflamed interest in the subject that Israel's El Al airlines created a 16-day tourist package that led visitors on a pilgrimage to the sites where Otto Preminger made his movie. [WHITFIELD, p. 79]  "People are the same no matter what they're called," says Eva Marie Saint in the movie. "Don't believe it," replies Paul Newman, "People have the right to be different." [WHITFIELD, p. 164] "In Exodus," notes Whitfield, "[the Jewish hero] battles not for the cause of democracy, nor for some cosmopolitan ideal of brotherhood, but as an unabashed [Jewish] nationalist." [WHITFIELD, p. 164]

 

     The book has sold, to date, over 20 million copies. [BREINES, p. 56]  "All my life I've heard I'm supposed to be a coward because I'm a Jew," the American Jewish captain of the ship, the Exodus, tells a Gentile nurse in the novel, "Let me tell you, kid. Every time the Palmach [a Jewish military branch in Palestine] blows up a British depot or knocks the hell out of some Arabs he's winning respect for me. He's making a liar out of everyone who tells me Jews are yellow. The guys over there are fighting my battle for respect ... understand that?" [CHAFETS, p. 218] The real-life Israeli captain, Yeheil Aranowicz, of the blockade-running ship, the Exodus, upon which the novel is based, was subsequently quoted as saying that "the type [of characters in the novel] never existed in Israel. The novel is neither history or literature." Informed of Captain Aranowicz's authoritative judgements, Uris responded, "Captain who? And that's all I have to say. I'm not going to pick on a light weight. Just look at my sales figures." [BREINES, p. 55]  Whatever the case, says Edward Tivnan, "the Israel of most Americans, including Jews, is still the Exodus version." [BREINES, p. 56]

      As Israeli writers Herbert Russcol and Margalit Banai noted in 1970 about the (overwhelmingly Jewish) illusory depictions of Israel:
     
    "It may be better to rely upon the views of foreign [non-Israeli] observers, but
     most of them are too sympathetic [to Israel]. Their hearts are in the right
     places and they love us too much to see us plain. They are blinded by their
     gallant cause. In all the books written about Israel by outsiders there are
     never whores or alcoholics or greedy bankers or black marketeers. There
     are only hero-farmers with a plow in one hand and a rifle in the other. We
     emerge from their pages rather like the cloth-dolls-of-Israel types which
     are sold in the souvenir shops of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv -- here is the happy
     kibbutznik, the attractive girl soldier, the earlocked Jerusalemite, the quaint new
     immigrant from Yemen." [RUSSCOL/BANAI, 1970, p. x]

     Such views still persist, dominantly, with the widespread help of an institutionalized suppression of counter views to the alleged Israeli reality. Results of a 1987 Roper Poll during the Intifada [Palestinian uprising] era, noted a Jewish scholar, "reveal positive attitudes towards Israel and American Jews on the part of the American public." These findings "are consistent with previous Roper results, [and] suggest that recent events, including the Iran-Contra affair, the Ivan Boesky insider trading scandal, and the Jonathan Pollard spy case have had little negative fall-out as far as attitudes towards Israel and American Jews are concerned." [TOBIN, p. 50] Jewish pollster Lewis Harris noted in an interview in 1986 that "support for Israel is high despite all the controversies, just as it's always been. At present, 78% of Americans feel very warm to Israel." [TOBIN, p. 51] In the Jewish community itself, during the Intifada, "at the largest annual meeting of American Jews, the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Organizations ... the Intifada was scarcely more than a side issue on the agenda." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 199]

 

     In 1979, Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian-American professor at Columbia University, was troubled by the growing use of Jewish Holocaust mythologies in the media towards latent political ends:

 

        "Anyone who watched the spring 1978 NBC presentation of

        Holocaust [by Graham Greene] was aware that at least part of

        the program was intended as a justification for Zionism -- even

        while at about the same time Israeli troops in Lebanon produced

        devastation, thousands of civilian casualties, and untold suffering."

        [SAID, Palestine, p. 55]

 

     More generally, Jewish anti-Zionist Alfred Lilienthal condemned the dominant pro-Israel slant in the American mass media:

 

      "Zionism did not waste time or energy on proving its extreme

      program to be morally and historically sound. All it had to do

      was to equate it with man's compassion for the victims of

      history's most cruel pogrom ... The capture of the American

      press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete.

      Magazines as well as newspapers, news stories, as well as

      editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist view of events,

      before, during, and after Partition [of Palestine, creating a

      Jewish state]." [LILIENTHAL, p. 122]

 

     Rabbi Jonathan and Judith Pearl note popular televisions steady diet of pro-Israel emphasis:

 

    "In a bit of serendipitous timing, the rebirth of the state of Israel and the

    establishment of a nationwide network television in America took place

    in the same year, 1948. Since then, these two phenomena have been

    inextricably linked, as scores of television dramas, comedies, and

    mini-series have turned to Israel and its stunning and turbulent history

    for subject matter. Many of these images have continued to be in the

    tradition of popular television, which has generally portrayed Jewish

    themes in a positive light ... [PEARL/PEARL p. 173] ... A sense of

    admiration for the Jewish state informs nearly all portrayals of

    Israel on American popular television over the past fifty years ...

    Confidence in Israel's ability to survive and thrive, and praise for

    its doing so, permeates television's portrayal of Israel in a way

    that has seen little, if any, wavering or hesitation from the earliest

    years of network television until the present time. Almost invariably,

    these depictions include the expressing of much admiration by

    non-Jews for Israel's heroism, achievements, and pioneer spirit."

    [PEARL/PEARL p. 193]

 

     After Israel's Six Day War with Arab states in 1967, notes Amnon Rubenstein, "the reaction of the world press was so overtly pro-Israel ... that it worried western diplomats in Arab capitals and forced Arab propagandists to radically alter their stand vis-a-vis the Jewish state." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 158]  Leon Hadar notes in overview that

 

           "Many of the same American Jews who led the fight against US

      intervention in Vietnam, and supported an unconditional withdrawal

      of US forces, ignore or defend the long and bloody Israeli

      occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the mistreatment of

      Palestinian population there.

           How have most supporters of Israel in the United States avoided

      dealing with their own political inconsistencies? The answer lies

      in their personal image-maintenance methods designed to avoid

      the cognitive dissonance between their perceptions of Israel and

      its reality. That, and an American media that for many years

      sympathized with the Israeli point of view, has helped them to

      preserve the Israeli fantasy." [HADER, p. 27]

 

      In Stephen Green's research of documents at the United States National Center for a book about the founding of the state of Israel, he noted that "the reality was so different from the myth as to be unrecognizable ... Selective historical knowledge has led to fundamental false impressions in America about Israel and about the Middle East dispute generally." [GREEN, p. 10-11]

 

     Another of the endless mythologies surrounding Israeli society is the enforced illusion that women fare better against male sexist-mores in the Jewish state. Israel has long propagated the symbols of young, noble women working the farm fields and female soldiers in the Israeli army. Lesley Hazelton, in her book Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths, is among those who have severely deflated such propaganda. "Myths compel respect, not necessarily by their truth, but because they are needed by those who believe in them," she says.

 

      "It is not a rational need, certainly not a conscious need: but it is often

      vital, since myths lay the basis for society's perceptions of itself, for its

      collective identity and the identity of every member in it ... The liberation

      of Israeli women is such a myth. For nearly three decades Israeli women

      have been the paradigm of women's liberation ... They have made an

      essential contribution to Israel's self-image as good and progressive,

      the antithesis of its notoriously and cruelly sexist Arab neighbors ...

      But the destructive aspects of this myth far outweigh its creative

      potential for Israeli women ... Their reality has been subordinated to

      the accepted image, and they have been relegated to the status of

      shadows, while the gap continues to widen between their public image

      and their real selves." [HAZELTON, p. 22]

     Herbert Russcol and Margalit Banai noted in 1970 the status of women in Israeli society:

     "In Israel, today, a wife is still called by the lowly, pejorative term that the Old
     Testament calls hers: isha, woman. Her husband is still addressed by his
     splendid biblical title, ba'al, master. In the glorious days of the Kings of Israel,
     upon marriage an isha became the physical possession, the chattel, of her ba'al
     along with his handmaidens and slaves, his ox and his ass. For this reason,
     'to marry a wife' and 'to become master' have the same root meanings in Hebrew.
     The infinitive liv'ol, commonly used in the sacred texts, means bluntly,
     and most vulgarly, to possess a woman sexually.
       What our fiercely free sabra girl thinks of referring to her husband a dozen times
     a day as 'my master,' with all the humiliating connotations described above, may
     well be imagined by the reader." [RUSSCOL, BANAI, 1970, p. 178]

     New York Jewish feminist Congresswoman Bella Abzug was caught off guard when she visited Israel in the same era. Despite the fact that Israel once had a female prime minister,

     "When I was sitting in the Knesset [Israeli Parliament] I noticed, to my surprise,
     that only 8 of the 120 members were women. One evening I met with some
     some of the most outstanding women in the country and challenged them on
     this. The reply I got was that since women in Israel have equality they don't
     need to prove it so much." [ABZUG, B., 1972, p. 228]

      In Israel itself, central propagandizing myths and blatant historical distortions are only recently being addressed (and this remains controversial) in that country's school system. In 1999, noted the New York Times wire services, "new, officially approved textbooks make plain that many of the most common Israeli beliefs are as much myth as fact. The new books say, for example, that it was the Israelis who had the military edge in the War of Independence. The books say that many Palestinians left their land not -- as has traditionally been taught -- because they smugly expected the Arab states to sweep back in victory, but because they were afraid and, in some cases, expelled by Israeli soldiers." [BRONNER, E., Rewriting, p. 1]

 

     "Only 10 years ago much of this was taboo," explained Eyal Naveh, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, "We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way Americans deal with Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths." [BRONNER, E., p. 1]

 

     A 1984 Israeli history text, for example, from the Israeli Education Ministry stated that (concerning Arab-Israel fighting from 1939-49), "The numerical standoff between the two sides in the conflict was horrifyingly unbalanced. The Jewish community numbered 650,000. The Arab states together came to 400 million. The chances were doubtful, and the Jewish community had to draft every possible fighter for the defense of the community." [BRONNER, p. 1]

 

     This traditional Jewish/Israeli view is only propaganda, a blatant misrepresentation of facts in mythologizing Jewish heroism and justifying mass expulsions of the Palestinians from their homeland. One of the new Israeli textbooks today concedes this: "On nearly every front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment, and also in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle." [BRONNER, p. 1]

 

    "Instead of portraying the early Zionists as pure, peace-loving pioneers who fell victim to Arab hatred," noted the Times, "the new historians focus on the early leaders' machinations to build an iron-walled Jewish state regardless of the consequences to non-Jews living there." [BRONNER, p. 1]

 

     Among long neglected issues only recently being publicly (albeit guardedly) addressed in America are those of Israeli-instigated atrocities against Arabs. As Israeli author Meron Benevisti noted in 2000,

 

     "Atrocities and acts of [Jewish] brutality characterized this period [the

     fighting with Arabs to formally create a Jewish state in 1948]: summary

     executions, rape, blowing up houses along with their occupants, looting

     and plundering, and leaving hundreds of villagers to their own devices

     in the fields, without food or water. The most serious atrocities were

     committed in the village of al-Dawayima, on the western slopes of the

     Hebron Highlands ... The occupying [Israeli] forces indiscriminately

     killed between 80 and 100 male villagers, blew up houses together

     with their occupants, murdered women and children, and committed

     rape. According to eyewitness testimony, these acts were committed

     'not in the heat of battle and inflamed passions, but out of a system

     of expulsion and destruction" .... These atrocities -- which fifty years

     later are regarded as libel, invented by the enemies of Israel, and whose

     retelling is perceived as an example of rewriting history by revisionist

     historians -- were, at the time they took place, known to ministers in

     the Israeli government, military commanders, and even the general

     public. The government set up commissions of inquiry and the army

     set up commissions of its own, but the work of these bodies came

     to naught because soldiers and officers refused to testify against

     their comrades in arms." [BENVENISTI, M., 2000, p. 153]

 

    As Aharon Cizling, the Israeli Minister of Agriculture at the time, wrote:

 

     "Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being

     has been shaken ... Obviously we have to conceal these actions

     from the public, and I agree that we should not even reveal that

     we're investigating them. But they must be investigated."

     [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 92]

 

    Amos Kenan, a writer for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, once wrote about his experiences on guard duty in an Arab town in the same era:

 

       "At night, those of us who couldn't restrain ourselves would go

     into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women. I want very much

     to assume, and perhaps even can, that those who couldn't restrain

     themselves did what they thought the Arabs would have done to

     them had they won the war.

        Once, only once, did an Arab woman -- perhaps a distant relative

     of [head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine George]

     Habash -- dare to complain. There was a court martial. The

     complainant didn't even get to testify. The accused, who was

     sitting behind the judges, ran the back of his hand across his

     throat, as a signal to the woman. She understood. The rapist was

     not acquitted, he simply was not accused, because there was no

     one who would are accuse him. Two years later he was killed

     while plowing the fields of an Arab village, one no longer on   

     the map because its inhabitants scattered and left it empty."

     [ELLIS, 1990, p. 106]

 

      In 1988 Israeli author David Grossman recounts with shame his meeting with Wadha Isma'il, a Palestinian woman in an Occupied Territory refugee camp. As a small girl, upon working in the family fields, Wadha watched Israeli soldiers blindfold her father, and then heard him shot behind some bushes. "I began to cry," she told Grossman,

 

     "The soldiers who had stayed with me asked me: Who is that man to

     you? I said: 'He is my father.' They said: 'Go to the garden down there,

     and you'll see that he is harvesting lettuce and eggplant.' When I was

     some distance from them, I glanced back and I saw one of the soldiers

     aiming his rifle at me. I was frightened and bent over. His bullet hit

     my neck and came out the other side."

 

     "I don't know what to say her," writes Grossman, "and she interprets my silence, apparently, as disbelief. 'Look,' she says, and her work-hardened fingers undo her kerchief, and she smiles a sort of apology about having to bother me with her wound. I see an ugly scar in back, and another ugly scar in front. Young Hana cries. It seems that Wadha is her mother. 'Every time I hear that story, it is as if it were the first time,' Hanan says." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 70-71]

 

     Israeli professor and Holocaust survivor Israel Shahak wrote about another set of atrocities by Jews against the Palestinians during the late 1980s uprising (the "Intifada.") Shahak translated eyewitness accounts from the Israeli Hebrew press into English. In his introduction to a compilation of such testimonies, Shahak noted that:

 

     "The systematic use of atrocities, which in their intensity and the

     special intention to humiliate are Nazi-like and should be compared

     to the analogous German Nazi methods, is intentional and in fact

     constitutes the Israeli method for ruling Palestinians ... There should

     be also no doubt that those Nazi-like horrors can and probably

     will become worse, if not stopped from the outside, and their use

     can lead to actual genocide, whether by 'transfer' or extermination.

     Indeed, this is one of my reasons for assembling this collection:

     to show that the actual genocide of the Palestinians in the territories

     is now possible, since those Israeli soldiers and officers who have

     committed the outrages recorded here are capable of anything and

     everything." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 85]

 

    Such cold realities, so very unwelcome in mainstream Jewish circles, drastically contrasts with widespread Jewish mythology about the Israeli army, the beloved Jewish "child-soldiers" as typically articulated by Elie Wiesel about the 1967 war: "I have seen many armies; none more humble, more humane in its victories ... My pride is that Israel has remained human because it has remained so deeply Jewish." [And what of Wiesel's subtext here, that if one is less "deeply Jewish," one is less "human?"] [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 10]  American Jewish Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky articulated the common Jewish view of the noble Israeli army and government in 1978: "When the War came, Israeli leaders did their best to convince their Arab neighbors not to run away." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 206] And, in the aftermath of Israel's 1967 victory over the Arabs, "There is little to be found in history to compare with the behavior of the Israelis after the war, their humility, almost sadness, in victory." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 360] "Few armies, especially in the Arab Middle East," declared Samuel Katz in 1990, "can boast the high morale and humane standards displayed by the Israeli soldier." [KATZ, S., 1990, p. 2]

 

     Among the prominent Israeli revisionist authors in recent years are Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. "The rise of revisionist historiography," notes Steven Heydemann, "... reflects a serious ambivalence about once-deeply held notions of the moral purposes of Zionism, its position in the Middle East, and the future." [HEYDEMANN, p. 6]  Such Zionist myths have for decades been unquestioned canon in Jewish circles, widely parroted in America, only in recent years been subject to increasing scholarly attack in (but rarely outside) the Jewish state. Such myths include the innately incorrigible morality of the Zionist enterprise and the conviction that a large Palestinian populace chose exodus -- and were not driven -- out of their homeland. More and more Israeli scholars are arriving at the fact that war with Arabs was not thrust upon the young Jewish nation, but was part of Zionist objective. Seminal Zionist leader Ben Gurion, says Avi Shlaim, "grasped that the essential structure of the conflict left no room for compromise and this would entail the settlement of Zionist claims by violent means." [HEYDEMANN, p. 23] As Heydemann notes,

 

     "Revisionist writings reveal a style of [Zionist] leadership [over past

     decades] in which the exercise of will was perceived primarily in terms

     of power and the application of force. Revisionism places an emphasis

     on the fierce, single-minded way in which Zionist leaders pursued three

     dominant strategic concerns: to expand the territory under Jewish

     control, to reduce the Arab population within this territory, and to

     encourage divisiveness among Arab states to prevent them from

     hindering the attainment of the first two." [HEYDEMANN, p. 12]

 

     These goals also included "compromise [with Arabs] as unnecessary in light of Israel's evident military superiority," and "indiscriminate whole expulsion of Arab communities, even those which had lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors." [HEYDEMANN, p. 14]

 

      "The 'exhilarating' possibilities of a land without Arabs," observes Heydemann, "and the transfer of Arab farms, houses, and wealth into Jewish hands, set, as Morris reminds us, in the context of war and massive immigration, quickly overwhelmed the reservations expressed by minority factions about the morality of expelling Palestinian Arabs and destroying their villages." [HEYDEMANN, p. 14]  "We not only eradicated Arab place names [in Israel]," notes former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti, "we actually destroyed the places as well." [BENVENISTI, p. 196] The Israeli erasure of Palestinian history was consciously as complete as possible. As Benvenisti notes

 

       "I was aware for quite some time that the Palestinian Research

      Institute in Beirut was compiling files on each Palestinian village

      in Israel. Since the beginning of the [Lebanon] war I wondered

      about the fate of those files. I was fairly sure that General [Ariel]

      Sharon and General Eitan would search them out, seize them, and

      destroy them in order to complete the eradication of Arab Palestine.

      That is what eventually happened when the Israeli army entered West

      Beirut." [BENVENISTI, p. 198]

 

     Benvenisti also notes the Israeli creation of a place called "Peace Forest" on the sites of eradicated Arab villages near Jerusalem, utterly destroyed to guarantee that the inhabitants never returned. "To call it Peace Forest," he laments, "to take well-meaning [Jewish] donors and with their money turn all these orchards into a picnic area for Israelis and tourists is something else entirely. This betrays not only a lack of sensitivity but is something that must eventually corrupt our youth ... Dehumanization is a contagious disease." [BENVENISTI, p. 200-201]

 

     Traditional Israeli reluctance to address the facts of history even stretches far into the distant past. As Elliot Horowitz notes about Jewish massacres of Christians in ancient Israel:

 

     "After 1967 the reluctance of Israeli historians, especially those linked

     institutionally to universities and research institutes, to acknowledge

     Jewish violence in the distant past has become even greater than in

     the decades immediately following the Holocaust. This is true especially

     with regard to acts allegedly committed against non-Jews in the land of

     Israel and its environs. One suspects that the resistance to acknowledging

     such phenomena in the past has been related to a desire on the part of

     many Israelis to see themselves as enlightened and humane occupiers

     at present." [HOROWITZ, 1998 p. 8]

 

                         ***********************************

 

      Israel is a very small nation -- in one area its width is only about ten miles; more than half of its land mass is desert. Only one-fifth of the country is arable. The Jewish nation has few natural resources; potash is one of them. Even limited water supplies loom as long-term threats to political stability with neighboring water-poor countries. Most water is pumped from the "Sea" of Galilee and its headwaters; water crucial to the Jewish state  originates in the heavily Arab West Bank and in southern Lebanon. "Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza," notes Amnon Rubenstein, "are routinely forbidden to dig new wells, deepen existing wells, or put in water systems that might reduce the water available for Israel." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 173] Although Israel is rich in religious lore and tradition, for all practical economic intents and purposes it is physically resource-less. It must rely of course upon the massive beneficence of wealthy and influential Jews throughout the world for help -- economic contributions, but -- more importantly -- world-wide lobbying efforts of governments and peoples throughout the world to sustain the Jewish state which can never sustain itself, in drastic contradiction of seminal Zionist plans for the Jewish state.  Hence, the resources of the rest of the world maintain an economic, social, and military level for Israel which it could never remotely maintain by its own means.

 

      Nonetheless, Jewish and Zionist mythology about the sacredness of the land of Israel has fostered an extremely strange, and disturbing, paradox. Israeli Amos Oz notes Jewish myth about the actual land of Israel in Zionist tradition: "This is ... what some of my teachers taught me when I was a child: after our Temple was destroyed and we were banished from our Land, the gentiles came into our heritage and defiled it. Wild Arabs laid the land waste ... When our first pioneers came to the land to rebuild and be rebuilt by it and redeem it from its desolation, they found an abandoned wasteland." [OZ, p. 88]

 

     This is an especially curious myth, given the fact that the deeds of defiling Gentiles and "wild Arabs" over all centuries combined can not remotely compare to the atrocious Jewish care taking of the Holy Land in recent history, in which the modern Israeli military-industrial state rampantly pollutes the place so important to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The most visible physical landmark in the Tel Aviv area, for example, on the outskirts of the city along the highway to Israel's international airport, is a giant mountain of trash -- the Hiriya dump. It had been absorbing 3,000 tons of garbage every day until it was recently closed, but not before the mountain of garbage "collapsed into the Ayalon River, threatening one of Tel Aviv's sources of drinking water." [COHN, M., 10-18-98]  "As a Zionist," bemoaned professor Harvey Lithwick, "you can't believe that you came to reclaim the country ... and yet you let the land go to garbage. For me, that's horrible." [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

 

     In July 1999 one hundred scientists, under sponsorship of Israel's Economic Forum and the Technion Institute in Haifa, released a report announcing that Israel's environment was "on the verge of collapse." The report noted that "underground aquifers suffer from almost irreversible salination, the quality of air is declining, causing one in ten children to have asthma, garbage is piling up [and] uncontrolled construction is eating away at open areas." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 7-14-99]  That same year London's Financial Times noted that "the statistics make grim reading. More than half of all untreated industrial waste, including poisonous chemicals and salts, flows directly into the [Israeli] environment, damaging underground aquifers, rivers and streams." [FINANCIAL TIMES, 1-29-99, p. 12]  Israel produces 170,000 tons of toxic waste a year -- two-thirds of it is believed to be dumped illegally throughout the country and into the Mediterranean Sea. [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

 

      "Zionists -- who passionately reclaimed these biblical lands after 2,000 years in exile, "noted the Toronto Star in 1998, "have ... a blind spot about their birthright." "During the past 50 years," said Israeli environmental activist Bilha Givon, "all the coasts along Israel have become wasteland, polluted by factories." In 1997, during Israel's international Jewish sporting event, the Maccabiah Games, a bridge collapsed over the Yarkon River. Two Jewish athletes from Australia survived the fall, notes the Star, "only to die of infection from the polluted river. The scandal over lethal toxins swirling in the water rocked the Jewish Maccabiah games." [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

 

    Of particular note, and increasing controversy, is Israel's official toxic waste dumping ground, Ramat Hovav, located twelve miles south of Be'er Sheva in the Negev desert. With 43,000 tons of toxic material a year delivered its way, Ramat Hovav is notorious for mismanagement and haphazard storage of a variety of dangers.  "Within the past twelve months," noted the Jerusalem Post in August 1998, "the chairman of the company that manages the toxic waste site, the site manager, and the site safety officer have all been fired over safety deficiencies." [COLLINS, L., 8-7-98, p. 3]

 

     A large community of (Muslim Arab) Bedouin of the Al-Azameh tribe lives in tents across the street. (Many were forced to move there after being evicted from their ancestral lands by the Jewish government). Putrid smells drift through the tents day and night.  Environmental Ministry tests in 1994-95, noted Haim Chertok, noted "dangerous levels of pollution, issuing from organic waste stewing in Ramat Hovav, more than 40 percent of the time." [CHERTOK, H., 5-30-97]

 

     Arab workers are also employed in the most dangerous jobs at the hazardous waste area and in the cluster of pesticide and chemical factories within Ramat Hovav grounds.  Explosions at the Chemgas chemical plant in 1999 injured six workers. "There are at least six factories, out of 15 at the site," noted the Jerusalem Post, "where emissions could result in an accident causing irreversible harm to residents, or even death." [COLLINS, L., 8-7-97]  Mishandling disasters at, and around, the site are common  -- from overturned trucks hauling toxic cargo to leaking storage barrels to explosions of dangerous chemicals. From 1988 to 1998 there were "ten major incidents" including "two leaks of poisonous gases within a 12 hour period." [COLLINS, L., 8-4-98, p. 3]  In 1997 a lithium battery storage area exploded, a wall of flames 300 feet tall burned for hours, sending thick, black smoke over the area. "No one thought," notes the Toronto Star, "to alert the Bedouin to the possible peril until three hours later." [COHN, M., 10-18-98] 

(In the same vein, in 1998 Palestinian investigators discovered a secret toxic waste dumping ground that Israeli companies had been using in Arab areas in the Occupied Territories, including "32 hazardous materials, including pesticides and medical waste." [COHN, M., 10-18-98] )

 

     Meanwhile, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, notes the ideological undercurrent of the Israeli "ecological" military order in the Occupied Territories that prohibits local Arabs from picking a herb called Za'atar, a wild plant they had freely gathered for centuries:

 

     "[The order] is only a strong political and ideological statement: You

      Palestinians despoil the land indiscriminately because you do not feel

      for it, ergo it is not your homeland. We [Jews] look after it. Therefore

      it is ours." [BENVENISTI, p. 24]

      

                      **************************************

 

      The ideological foundation for the modern state of Israel is the political philosophy of Zionism; its fundamental assertions were practical, secular, and activist in nature. Unlike traditional Judaism which passively awaited God's intervention via an expected Messiah to lead world Jewry into a messianic age of Jewish redemption, empowerment, and leadership, Zionism declared it important that Jews take their destiny into their own hands. "Zionism," notes Charles Silberman, "... transformed the meaning of Jewishness messianism. Instead of waiting for God to bring about the Messianic Age in His own way and time, as the Orthodox believed ... the Zionists insisted that the Jews had to go to work to bring about their own redemption." [SILBERMAN, p. 39]  And the most pressing Zionist issue at hand was the desire for an explicitly Jewish national homeland. Although in early Zionist years a temporary Jewish homeland in parts of Argentina or Kenya or Uganda was considered, few of the rank and file members of the movement took such suggestions seriously. The emotional attachment, after all, unlike other European-based nationalist movements, was based on traditional religious beliefs: the ancient homeland that God had reputedly given to the Israelites. The homeland was not really negotiable. It had to be a return to Zion: Israel. 

   Although Zionism was largely a secular movment, the first president of modern Israel (and an immigrant from Russia), Chaim Weizman, notes the attraction of what was then "Palestine," quite clearly:

"[Arthur James Balfour] asked me why some Jews, Zionists, were so bitterly opposed to the Uganda offer. The British Government was really anxious to do do something to relieve the misery of the Jews; and the problem was a practical one, calling for a practical approach. In reply I plunged into what I recall as a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement. I dwelt on the spiritual side of Zionism, I pointed out that nothing but a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive, and that this conviction had to be based on Palestine and on Palestine alone. Any deflection from Palestine was -- well, a form of idolatry. I added that if Moses had come into the sixth Zionist Congress when it was adopting the resolution in favour of the Commisssion for Uganda, he would surely have broken the tablets once again. We knew that the Uganda offer was well-meant, and on the surface of it might appear the more practical road. But I was sure that -- quite apart from the availability and suitability of the territory -- the Jewish people would never produce either the money or the energy required in order to build up a wasteland and make it habitable, unless that land was Palestine. Palestine had this magic and romantic appeal for the Jews; our history has been what it is because of our tenacious hold on Palestine. We have never accepted defeat and have never forsaken the memory of Palestine. Such a tradition could be converted into real political power." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 143]

      "Even those who rebelled against religion," notes Ehud Luz, "could not ignore the need to deal with it, for the simple reason that Jewish nationalism drew its legitimacy from the Jewish religion: Zionism was rooted in the Jewish past, and no one denied that this past had a religious character." [LUZ, p. x]  "The mythos-driven craving for the ancestral land," suggests Israeli Jay Gonen, "is tied to deep unconscious layers in the Jewish psyche." [GONEN, J., p. 200]

 

     Sometimes these "cravings" are not so unconscious. The underlying links between the religion of Judaism and secular Zionism is so great that Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah (the international Zionist women's organization), was the first woman to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. [HESCHEL, 1983, p. xiv]

 

     Part of the Zionist revival included reclaiming the nearly dead language of Hebrew (which had been reduced over the centuries to use only for religious purposes). Intended to be applied to a new, secularized Zionist society, as early as 1926 scholar Gershom Scholem noted the latent undercurrents in attempting to secularly appropriate a religiously-charged language: "The Land [of Israel] is a volcano. It provides lodging for the language [of Hebrew] ... What will be the result of the updating of Hebrew? Will the abyss of the holy tongue which we have implanted in our children not yawn wide? People here do not realize what they are doing. They think they have made Hebrew into a secular language, that they removed its apocalyptic sting. But that is not so ... Every word which is not simply made up but rather taken from the treasure house of well-worn terms is laden with explosives." [RAVITZKY, A., p. 3]

 

     "Although in rabbinic times an Aramaic translation of the Torah was declaimed alongside the biblical text in public readings ...," notes Barry Holtz,  "it was the Hebrew original that was venerated and preserved. This sense of the sacred quality of the language begins with the Bible itself. God speaks, and through language the world comes into being. Jews, at least since rabbinic times, have taken the holiness of the language with great seriousness." [HOLTZ, B., 1984, p. 21]

 

     "There is no Sabbath Judaism without Zionism," notes Dagobert Runes, "Every daily prayer of the observing Jew carries the undertone of return to Zion. The four great holidays of the Jewish faith are imbedded in Zionist land and Zionist homecoming. Judaism is a little possible without Zionism as Christianity without Christ." [MARX, K., 1959, p. x] "Herein lies the ambiguity of Zionism," says Jacob Neusner,

 

      "It was supposedly a secular movement, yet in reinterpreting the

      classic mythic structures of Judaism, it compromised its secularity

      and exposed its fundamental unity with the classic mythic being of

      Judaism ... What has happened in Zionism is that the old has been

      in one instant destroyed and resurrected. The 'holy people' are no

      more, the nation-people take their place. How much has changed

      in the religious tradition, when the allegedly secular successor-

      continuator has preserved not only the essential perspective of the

      tradition, but done so pretty much in the tradition's own symbols

      and language?" [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 100]

 

     "The fact," notes Alan Dowty, "that many early Zionists sought to 'divorce' themselves from Jewish history does not, however, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling themselves from its grip. In fact, the illusion that Zionism could escape the legacies -- negative and positive -- of the Jewish past, through an exercise of sheer ideological will, may have been the greatest conceit among the necessary self-deceptions of the founding fathers ... Holidays and national symbols were also inevitably drawn from the past, even if attempts were made to alter their content and significance. The very legitimacy of the entire [Zionist] enterprise also rested, in the end, on Jewish history and religion, a factor that grew in importance as conflict with the Arab population developed." [DOWTY, 1998]

     Monford Harris sees a strong Judaism-Zionism link in the old religious covenant notion:

     "The dynamic of Zionism ... is only possible on the basis of covenental solidarity.
     ... None of the universal categories