How the work of Israeli writers today reflects the foundation
myths of a Jewish state.
The
idea of the Jewish nation was conceived before the organization of
the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century and continued long
after the creation of the state of Israel. In The
Words and the Land,
post-Zionist Israeli historian Shlomo Sand examines how both Jewish
and Israeli intellectuals contributed to this process. One by one, he
identifies and calls into question the foundation myths of the
Israeli state, beginning with the myth of a people forcibly uprooted,
a people-race that began to wander the world in search of a land of
asylum. This was a people that would define itself on a biological
and “mythological-religious” basis, embodied in words that today
feed Israeli political, literary, and historical writing: “exile,”
“return,” and “ascent” (Alyah) to the land of its origins.
Since
1948, most intellectuals in Israel have continued to accept this
ethno-national image and embrace an exclusive state identity to which
only Jewish people can belong. The first challenges to this dominant
idea didn’t appear in Israel until the 1980s, in the innovative
work of the “post-Zionist” historians, who were bent on
dismantling the nationalist historical myth and arguing for a state
that would belong equally to all its citizens. Analyzing how Israeli
intellectuals positioned themselves during the Gulf War and in the
new era of communication technologies, Sand extends his analysis
globally, looking at the status of intellectuals in all societies.