Rewriting the Zionist Narrative

...This transformation of the Israeli body politic helped set the stage for the present peace process...

...For once recruits don their uniforms the "suppression of individuality" becomes explicit policy...

...And as the author recalls from his own childhood, students were often required to wear uniforms and parents "were told not to send their children to school with expensive fruit or foodstuffs which other families might not be able to afford...

...Ezrahi does not deny the appeal of these ideals and practices...

...yetthe inevitable consequence...

...Yet the author never denies that real peace can come only with parallel transformation among the Palestinians and the other Arab peoples...

...Among these is the notion that there is glory in sacrificing one's life for the national mission...

...Birthdays are customarily marked only for the young, and even then are "celebrated in school for several children at once, rather than as a separate one for each" (a practice that was cruelly apparent to me as a visiting American boy in an Israeli kindergarten...

...During modern Israel's formative period, observes Ezrahi, even the national language tended to militate against self-expression...

...Thus, efforts to personalize grief and mourning are of great importance to Ezrahi...

...Although the kibbutz communities have never accounted for more than a tiny minority of the population, says Ezrahi, they have played a "pivotal role in projecting ideals of altruism, camaraderie, self-sacrifice, voluntarism, patriotism, and a high work ethic...

...To call it a war would have allowed the military to bring its full might to bear against the demonstrators...

...Ezrahi points to America's national parks and nature preserves as manifestations of this romantic ideal...

...This endeavor has been a difficult, sometimes traumatic one, requiring them to challenge many comfortable "truths...

...collectivist social engineering...

...From the outset, however, Army spokesmen advocated treating it as extreme civil disorder...

...he observes, was a devaluation of individualism...

...where the earth is but a buffer between past and present...

...His own country, however, offers no such relief from the multitude: "In Israel, where nature, like a thin layer of dust covering ancient scrolls, is but the back side of human scriptures...

...Israelis have still to resolve the difficult tensions of living in a state whose Declaration of Independence upholds both the particularistic values of Judaism and the universalistic values of liberal democracy...

...His gaze is intentionally, and courageously, turned inward, on Israel and Israelis...

...A chapter entitled "The Precariousness of Autobiographical Time" examines how the Zionist narrative has tended to crowd out personal ones...

...they were established partly in recognition of the need for protected space to allow the "experience of solitude and privacy, for the intimate edifying dialogue between self and nature...

...They knew better than many of the political leaders," the author writes, "that a policy of shooting civilians, including women and children, would be not only illegal but morally unthinkable for many soldiers...

...While acknowledging that it is "easy to be skeptical of any attempt to 'moderate' the force applied by soldiers to civilians," he believes the use of rubber bullets also represents Israel's "readiness to actually reframe the conflict, to see it not as a war of survival but as a struggle between a civilian population and an occupying force...

...The remainder of the book charts the course Israelis have taken to bring out what the author calls their "lyrical personal voice...

...A senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, Ezrahi has written an eloquent, often personal account of a not often talked about transformation in the way Israelis see themselves: Where once citizens were taught their individual lives mattered only insofar as they were actors in the collective Zionist drama of return and redemption, the special meaning of private existence is now ever more assertively permeating life...

...The collectivist ethos has been extended across society by mandatory Army service...

...And of course, living under constant external pressure, Israelis were understandably driven to identify strongly with the state...

...Among them are teaching Hebrew to immigrants, educating the underprivileged and rehabilitating ex-convicts...

...heroic sacrifice," writes Ezrahi, that "as the children raised on the Zionist narrative began to die in the thousands, their own agony and ambivalence were largely repressed...

...Nowhere was this more evident than in the country's distinctive collective settlements...

...Hebrew, an ancient tongue revived, "was not a suitable medium for communicating personal thoughts or feelings...

...Today, Yaron Ezrahi wonders whether his grandfather was conscious of the deep symbolic meaning of this choice...

...In recent years, he notes, the demystification of death in war even seems to have received the blessings of the government—which once saw itself as the true parent of the soldiers who were lost...

...When Yitzchak Rabin was sworn in as Prime Minister in July 1992, he spoke of the Labor Party's determination to "place the citizen at the top of our concerns...

...and living in a land literally strewn with reminders of the biblical Jewish commonwealths...

...Indeed, it was during the Intifada that Israelis began to come to terms with the tension between the prerogatives of power and the demands of conscience...

...Ezrahi explores how this emerging individualism has allowed many Israelis— among them the late Yitzchak Rabin— to view the "land for peace" equation as something other than a betrayal of the Zionist dream...

...It was in this context, says Ezrahi, that "the readiness to make territorial concessions made sense...

...The author draws a striking conclusion from this trend: "Because the loss of life is an absolute loss, the gradual spread of the values of individualism has forced Israelis to juxtapose 'there is no other place' with the no less compelling imperative 'there is no other life.'" From there it was scarcely a great leap to question the justice of making others mourn and suffer for the sake of ideals that were no longer sacred...

...Rubber Bullets would be worth reading for this nuanced analysis alone, but the author renders an additional service by painting a picture of a country that is defined by more than its military and political struggles (thus avoiding a shortcoming of many other important works...

...Dates of mainly personal significance, by contrast, have generally been downplayed in Israel...

...At any rate, peace will merely be an early step toward self-discovery...

...where nature is younger than history, no landscape is a retreat from society and any scenery is but politics in disguise...

...And epic death cannot be adequately mourned by the immediate families of the deceased...

...This, of course, is true for any nation's fighting force, and is typically justified by the need for order, discipline and solidarity...

...In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kjppur War, however, Israelis began to assert their right to "co-author, even rewrite, the story rather than merely to enact it...

...In the West, nature has long been conceived as a refuge from society...

...While children in the cities were never reared communally, as they once were on the kibbutz, many were drawn into the socialist youth movements...

...The purposeful sequencing of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day—on a calendar already filled with Jewish holidays carrying similar subtexts—dramatically reinforces the Zionist narrative passage "from mourning to rebirth, from fall to redemption...

...But in Israel the military takes on additional roles that make civilian life much "more permeable to the Army's values and mores...

...where any hill can be a shrine covered by dirt and any valley hide a sunken city...

...He probably could not have anticipated the ambivalence of at least one of his grandsons, who would share his enthusiasm for and commitment to the privileges of citizenship for Jews but would feel an equally insistent impulse to keep the family domain separate from the public space and public duties...

...As the Palestinian rioting that erupted on December 8,1987 in Gaza spread to the West Bank, a debate ensued in Israel about how to classify the violence...

...Not surprisingly, many of Israel's more celebrated military and political leaders came from kibbutzim...

...Probably the most powerful influence on the way Israelis have seen their role in society was the socialism at the core of mainstream Zionism...

...It was "thick with layers of majestic, biblical, midrashic, or literary style...

...An illuminating example is the way in which holidays are observed...

...Reviewed by Hanan Cohen Soon after Mordechai Krichevsky arrived in Palestine at the end of the 19th century, he adopted the surname Ezrahi —from the Hebrew for "citizen...

...According to the "unqualified redemptive versions of Zionism," Israel's battles have all been epic battles, the nation's war-dead have all died epic deaths...

...Some of the author's most thoughtprovoking insights into the Israeli condition are found in his discussion of nature...

...So strong was the impluse to "estheticize...

...Israel's impoverished culture of the self resulted from a confluence of factors: religious and cultural traditions that elevate communal values...

...So the soldiers used rubber bullets...

...Ezrahi has chosen this mitigating munition as a metaphor for the struggle to uphold the moral basis of Israeli society...

...Critics on the Zionist Right may argue that by focusing so determinedly on how changes in Israel have opened the door to peace, Ezrahi implies that the Jewish State is the only significant actor in the Middle Eastern conflict—and in its resolution...

...On Memorial Day, 1996, instead of broadcasting documentaries that hallowed Israel's war heroes and the bravery of their families, state television "focused on the more strictly private emotional or psychological responses to the absence of the dead men...

...JeanJacques Rousseau went so far as to recommend that children be temporarily removed to the wilderness in order to strengthen their individuality and independence...

...This book is less about policy than it is about people...