From the Palmach Generation to the Candle Children: Changing Patterns in Israeli Identity

Anita Shapira

Gvile Esh (Parchments of Fire), a memorial volume of posthumous literary texts penned by soldiers who fell in Israel’s War of Independence, opens with a passage by Zvi Guber:

How poor, how wretched you are, O homeland. . .there is nothing in you of that splendor sublime, of majesty that stirs the heart. Why then did our souls so cling to your love? . . .From your dust were we molded, from your soil we sprouted, your children. . . .To us you were both mother and father, our nursemaid and teacher! We are your harvest. . .we are with you, true to the last.

Behold: we poured forth the best of our young blood to drench your dust. Upon the altar of your freedom we laid the cream of our youth, a sacrifice to liberty.

Find favor in the youthful vigor of our offering, O motherland!

If we disregard the ornate style, untypical of the first Sabra generation eager to break free from the confining literary Hebrew of their parents and find a more forthright and simple language, we have here a text that bespeaks the ideological tenor and temperament of the generation of young women and men for which the poet Natan Alterman coined the epithet the "silver platter": the first generation of native sons and daughters, bred in Palestine, a group inseparably linked with the figure of Yitzhak Rabin. The homeland they cherished was a land of open expanses, parched wadis, of baked clods of earth that crumbled beneath the naked foot under the scorching summer sun. There were no cities, asphalt roads, factories, or dense concentrations of population. It was a homeland of fields in the Jezreel Valley redolent with "the scent of manure, the aroma of new-mown hay" (as in a popular song of the day).

Zvi Guber’s cohort was part of a generation issued forth at the end of the 1930s whose identity was shaped in the decade that followed. The sabra or prickly pear cactus was a plant unfamiliar to the founding fathers in their lands of origin. It bloomed on the edge between the verdant land and the desert, thorny and stinging on the outside but sweet and juicy within. This seized the imagination of the settlers who emigrated from Europe: here was an emblem of the new experience and ambiance, exotic and oriental. So the pioneer first generation embraced it to symbolize their children raised to adolescence and adulthood in Palestine, the quintessence of Palestinian youth: native sons and daughters, almost children of nature, liberated from the inhibitions of their parents, forthright and simple–unencumbered by the oppression of Jewish history or the dubious legacy of European culture. Young men and women, for whom the idea of Zionism was self-evident, prepared to sacrifice their lives for the creation of the Jewish state. They liked to envision and represent the struggle for an independent Israel as one chapter in the broader ongoing global struggle for human emancipation, designating their war "Milhemet Hashihrur"–the War of Liberation against the oppressive yoke of imperialism. That was the first generation of indigenous Israelis, who came to be dubbed the Palmach generation.

Zvi Guber, Yitzhak Rabin, and their comrades did not constitute a majority among Jewish youth in the era of the Yishuv. Many chose a lifestyle where a successful career, material pleasures, academic study, and the world’s manifold allurements loomed foremost in their scale of values. Nonetheless, society in the Yishuv and at least the state’s first decade adopted the image of the mythological Sabra as the model to which they aspired, their fundamental matrix and paradigm. This model was not free of flaws and imperfections: forthrightness degenerated at times into coarseness, love for Eretz Israel into imperviousness toward the other people in and on the land. Their shared experiential world engendered a sense of haughtiness toward anyone not part of their special in-group. Yet their merits and virtues were accented, their shortcomings obscured.

The literary creations of the generation of the War of Independence (1948), by writers such as Moshe Shamir, Natan Shaham, S. Izhar, Uri Avneri, and the poems and ballads by Hayyim Guri and Hayyim Hefer, to mention the best-known among them, attested to that model. Even more, these literary texts filtered and refined that paradigm, infusing it with identificational features that characterized the member of a small closed group with its own Hebrew vernacular and distinctive rituals: the kumzitz campfire cookout, the coffee finjan making the rounds, the songs and camaraderie.

There was an anachronistic element adhering to this image almost from the moment it crystallized. The mass influx of immigrants that commenced while the battles raged in 1948 created a new situation in the State of Israel, marking a rupture in the previous realities of the Yishuv. This transformed state of affairs bore numerous new revolutionary features that necessitated changes in consciousness and culture. Thus, at the very moment the first stage of Israeli identity ripened to maturity, embodied in the identity and ethos of the Sabra, salient elements also surfaced that were destined to undermine its moorings.

To all appearances, the transition from the Yishuv to the state was a stunning success story–the creation of the institutions of government, the formation of a national defense force, and the establishment of the basic frameworks for the functioning of national life. Yet that revolutionary and sweeping transition from a small and lean network of institutions to a broad and open array of organs for governance was not accompanied by a corresponding shift in the emotional foundations of the society, its modes of thought, and cultural structures. They continued to be anchored in the sentiments, temperament, and elemental approaches that had crystallized during the period of the Yishuv. To make use of a metaphor, the culture of the campfire circle which had been cultivated as an emblem of the pervasive camaraderie of the Palmach and youth movement, also became a token of exclusiveness–the exclusion of anyone external to that ethos, and in whom the old symbology of Eretz Israel did not strike an immediate responsive chord.

The decades of the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the emergence of a new generation, termed in common parlance the "sons of the State." In its amplified sense, this designates a specific cultural elite that reviled the literature of the Palmach generation. In their onslaughts on what they dubbed the collectivistic culture of the "first person plural," Natan Zach, David Avidan, Yehuda Amichai, and Amalia Cahannah-Carmon rocked the foundations of Kassit and other coffeehouses that were the frequent haunts of the Israeli boheme. To it they counterposed the claims of the individual to autonomy and freedom from the restrictive shackles of the collective. Most members of this group belonged to the Palmach generation, yet they repudiated the literary school of their peers, preoccupied in their writings solely with their own life-world, a literature that gave expression to the collective Eretz-Israeli experience. Socialist realism, a common style and stance in their work, also infuriated the "modernists."

On the one hand, they wished to forge a link with the European cultural avant-garde, on the other, they sought to sunder the historical bonds tying Hebrew literature to the Zionist enterprise. Those links had been an essential component in the creation of the nation. Though they were termed the generation of the State, so as to distinguish them from the preceding Palmach generational cohort, many made up what was only a different cultural elite drawn from the ranks of that same "native-son" youth.

For the truly Israeli-bred sons of the State, the War of Independence was only a childhood memory. The first war they participated in was the 1956 Sinai Campaign or the Six-Day War. They were raised and schooled in a state whose borders were marked by the armistice lines that came to be called the "Green Line." The sons and daughters of the State had been brought up and educated in the shadow of the Palmach generation. Yet the War of Independence loomed larger than life, and members of the generation of the State were plagued by a gnawing feeling of having missed the boat of glory–no wars were left to fight, no bold deeds by which to prove their mettle, no new states to bring into being. That generation was plagued by a distinct sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the Palmach native sons, and took on the character of those treading in the footsteps of the first victors and trailblazers. Just as the Palmach generation had constituted the elite of Palestinian youth, the sons and daughters of the State comprised but a small group within an Israeli society caught up in the grips of swift and powerful change. Nonetheless, the values subscribed to by that group were deemed at the time to represent the very acme of what it meant to be Israeli.

To each generation its own myths. One of the compelling myths of the 1950s and 1960s was that of Petra. The march to Petra, the ancient Nabatean capital south of the Dead Sea, sprung from the matrix of the Palmach experience, but soon came to symbolize the ambivalence in culture and values of the fledgling state. The first five who stole across the border to Petra, only to meet death on their journey back (August 1953) were Palmach members who felt the lack of any challenge and were "seeking tomorrow." They still had not comprehended the real meaning of a border and the dangers inherent in a stealthy crossing. In their eyes, the quest to Petra was part of a journey into the desert wilds, infused with the enchantment of leaving behind civilization on an expedition into the wilderness, the breaching of boundaries by scouts on foot.

Rahel Sevorai and Meir Har-Tziyon (a member of the Israeli-born generation and one of its icons) had accomplished the exploit several months before. In their descriptions, they downplayed the importance of the dangers and difficulties of such a journey–that was consonant with the ethos common to the era, which deemed it taboo to brag about feats of daring. The five who perished did not believe they were endangering their lives by embarking upon this venture. Those who attempted the trek in 1956 and 1957 were well aware of the perils it entailed and saw this as a dimension of Petra’s challenge.

In Yehoshua Kenaz’s Hitganvut Yehidim (On Lonely Reconnaissance), the hero of the tale, set in the 1950s, takes part in a training course for physically handicapped recruits, but makes a supreme effort to prove to himself and those around him, who expect him to be a fighter, that he can indeed live up to their great expectations. He ultimately buckles under pressure, loses his sense of reality, and resorts to dissembling, pretending to be an officer in a combat unit. There is a powerful nexus between Kenaz’s protagonist and the heroes who ventured to Petra: all seek to live up to the stringent criteria of courage and derring-do which the society deemed an expression of true manly valor and self-sacrifice. Those youths were supreme individualists, and it is no accident that in their eyes, Meir Har-Tziyon, the scout alone out on patrol, embodied the symbol of their aspirations. But their individualism did not rail against the received norms in the society. On the contrary; it sought to bring them to true fulfillment. "The individualists did not turn against all the others, rather they aspired to outdo them, to be something more."

For the identity of the sons of the State, journeying to Petra was salient from another dimension as well. Petra was an alluring lodestone of Nabatean culture. It bore no link whatsoever with Jewish history in the Land of Israel either in ancient times or the more recent present. Their quest expressed a profound longing for a world beyond the horizon, a site replete with its own mystique and mystery, beyond the imagination to conceive. It expressed the lust for adventure of a youth brought up in a state with hermetic closed borders, in an era when a trip abroad was beyond the reach of all but a few.

The myth of Petra is paradigmatic for the aims of that generation and its scale of cardinal norms. The model of the scout emulated by Meir Har-Tziyon reflects the paragon of the Palmach patrol. But in contrast with the Palmach’s distinctive camaraderie, Meir Har-Tziyon and those who ventured to Petra were more reminiscent of the lonely rider in Hollywood westerns: the fearless fighter, ever pushing toward the frontier, into broad borderless spaces, distant from all settled habitation. Destinations were selected based on the likelihood of accomplishing the exploit and the adventurous challenge they represented, and embodied no link with the Jewish past in the land.

Amos Kenan once remarked: "For me, the state murdered the homeland." For him, the "homeland" signified those expanses not settled by Jews, territory one could gaze upon and in the mind’s eye imagine being transported back to the days of the Bible. But the young state underwent an accelerated process of construction and industrialization–small cubicles of residential blocks and concrete in the virgin landscape. Hedges of sabra cactus were supplanted by metal or stone fences, and the creaking cadence of the old water pump was swept aside by the rotating sprinkler and the national water conduit. The pre-state romanticism of the days of the Mandate, of olive trees and shepherds’ flocks, camels’ bells and the doleful lament of the flute, immortalized by Israeli artists on canvas, in song, and in literature, retreated before the headlong surge of development of the modern state. Among members of the Palmach generation, Kenan’s outlook was widespread.

In contrast, the Israeli-bred generation of the State was not pining for some "beautiful and forgotten Land of Israel," as Naomi Shemer wrote. They had not known the Arab villages destroyed in the War of Independence and in its wake. Nor did they yearn for a mode of existence and lifestyle that had been swept away. They grew to adolescence and adulthood in a state where Arabs constituted a threat, dangerous enemies who stole over the border, a kind of demonic force from the desert coming to ravage the fertile land. For that generation, the Green Line was the border.

The new Hebrew literature that ripened in the period of the State also had no hankering for some ancient historical agenda with Biblical sites and vistas. It was anchored in the reality of modern Jewish life, whether dealing with the period prior to the establishment of the state or thereafter. Tel Aviv, the new Jerusalem, the kibbutzim–these were the foci of the new Hebrew literature. In an interview with Geula Cohen in the newspaper Maariv in 1963, Yitzhak Shalev, a writer with right-wing inclinations, complained that the "cease-fire lines have become our emotional borders, the boundary to our longings and desires." He lamented that no poem or tale had ventured further south in setting than Kibbutz Ramat Rahel (overlooking the old border south of Jerusalem) or further east than Mount Zion. His disapproval described the basic parameters: the parting from historical Eretz Israel was not just a political fact but had also been internalized as an existential experience by the Israel-bred generation of the State.

The Six-Day War constituted the high point of the myth of the Sabra. The General Staff in 1967 was proud of its strong links with the Palmach, from Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin to Barlev, Uzi Narkis, and others. The conquest of Jerusalem was conceived as completing the mission of the Harel Brigade from the War of Independence, a belated payment of sorts for a long-standing debt to the valiant men who had fallen in battle back then. Moshe Dayan, the warrior with an eye patch, became the veritable symbol of Sabra pluck and élan, the emblem of a small and intrepid Israel.

Yitzhak Rabin, the rugged and handsome Chief of Staff who delivered a stirring speech in the amphitheater of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, facing the inhabited land, his back to the desert, seemed an embodiment of all that was admirable in the new Israeli paradigm: fusing ancient Jewish tradition with the new reality, a brave conqueror, yet compassionate in victory and sensitive to the sufferings of the enemy, illustrious in battle but fully aware of its heavy price, ready for war but desirous of peace. Never before or since was there an Israeli identity more self-assured, more clearly defined and unequivocal.

In the forge of the Six-Day War, a link was welded between those two Israeli generations. The officers were "native sons," the enlisted men under their command were soldiers raised and trained in the State. For the first time in Israel’s military history, fathers and sons fought together shoulder to shoulder, but their responses to the war differed. The fathers felt they were returning to the homeland they had known and loved in their youth. By contrast, the sons were burdened by the perception that they were invaders in a foreign land. The "native sons" were endowed with a distinctive facility: they were able not to see the Arabs, be blind to them.

Prior to 1967, it had been Yitzhak Shalev’s wont to accompany his son Meir to the Notre Dame monastery to gaze together at the vista of the Old City. This was part of his son’s upbringing, a lesson in love for Eretz Israel and Jerusalem. From afar, it was impossible to make out the flesh-and-blood inhabitants who lived there. But, as a soldier on the Jericho Road, Meir Shalev would encounter Arab refugees fleeing with their bundled belongings. He also came face to face with the harsh reality of the occupation–the kowtowing and abasement of the humbled conquered, the overbearing arrogance of the conquerors. For him, these experiences expunged once and for all the dream of Greater Israel–the land in its Biblical entirety.

Another young man from Jerusalem had an analogous experience, he too was from the ranks of the sons of the State. Amos Oz returned to East Jerusalem after the war: the city resembled new Jerusalem in the west–the identical sky, the same stones.

But the city is breathing, alive. People live there who are strangers. I don’t understand their language. They’re in their homes, their shops and businesses, and I’m the stranger from outside. . . .The city where I was born. The city of dreams. The city of my fathers’ longing, the yearnings of my people. And I was sentenced to walk through its streets and alleyways, submachine gun in hand, like a figure from the monstrous nightmares of my childhood. Consigned to be a stranger in a city so strange.

On September 22, 1967, the Movement for Greater Israel published its manifesto. It was signed by distinguished personalities from the world of Hebrew letters: Alterman, Agnon, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and other respected and renowned figures. The list of names represented several generations in Israeli society and culture ranging from veteran authors like Agnon to younger artists such as Moshe Shamir, and included several from the Palmach generation. Yet, not a single one of the signatories stemmed from the sons of the State.

I do not wish to contend that that entire generation was opposed to the territorial concept of Greater Israel. But it is important to underscore that the intellectual elite which came to maturity in the small state was not imbued with that sense of possessiveness and mastery over all the Land of Israel inscribed so deeply in the psyche of many who had grown to maturity in mandatory Palestine. For A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Meir Shalev, Yehoshua Kenaz, and David Grossman, the legitimate state and the confines of Israeli rule were limited to the territory within the cease-fire lines. It halted there. Beyond that perimeter lay a foreign land whose inhabitants were hostile–a land under the boot, not liberated, occupied territories and not ancient patrimony. The distinction was between a historical legacy anchored in Biblical tradition and contemporary political conclusions based on the present situation. This perspective was grounded in the mentality of "Little Israel" that had crystallized over nineteen years of solitude.

The Six-Day War stirred up anew all the old questions about Israeli identity that had been seemingly laid to rest in the decade of stability preceding the war. In the cunning of history, the greatest Israeli victory engendered doubts about Israel’s right to the land. The encounter with the Arabs in the Land of Israel was traumatic, its implications disconcerting. For the first time since 1948, people began to grapple in classrooms and seminars with thorny issues such as the Arab refugees, Palestinian self-identity, and administrative detentions. The "Arab question," marginal in "Little Israel" prior to 1967, was now raised anew and became a major topic, not only on the political stage but also at deeper levels, bound up with the entire complexity of Israeli self-identity. From the moment Yeshayahu Leibovitz publicly broached the dilemma of the corruptive occupation, the contradiction between rule over a foreign people and democracy has remained front and center on the public agenda.

The invidious image of fathers sacrificing their sons began cropping up in the immediate wake of the Six-Day War, and intensified in the period of the War of Attrition between Egyptian and Israeli forces (October 1968 to August 1970): a leadership waiting for a phone call, portrayed as incapable of seizing upon the slightest crack of light for advancing peace, prepared to sacrifice their young sons to the Moloch of a war without end. Gyrating around that motif were such public manifestations as the famous "letter of the ‘68ers" in which the sons of the state’s leaders upbraided their elders for not pursuing the cause of peace with greater resolve, and the staging of the Queen of the Bathroom, a political satire that triggered a storm of public controversy, chastising the army and the older generation in general.

Of course, there was also the impact from the broader climate of turbulence abroad: the 1968 revolt in France, as students rose in violent protest against the establishment, and the student unrest against the draft and the war in Vietnam that was rocking the United States. The Israeli "Song of Peace" that entered history on that momentous evening in November 1995 was patterned on a similar song in the 1969 musical Hair. To a much greater extent than the pre-1967 provincial state, Greater Israel was now opened up and exposed to the wide world beyond. It discovered Israel and Israel discovered the world.

Yet this protest was an authentic indigenous Israeli expression of the contradictions between the established and younger elites that was manifested in the profound sense of resentment and exasperation felt by the young, no longer confident that the leadership at the state’s helm was indeed steering a course toward peace. As Amos Eilon had already remonstrated in a 1970 series of articles on the "gap between generations and the gulf in credibility": "When you take from this nation the belief in peace, you shatter something vital and essential deep inside."

But Israeli identity was still coiled around the armature of preparedness for sacrifice, the obligation of courage, and the disgrace of evading one’s duty. The authors of the "letters of the ’68ers" did not contemplate the idea of refusing to serve in combat. American students were heading north across the border to Canada, their Israeli peers ended their quandaries in the trenches at the Suez Canal. But this was the first intimation of the tremors below shaking the consciousness of educated Israeli youth.

In the public mind, the Yom Kippur War marked the defeat of the Sabra generation. Moshe Dayan, the dauntless warrior, was emblematic of all that was good and bad in that generation. He symbolized creativity and cockiness, courage and boastfulness, simplicity of manner that could mutate to hedonism. He had a gift for improvisation that led to contempt for the law, and revolted against bourgeois conventions in a way that degenerated into indifference toward public opinion. From an icon revered by a substantial segment of the Israeli public, Dayan was transformed overnight into the symbol of an entire generation’s debacle: "How have you fallen from heaven, bright morning star."

Weaknesses that were excused in the days of glory were now enumerated in obloquy. Dayan was not the only target singled out for denigration. The chief of staff and the entire military elite were also hauled over the coals of public censure. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF), that pivot of Israeli identity, had remained above the fray in the political and cultural arena. The salvos against it in the Queen of the Bathroom controversy had been viewed as undermining the bedrock of Israeli society. Now the IDF stood in the dock of public opinion. This was the Israeli "twilight of the gods."

The political expression of the transformation in Israeli identity came in 1977 with the revolution at the ballot box that catapulted the Likud Party to power. All who felt spurned and degraded under the press of the dominant Israeli identity now had an opportunity to avenge that sense of humiliation. Fighters from the right-wing pre-state undergrounds, Oriental Jews, and Holocaust survivors all began to clamor for their place in the sun, their corner in Israeli identity and collective memory. The typical Israeli was no longer the eternal youth clad in open shirt and shorts. New types began to appear in media representations, dressed in that elegant look of nonchalant neglect considered en vogue among designers on the international stage.

But that process was not one-sided: the photo of a handsome young man in a bright blue shirt, the emblem of the youth movement, rifle in hand and radiating the aura of the old pioneering spirit, began to appear frequently in publications of a new party that had been founded at that same time. The Tehiya (Regeneration) marked the far Right in the Israeli political spectrum. Actually, the photo was of the writer Yaakov Shabtai as a young man, an image the Tehiya had unknowingly adopted as its pictorial icon. Shabtai, who belonged to another political camp, vehemently objected. His critique pointed up a significant phenomenon: namely the appropriation and refurbishing of old outmoded symbols of the Left by newer political currents far to the right.

In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, two extra-parliamentary movements emerged: Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) and Shalom Akhshav (Peace Now). Both arose from within the sons of the State; in many respects, both carried aloft the banner of idealism that had characterized the "Small Israel" of the 1950s and early 1960s and had waned in the social and cultural climate of the Greater Israel after 1967. There were first intimations of these two currents, marking a profound and deep ideological cleavage, in the weeks immediately following the Six-Day War. The critical voices raised in Siah Lohamim (Combatants Discourse) and the humanistic sentiments articulated in the discussions documented in the book led to the founding of the Peace Now movement.

Yet there was one discourse that contained views and comments so grating on the ears of listeners that they were not included in the book but published separately in Shdemot (Cornfields), the journal of the kibbutzim. This was the transcript of a discussion held at the Yeshivat Merkaz Harav; its participants included a number of young men who several years later would rise to the leadership of Gush Emunim. The disciples of Merkaz Harav did not deny the fact that on the eve of the Six-Day War they had harbored no dreams of conquest of the Land of Israel, nor did they long for the Old City in Jerusalem. The messianic element did not appear as yet in their thinking.

The difficulty that erupted in that discussion and so dismayed participants from the Left was the attitude of Merkaz Harav graduates toward the Arabs. The religious co-discussants repudiated the humanistic approach that had been fundamental in all the other talks with the fighters. When the topic turned to the fate of Arab combat soldiers, values such as sanctity of human life and respect for the human dignity of the enemy were of no importance to the young men from Merkaz Harav. This talk heralded the schism in mentality well before the question of the Jewish settlements in territory with dense Arab population was propelled onto the public agenda.

That cleft grew wider and deeper with the years. The generation of the State was divided along the lines of two configurative experiences flowing from the Six-Day War and its aftermath: one mytho-historical, the other that of occupation. Amos Oz defined its contours in asking: what do you see when you look at the territories–the land or the people? Those who could see only the land gave a stamp of legitimacy to the blinkered view that turned a blind eye to the humanity of the Arab inhabitants. All the rest sprang directly from that. Anyone whose eyes are open to the human beings will see their suffering, their insult and injury, their rage and hatred–and search for solutions out of the impasse. From that juncture on, the sons of the State have remained a generation divided. And here perhaps lies the source of various afflictions in Israeli society that have festered down to the present.

Since the late 1980s, a new generational group has appeared, still unnamed though possible to label the "postmodern generation." Dani Carmi, a young soldier who had seen action in the Intifada, said in Maariv:

As far as I’m concerned, the world can go to hell. Let ’em drop a bomb on it. I’ve got no damn interest in the rain forests or people who are starving. What interests me is my job, my friends, and my family. My parents hope some day that’ll change. I don’t know.

That sense of self is the polar opposite to Zvi Guber. It is also the antipode to the individualism in the early days of the state, not individualism rising up against existing reality in a desire to transform its parameters, but the individualism of the snail in its shell–of someone in retreat from responsibility for the community into an absolutely private existence.

Indeed, we’ve come a long way from Guber to Carmi. Yehoshua Kenaz’s new novel, Mahzir Ahavot Kodmot (Returning Past Loves) provides a mirror reflecting the new reality. You will recall that in his Hitganvut Yehidim, Kenaz describes how the individual is coerced by social pressures into valor on the battlefield. In Mahzir Ahavot Kodmot, he portrays a young man who deserts his military unit and the reactions of his family members. Right down to the end of the tale, the reader doesn’t know why the soldier has decided to desert and why he finally chooses to return to the army. His father, a son of the State, finds it difficult to condone his boy’s derelict behavior, and basically tries to find out the why and wherefore of his actions. He does not get any answer. But the society around him seems tolerant of his son’s erring ways, and the father comes to understand and accept his boy and the altered social situation.

This is the portrait of a society that has broken from the tethers of its traditions and looks to a wishful world in which people live, love, suffer, and die suspended in a kind of vacuum unlinked to time or place. All that remains is the private individual ego.

This generational phenomenon is alarming in its implications, since it raises difficult questions about the social cement binding the individual to society, the ligature and balance between private and public.

The old Israeli modal identity was characterized by its collective mainspring: even individuals who did not adopt it felt that it represented them. Is there a common Israeli identity today? What is an Israeli? A settler on the West Bank, in military fatigues and tallith, with skull cap and automatic rifle? An ultra-Orthodox youth from B’nei B’rak dutiful to the directives of his Hasidic rebbe? A youngster from the Sheinkin Street bohemian milieu in downtown Tel Aviv with a weird, attention-grabbing hair style? A newcomer immigrant from Russia proud of his language and culture? Or one from Ethiopia who has struggled for recognition as a Jew by the Chief Rabbinate? An Ashkenazi who loves classical music, or an Oriental Jew who prefers Eastern rhythms and riffs? Or maybe there exists a silent Israeli majority, secular in outlook yet wishing to keep a link to ancient Jewish tradition, who long for peace with security, who want economic progress–or simply just to get on with their lives, like any human being? And what about the Arab citizens of the state? And of course, we could have framed the whole passage in gendered terms, shifting the focus to the other 50 percent of the population that is not male.

The optimists will argue that we are in a phase of transition and from all the friction and clash between contending sub-identities a new Israeli identity will issue forth. It’s a normal process. But if it’s so good and normal, why is it so hard and painful?

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin marked a watershed, a foundational event in Israeli society. At the time it seemed that a new generation had made its debut upon the historical stage, the Candle Children generation: the Israeli youth who had grown to adolescence in the shadow and smoke of the Intifada and blossomed in the glow of the peace process initiated at Oslo. This generation reeled in shock with the death of the revered leader, the collective father who symbolized hope for a better tomorrow. Will the shaping experience of that generation help to fuel a new nihilism, the loss of basic existential moorings such as we witnessed in the manifestation of the snail retreating into its shell? Or will it perhaps serve as a basis for a return to a rejuvenated sense of solidarity, the creation of a new collective will? A shared spirit that is moderate, tolerant, respective of diversity and difference, but also desirous of creating a constructive public space–positive, responsible, and able to weld together diverse segments of society. Will this generation become ensnared in the quagmire of despair, bogged down in cynicism devoid of any hope? Or will it be able to take stock and translate its trauma into a new set of blueprints and visions for building a better social order?

Five years have passed since those days of blood and sorrow. On May 17, 1999, the Candle Children went to the polls for the first time. They seem to have given a clue to their state of mind: are we witnessing the emergence of a new generational cohort which will leave its imprint on Israeli society and culture?

Translated from the Hebrew by William Templer