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mas of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the disastrous Lebanon adventure in
the 1980s, and the Palestinian uprising doubtless reinforced this trend and
paved the way for a new iconoclasm. So, too, did the impact of the elec–
tronic media, especially on a younger generation for whom pop stars,
comedians, and basketball stars are better known and loved today than
Israeli politicians or Zionist ideologues. In contemporary Israel, with its
technological sophistication, its more easygoing individualism and all-too–
cynical knowingness, nothing, it would seem, is sacred any more. The old
heroes, the ideal of self-sacrificing patriotism, collectivist ideologies, the
cult of the Sabra (native-born Israeli) seem increasingly out of date - at
least to much of the liberal and leftist intelligentsia or the new profession–
als seeking access to the warming prosperity of the global economy. It is
the stock exchange rather than the Kibbutz, technocracy instead of Zion–
ist visions, the dream of quick profits not Hebrew prophets, which set the
tone for much of present-day Israeli society.
In this kind of climate in which there are no great causes left, de–
bunking the founding fathers and myths of Israel has become a national
sport. For the left, this is a welcome part of the new maturity in Israel, a
healthy and necessary process of adapting to modernity and freeing the
country from its imprisonment in outmoded ideologies and dogmas. In
that sense, the demystification of Israeli history is viewed as a positive
contribution to the peace process. Moreover, it tends to emphasize the
virtues of negotiation and compromise rather than the mystique of self–
sacrifice and death in the service of the homeland, encouraged by an ear–
lier generation of Israelis. By the same token, this trend is seen on the
right as undermining the ethos, the ideals, and the goals of Zionism - a
blow to the self-sustaining convictions and belief-systems that have ani–
mated the country from its inception. This assault on the founding myths
is often presented as a form of decadence, as the cultural expression of
defeatism, and as a retreat from the dominant Zionist ideology which can
lead only to disaster.
This is a debate about nothing less than history itself The focus is not
only on the Israeli-Palestinian or the Jewish-Arab conflict, which has
taken up so much international attention from politicians, academics, or
the media.
It
is also about those internal Jewish factors which have shaped
Israeli collective consciousness and national-cultural identity during the
past one hundred years - in all their pluralism, ambivalence, and contra–
dictions. Naturally these myths, memories, and traumas did not develop
in a vacuum or as the pure product of internal development within
twentieth-century Jewish history. They have all along interacted with
external forces in the non-Jewish world and been profoundly modified by
confrontation and conflict with the Arab-Muslim Middle Eastern envi-
