The Arabic Image in Zionist Literature

Shihab Mahmooud, Loui

	The Arabic Image in Zionist Literature
Journal of the Center Palestine Studies
Article 1, Volume 0, Issue 15, 2013, Pages 91-139
Author
Loui Shihab Mahmooud
Abstract
Bsychological attitude: a communal "personality." It is formed at its core by the conviction that Israel is a Jewish island, a people under constant siege by hostile goyim. A key ingredient of the Israeli public persona, much championed, is that Jews are tough, emotionally hardened, and ruthless, a self-image epitomized in the "sabra" (literally meaning a cactus fruit, but colloquially meaning a Jew born in Israel). In popular Israeli folklore, the Jews of Israel are "thorny and tough on the outside, but soft inside." The sabra image also has deep psychological sources in the nationalist "lessons" learned from the Holocaust, a situation where a perceived lack of Jewish physical force and power in the diaspora (galut) throughout the world inevitably must — sooner or later — lead to disaster at the hands of Gentiles. Zionism, in whatever form, has invariably dovetailed with some of the central tenets of classical religious Judaism, including the old "people apart" syndrome: Jewish alienation from all other peoples. "The civil religion [of Israel]," notes Charles Liebman and Eliezer Dov-Yehiya, "has been most forceful in asserting that Israel is an isolated nation confronting a hostile world ... The growing importance of traditional Judaism and Jewishness is associated with the centrality of the Holocaust as the primary political myth of Israeli society, the symbol of Israel's present condition and the one which provides Israel with legitimacy ... The Holocaust to a great extent fashions 'our national consciousness' and the memory is omnipresent in Israeli society." "Israeli political culture," says Israeli professor Myron Aronoff, "reflects not only the general theme of the few against the many, but a growing emphasis of 'them against us'... The traditional concept of Esau hates Jacob [Gentiles hate Jews] and a nation that dwells alone became explanations of reality and legitimization of Israeli policy." As former lobbyist for Israel Doug Bloomtleld once noted, some Israelis tend to have a "You owe us" and "Screw the world" attitudes. Zev Chafets remembers an Israeli concert he attended in 1969, two years after he moved to Israel from America: "As the show drew to a close, the group swung into an up-temp number. 'Ha'olam Ku'lo heg'denu,' they sang. 'The whole world is against us.' The audience knew the song and joined in on the chorus .'The whole world is against us; never mind, we'll get by; we don't give a damn about them anyway.'" Jewish scholar Daniel Niewyk describes the racist dimension of this Zionist ideology of alienation from others, especially as it developed in Germany: At the heart of the Zionist critique of liberal assimilation lay the conviction that Jews constitute a unique race. It was the belief in insurmountable racial differences that made the inevitability of anti-Semitism credible, just as it rationalizes the view that every effort to assimilate must go aground on the barrier reef of biological determinism ... The maintenance of that [racial] purity was essential to German Zionism, for it acknowledged the essential prerequisite for nationhood to be [in the 1922 words of Zionist Fritz Kahn] "consanguinity of the flesh and solidarity of the soul" together with the "will to establish a closer [Jewish] brotherhood over [and] against all other communities on earth." Amnon Rubenstein notes the disturbing irony expressed in this world view of the Israeli people: "The establishment of Israel was an attempt to make Jews like everybody else. They would now have a state. It has not worked out that way. Israel has made Jews more, not less, exceptional. The pariah people, it seems, have simply succeeded in creating a pariah state." Perhaps, however, this situation is inevitable. Unmentioned by Rubenstein is the religiously-based "nation apart" self-concept always so deeply embedded in Jewish mass psychology, a self-understanding and communal choice that apparently cannot be shaken, even in a secular nation-state context. So we conclude about that's research that's the Socialization of Israelis Childs focused upon two main purposes: First of all make the Israeli child hate and hatred the Arabs, so that's lead them when growing they will fight Arabs with more inclination.
Keywords
Political socialization; educational and religious Zionist community

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