Why Israel's Self-Image Changed From Self-Reliance To Militarism

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One innovation in particular, the physical transformation of the Jewish image , had profound consequences that continue to reverberate today as we see in the tragic war on Gaza. At the heart of the Zionist cultural revolution lay a determination to overturn centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as outcasts: weak, passive, cowardly.

Drawing on European nationalist ideals, Zionists wanted to disprove these slanders by forging new Jewish men (men in particular): strong, productive and self-reliant.

Israeli kibbutzim celebrate 'Bikurim', also known as the Festival of First Fruits, 1951. Israel Preker via the PikiWiki via Wikimedia Commons

This remaking of the Jewish body was not merely symbolic. It was a deliberate strategy to reclaim visibility, dignity and respect. It was a quest that would have far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike.

The obsession with manual labor was both a necessity and an ideological cornerstone of Zionist ideology. It was the engine behind the remarkable growth of the Yishuv – (literally: settlement) – the Jewish community that developed in Palestine in the first half of the 20th century.

Commonly referred to in quasi-military terms as the“conquest of labor,” it romanticized agriculture and construction work as a moral and spiritual renewal. It was a rebuttal to the negative stereotype of Jews.

But I believe it had a more problematic side. As Arab resistance to Zionist settlement grew, the new Jewish farmers evolved a military side as well.

The inspiration for it came from two sources, from the fighting culture of local Bedouins, and from the Ukrainian Cossacks. This was an ironic twist given the violence Cossacks often directed at Jews . By 1948, both farmers and soldiers became two of Zionism's most distinct symbols, national ideals of productivity and physical force.

Jewish defense forces (Haganah) training in March 1948, two months before the creation of the state of Israel. Kluger Zoltan/GPO , CC BY-SA

But something unexpected happened to that evolution somewhere along the way. In their effort to create a new kind of Jew, Zionists in Israel distanced themselves from life in the Jewish diaspora – sometimes by internalising antisemitic notions of that life.

One sad example was the chilly reception Holocaust survivors received in 1950s Israel. Some Jews born in what is now Israel, who were referred to as sabras (prickly pears), were arrogant enough to believe they would have fared better under the same circumstances than those caught up by the Holocaust, who they called sabonim (soap).

Return of victimhood

By the 1980s, attempts to leave behind the so-called “lachrymose history” of Jews – which viewed Jewish history primarily as a narrative of suffering and persecution – began to be supplanted.

During and after the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in 1961, Nazi persecution of Jews was linked first by Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and then journalists and academics with Arab resistance to the state of Israel.

Both were eventually presented as examples of congenital hatred and used as a powerful argument for the establishment of the state and its right to exist. It was a dramatic combination, hard to resist, that connected the creation of the Jewish state with the near destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust – even if Zionism emerged long before that catastrophe.