Birth-Throes of the Israeli Homeland

The Concept of Moledet

David Ohana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000067484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book brings forth various perspectives on the Israeli "homeland" ( moledet ) from various known Israeli intellectuals such as Boaz Evron, Menachem Brinker, Jacqueline Kahanoff and more. Binding together various academic fields to deal with the question of the essence of the Israeli homeland: from the examination of the status of the Israeli homeland by such known sociologist as Michael Feige, to the historical analysis of Robert Wistrich of the place Israel occupies in history in relation to historical antisemitism.

The study also examines various movements that bear significant importance on the development of the notion of the Israeli homeland in Israeli society: Such movement as "The New Hebrews" and Hebrewism are examined both historically in relation to their place in Zionist history and ideologically in comparison with other prominent movements. Drawing on the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff to provide a unique Mediterranean model for the Israeli homeland, the volume examines prominent models among the Religious Zionist sector of Israeli society regarding the relation of the biblical homeland to the actual homeland of our times.

Discussing the various interpretations of the concept of the nation and its land in the discourse of Hebrew and Israeli identity, the book is a key resource for scholars interested in nationalism, philosophy, modern Jewish history and Israeli Studies.

1 Pilgrimage to the backside of the desert

“One of the splendid things about Ben-Gurion’s decision to be buried at Sde Boker,” said a perspicacious woman-journalist, “was that it forced every officiating prime minister to go down to the Negev once a year. I feel that I am not exaggerating if I say that this was Ben-Gurion’s original intention.”¹ David Ben-Gurion, founder of the nation and Israel’s first prime minister, passed away on December 1, 1973, and his annual commemoration takes place at his graveside at the Midreshet Ben-Gurion. Many political, administrative and military leaders are present, and usually the prime minister, the president, members of the government and official representatives of the state institutions. Once a year there is a solemn moment when the Israeli nation comes face to face with the figure and outlook of its founder and leader, David Ben-Gurion. The ceremony is a confrontation of the real Israel with Ben-Gurion’s vision, the potentialities it sought to realize and the problematic nature of the place where the ceremony is held. The metamorphoses the ceremony has undergone bear witness both to the changing face of the country and the relationship of its society to the image of its founder.

The impressive state ceremony is a meeting between the Israeli elite and the nation’s founding ethos, but its importance should not be exaggerated, especially if one considers the public’s view of it. The day of commemoration for Ben-Gurion, known as Ben-Gurion Day, is a relatively marginal event compared to some other days of remembrance in the Israeli calendar. Holocaust Remembrance Day, Remembrance Day for the Fallen, and Independence Day are events that take up a whole day. They include many activities and arouse strong feelings. The commemoration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin lasts for about a week and is filled with ceremonies and events. The ceremony that takes place at Ben-Gurion’s graveside is generally the only significant event of Ben-Gurion Day, and it is hardly felt outside Midreshet Ben-Gurion. At the same time, the annual state ceremonies in his memory fulfill an essential role: they represent the continuity of the state and symbolize the Israeli nation above and beyond day-to-day politics.

Even if the ceremony is marginal both from a geopolitical point of view and from the point of view of the attention it receives, it would be wrong to say that the figure of Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state is forgotten. Israelis, both young and old, remember him and to a greater or lesser degree are familiar with his image.² This chapter focuses on a certain element of special importance in the commemoration of Ben-Gurion, in which one may perhaps discern the changes in the image of that leader. There is a great distance between the historical Ben-Gurion – a demanding, energetic leader with clear positions and supporting and opposing camps – and his image in the Israeli collective memory, and the distance only increases with the passage of time.

The canonical element and the self-referential element

In the first commemorative ceremony for Ben-Gurion, which took place in December 1974, the form of the ceremony was fixed, and it did not change in the course of time.³ A member of the family said “Kaddish,” a cantor sang “El malei rahamin,” the president and the prime minister made speeches, and if the latter was not there, he was replaced by a senior member of the government. State representatives, the diplomatic corps and the family laid wreaths on the grave. The participants in the ceremony were invited in accordance with the rules of diplomacy. The laying of wreaths by the public and family was organized in accordance with protocol, and the subsequent changes were slight and insignificant. The religious element changed almost from year to year, and here a certain amount of freedom was given to the chief body organizing the ceremony: the information center in the Prime Minister’s Office. From the first ceremony in 1974 until 2004, the emphasis was generally on a subject chosen each year by the Ministry of Education, and very often it was a passage that was read from Ben-Gurion’s writings. Sometimes a poem was included in the ceremony, and sometimes Ben-Gurion’s voice was heard over the loudspeakers.⁴ Despite the slight changes in the religious content, the ceremonies had a monotonous, conservative character, expressing the continuity of the state like other official ceremonies.

While this fixed structure is the basic element in the ceremony, symbolizing the eternity of the people and state and the unchanging relationship of the nation to the figure of its founder, the changes in the ceremony every year reflect social changes. Here the distinction made by the anthropologist Roy Rappaport between the canonical element in ceremonies and the self-referential element is instructive.⁵ The canonical element is the liturgy, the ceremonial element recurring year after year, for in the opinion of the organizers of the ceremony changes in its structure and order of appearance would harm its effectiveness. In a broad historical perspective, we can discern the changes that take place in ceremonies that on the face of it seem eternal (the service for the eve of the Day of Atonement, for example, or the Seder night) and see how adaptations are made in accordance with the period. But where the participants themselves are concerned, the ceremony seems fixed for all eternity, and this continuity provides it with its sanctity.

But, side-by-side with the canonical element of the text, there is another, self-referential element which changes from one ceremony to the next, and which is expressed in routine matters dictated by its purpose. It can take the form of the names of couples getting married or a child entering adolescence on his Bar-Mitzva. Weddings and Bar-Mitzvas are canonical ceremonies, but the specific content of the ceremony which takes place in honor of particular people is an individual and changing factor. This factor represents a limited measure of freedom of choice within the accepted forms of the ceremony: for instance, in the decision whether to participate in the ceremony, how one should behave, how one should dress, or what it is permissible to say on the platform. The canonical element, on the other hand, cannot be changed, because the success of the ceremony is measured by its exact execution in the proper order, as prescribed.

The importance of the ceremony derives from its canonical element. It provides a sense of stability among the changes of life and reminds the participants that that there are eternal, transcendental values beyond their daily lives, whether they are religious, national, or some other kind. The canonical element gives the self-referential element its validity: the ceremony is moving and significant because it connects the life of the individual to the eternity beyond it.

The canonical element in the Ben-Gurion memorial ceremony is based on a more sacred ritual. In fact, it represents a hybridization of two ceremonies which make it “right” and even self-evident. The gathering by the graveside, the saying of “kaddish,” the singing of “El malei rahamin,” the speeches of the president and prime minister, the placing of wreaths on the grave by senior public officials: none of this is unique to Ben-Gurion Day and no special tradition has developed for that ceremony.⁶ The Ben-Gurion memorial ceremony imitates other ceremonies, and its canonical character could be described as second-hand. If it has any freshness, it is owing to the landscape which surrounds it and the special location of the grave facing the desert, which make it completely different from other state ceremonies.

The evolution of the self-referential element, which changes from year to year, is the focus of this chapter. Those who take the trouble to come to the ceremony, the messages delivered by the speeches of the president and prime minister and the kind of people brought to the ceremony: these things illustrate the dynamic of the Israelis’ relationship to their country, and stand out against the static background of the canonical element.

The death of the leader. Why Sde Boker?

The subject of this study is not the death or funeral of Ben-Gurion: This research has been conducted elsewhere.⁷ The annual memorial ceremonies reflect the evolution of Ben-Gution’s image and his status with the Israeli public. However, the fixed canonical element and the dynamic of the commemorations are by-products of an original decision by Ben-Gurion himself a number of years before his death. The place of burial reflects a consistent set of values, and he was buried on his orders in a place he had carefully chosen. In his writings and in his diaries, he did not give the reasons why he chose to be buried on the cliff overlooking Nahal Zin, but from his biography and from the accounts of people who were with him one can learn the motives for this choice. Is it possible that he wanted a ceremony that would force the head of state to make a pilgrimage to Sde Boker once a year? Perhaps that was one of his considerations, but there is no indication of it in his speech or in his writings.

Ben-Gurion’s place of burial was the direct result of the decision he made at the beginning of the 1950s to go and live in the Negev. The move to the Negev derived from his commitment to pioneering values, and when he made his home in Sde Boker he called on the Israelis to join him. But this step did not bring about a revival of the pioneering movement, and few chose to follow his lead. In the 1970s, towards his death, Ben-Gurion’s failure to persuade the masses to move to the Negev was clear. Pioneering had lost the power of attraction it possessed in the early days of the state, but by choosing to be buried in the Negev, Ben-Gurion showed consistency and demonstrated his commitment to the idea of making the desert bloom.

His decision to act according to the pioneering ethos to some extent contradicted another value associated with Ben-Gurion: mamlachtiyut (statism).⁸ The place of burial of a prime minister was supposed to be Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, next to the great national figures and the slain of the armed forces, and opposite Yad Va-Shem, a place that he himself had nurtured as a symbol of the revival of the nation.⁹ His decision to be buried elsewhere resembled the decisions of some other prime ministers: Moshe Sharett, who was buried in the Trumpeldor cemetery in his city, Tel Aviv, and Menahem Begin, who chose the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Ben-Gurion’s place of burial testifies to his choice between pioneering values and mamlachtiyut, and in this case its location was different. He chose not to be buried in the cemetery of Sde Boker but in a burial plot devoted solely to him and his wife. No one else is buried there.

Ben-Gurion ended his tenure as prime minister and minister of defense in 1963 and returned to his home in Sde Boker in 1963, when he was seventy-seven years old. He finally left politics in 1970, when he was eighty-four.¹⁰ He made his decision about his place of burial on the death of his wife, Paula Ben-Gurion, on January 29, 1968. The decision on where she would be buried was also a decision about his own place of burial. A reporter of Haaretz described the happening in Ben-Gurion’s household when the message about the death of Pola Ben-Gurion arrived.¹¹

His choice to be buried in the desert, like his choice to live in the desert, expressed both the emptiness and the special significance of the desert.¹² On the one hand, in the pioneering view, the desert was a virginal place devoid of history, a place on which the future would be written. On the other hand, the desert was connected to the ancient history of the people and its time of origin, to the ancient myths which were a central feature in the making of the Israeli ethos. Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar reflected on the mythological significance of the choice of this particular spot:

What did he see when he stood on the cliff face and embraced the endless space with his eyes? The land of Israel, which he loved with such a strong, total love? Thus stood Moses on another summit, in a different time, and savored with his eyes the land he had promised to his people: “And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan” (Deuteronomy 34:1). Thus Joshua saw the land he had conquered with the sword: “So Joshua took all that land, the hill country and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the Aravah and the hill country of Israel and its lowland” (Jushua 11:16). Thus he too had looked towards the land when he came to its coasts as a youth, moved and thrilled, and did not know that he had come to inherit it.¹³

Ben-Gurion passed away on December 1, 1973. His funeral was an event of great symbolic significance: the nation’s farewell to its founding father and a moment of collective orphanhood, which was all the more significant because of the shock of the Yom Kippur War which had ended a few weeks earlier.¹⁴ The funeral ceremony began in Jerusalem. The coffin was placed in the Knesset enclosure and from there was taken by helicopter to Sde Boker. Ben-Gurion did not want any eulogies, and so the military presence and the religious ceremonies stood out, and there was a limited number of participants. The specifications in Ben-Gurion’s will imposed silence on those present. When the commemorative ceremonies began, there were speeches from the leader...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: whence and whither the homeland
• 1 Pilgrimage to the backside of the desert
• 2 The Hebrewism that engendered the homeland
• 3 The new Hebrews
• 4 From antisemitism and anti-Zionism to Moledet
• 5 A Levantine Moledet
• 6 Israel’s realms of memory
• 7 Settlers and the Land of the Bible
• Bibliography
• Index