There is a sequence of holidays lined up over eight days which shows the narrative of the founding of the Jewish State. Last week was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tonight is Memorial Day, which at sundown tomorrow turns into Independence Day.
To mark Memorial Day, I went to Rabin Square, where thousands of people showed up to hear live music, sing along and see videos of mostly women who lost husbands, kids and brothers to war. It was an emotional ceremony, and some people were crying and hugging as they watched the videos.
The idea of the holiday line-up is that without the Holocaust, and without all the soldiers who died defending the country, Israel would not be here.
That sequence is difficult to take in. It's not that the Holocaust and soldiers dying in battle aren't integral to Israel's creation - but these holidays make it seem like they are the only thing that counts. What about the urban immigrants from Odessa who scratched out a living farming in the late 1880s? There isn't any mention of these pilgrims. Or the revival of the Hebrew language? Or the building of a place like Tel Aviv from scratch?
Tom Segev in Haaretz today looks at the paper's May 14, 1948 edition, and then writes that the Israeli public at the time of Independence had a huge amount of culture to take in over a weekend.
"Newspaper readers could travel to Magdiel for a friendly chat with Mrs. Zimmerman from the Women's International Zionist Organization. After Shabbat they could attend the opera in Tel Aviv, conducted by Mordechai Golinkin and starring Adis de Filip. If there were no tickets to be had, they could go to the opening of the new rooftop garden, Hermon Ice Cream, at Beit Moghrabi in Tel Aviv....
"An examination of the newspaper suggests something that the 60th anniversary celebrations tend to blur and that many Israelis tend to drown in the outpouring of nostalgia swirling around them: that 1948 was not Zero Hour. Israeli identity was born many years before Israel."
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