When Martha Graham — the American high priestess of modern dance — first arrived in Israel in 1956 for a performance tour with her dance company, it was to a rapturous reception. They returned for a further series of performances in 1958 and 1961, to similar acclaim.
So you can imagine the starstruck Israelis’ delight when, in November 1964, the Baroness de Rothschild founded the Batsheva Dance Company, Graham agreed to serve as its artistic adviser.
Smiles faded, however, when, in an interview with Dance Magazine about her work in Israel and the new dance that she was about to stage, Graham said:
This was a promise to them. Although I am not Jewish, I immediately felt drawn to their country […] to the desert, a place of terror and magic. [My emphasis—JO-S]
How green is my valley
You see, Israelis don’t like to be reminded that their country lies at the edge of a desert (much less that the desert is an integral part of the Jewish identity). In promotional advertisements of Israeli tourist establishment and industry, most images that are not of holy sites emphasize its greenery:
Marketing of real-estate investment in the Israeli countryside invariably depicts implausibly green, European-like settings:
As do advertisements related to housing (or saving for such):
And, of course, no favourable account of the history of modern Zionism is ever complete without mention of how Jewish settlers since the late nineteenth century have “made the desert bloom”:
In historical reviews, the emphasis is always on how Canaan (or Eretz-Yisrael— the Land of Israel—as it is more commonly known in Hebrew) is part of the “Fertile Crescent” that stretches in a great arc as far as Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq):
Which, in fact, is at least partly true. Contrary to the Holy Land’s depiction in popular Western imagination, book illustrations or biblical epic films as a uniformly beige, rocky, dusty, wasteland, only the southern half of modern Israel (known as the Negev, which in fact lies south of biblical Judea) and the area east of Judean-Samarian mountain range (roughly corresponding to the West Bank) is arid wilderness. The northern (Galilee) and coastal regions, and the western slopes of the Judean mountains benefit from winter rains and even occasional snow from the Mediterranean, and are very similar to the landscapes of southern Europe. As attested in the Hebrew Bible on more than one occasion, the land was at least partly forested, and harboured lions, and bears, and deer (O my!), and other wildlife.
In fact, somewhat bizarrely, the region most uncannily similar to the Holy Land is not Morocco (the usual setting for Hollywood biblical epics), but (filmmakers: note) the Okanagan region of southern British Columbia, and its western approaches (and for similar reasons: rain falls on the western slopes of a north-south mountain range, then tapers off over the eastern slopes and subsequent valley as the air is compressed and dries).
Which puts an entirely new spin on an old standing joke in Israel about the true tragedy of Jewish history:
Moses was told by God to take the Children of Israel to Canada—but because he had a speech impediment, he said “Canaan,” instead.
All of this, when you think about it, shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the Children of Israel didn’t wander about the Sinai Desert for forty years just in order to enter another desert. The entire concept of the Promised Land is predicated on the premise that — in contrast to the surrounding region — it is “a land of milk and honey” (Exod. 3:8, and elsewhere).
In other words — and this is critical to understanding the entire Israelite/Israeli psyche —
The desert is not one’s home, but the region one has left in order to dwell in greener pastures.
As such, the desert represents the past that the nation has left behind; a place where one banishes people to; and where no self-respecting Israelite dwelled. Which is why it also served as a place of refuge (e.g. David when fled from Saul), or where prophets would go to commune with God.
Thus, deliverance from the desert, into a region of arable land, with sufficient rains to sustain agriculture, is the core of God’s promise to his Chosen People. Otherwise, the prospect of a Promised Land is meaningless.
Indeed, throughout the Hebrew Bible, greenery and water serve as a barometer of divine favour. If one follows His commandments, one “shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper” (Psalms 1:3). Conversely, if one doesn’t: “I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest” (Amos 4:6,7).
South & East = Bad; North & West = Good
The aversion to all-things-desert in the biblical Israelite mindset extended to the desert-dwelling neighbours to the south and east of Judea. Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites, who resided in the desert regions east or south of Judea, were looked down upon: “Moab is my washpot,” King David boasts to his chief musician, in Psalms 60:8, and Herod the Great was rejected by his own Judean subjects as a legitimate king, because his father had been born an Edomite (notwithstanding the father’s official conversion to Judaism).
The Amalekites—of the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula — are singled out for particular and eternal vitriol, reputedly because they opted to fight the Israelites as they came out of Egypt, rather than grant them safe passage through their territory. To this day, the expression “Remember Amalek” is a byword for not forgetting past iniquities of the nation’s enemies (as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu most recently noted with regard to the conflict in Gaza).
And of course, the Ishmaelites (which, in modern Hebrew, are synonymous with “Arabs”) will never be forgiven for having bought Joseph from his brothers and sold him to the Egyptians (never mind that it was his own brothers who sold him…).
In fact, the only desert people not despised in the Israelite tradition were the Midianites (inhabitants of modern-day Arabia and the eastern Sinai Peninsula). This is probably because Jethro the Midianite gave Moses refugewhen Moses fled from Egypt, and became his father-in-law, and partly because the Midianite religion was likely the foundation of the Judaic one).
Conversely, nations to the west and north of Israel & Judea are not excoriated in the Hebrew Bible. The Phoenicians (inhabitants of modern-day Lebanon) were even admired and courted by both David and Solomon, as they needed their skilled carpenters and cedar wood to build the First Temple in Jerusalem.
Even the Philistines—settlers of Aegean origin who resided west of Judea, in the coastal region corresponding to the area from modern-day Tel-Aviv to Gaza—were not reviled in the Hebrew Bible, even though they dominated and tormented the Israelite tribes for at least a century after their arrival ca. 1200 BCE, with their iron-based technology that the Israelites’ bronze weaponry was no match for. Samson maintained a love-hate relationship with them—alternately smiting them in battle and carousing with them and with their women (Judges 14–16), and David, too, regularly availed himself of their hospitality, despite having fought them in battle.
The historic U-turn
Interestingly, ‘twas not always thus: the ancestors of the Israelites were clearly oriented towards the east. How do we know this? Because it’s right there in the Hebrew language. The word for “forward” is קדימה (qadimah )—from the root q-d-m (qedem), meaning both “distant past” and “east.” Clearly, then, when the proto-Semitic language was first conceived, people tended to face east (to the rising sun), rather than westward. This is corroborated in Arabic, where the word for “north” is شمال (shmal) — a cognate of the Hebrew שמאל (smol), meaning “left.” It was also evident in the design of ancient temples, throughout the Near East.
So what brought about this about-face in the Israelite attitude?
Arguably, the westward orientation may be traced back to the mythological first Hebrew, Abraham, who was told to “Get thee out of thy country” by going (south)west from his native Haran (southeastern Turkey of today), to Canaan. Of course, Abraham is a mythological figure, not a historical one, but like many mythologies, may be based on a kernel of truth about significant migration from modern-day Turkey and even the Caucasus in the second millennium BCE.
A more compelling reason is the fact that Canaan, lying as it does at the proverbial crossroads of three continents, was predestined to be a melting pot of demographics and culture. This is neatly reflected in Heinrich Bünting’s symbolic mappa mundi of the world, which depicted the Old World as a three-leaf clover, with the Holy Land (specifically, Jerusalem) as its nexus:
This perception certainly held in ancient times. Canaan—or at least its coastal region—was arguably the southeastern boundary of the ancient Greek world. Andromeda (of Perseus fame) was chained to a rock off the coast of Joppa (modern-day Jaffa, south of Tel-Aviv). The very name “Europe” comes from the name of the Phoenician princess Europa of Tyre (in modern-day Lebanon); her brother Cadmus is said to have introduced the alphabet to mainland Greece (a mythological echo of its actual introduction by Phoenician sea traders). Indo-European peoples such as the Philistinesand the Hittites settled and were eventually assimilated into the local population, and likely played a part in the Canaanite Shift that occurred in the local language.
The conquest of the entire Near East region by Alexander the Great, and its subsequent domination by Hellenist kingdoms, and then Rome, for centuries after that (with a brief, 100-year interval of Judean self-rule), supplanted the previous Mesopotamian and Persian influences, such that, by the third century BCE, learning Greek was as de rigueur for educated Judeans as much as learning English is for modern-day Israelis. Indeed, many Judeans chose to emigrate to other parts of the Hellenist world, such Tarsusand Alexandria, and lost their command of Hebrew to such an extent that a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) had to be commissioned for them to understand it.
The destruction of Judea and exile of its refugees by the Romans in the wake of the Jewish revolts against Roman rule in the first century and a half of the Common Era set the seal on the western orientation of what was left of the Judean (now Jewish) people. With the exception of the Judean community that had remained in Babylon since the First Exile in the sixth century BCE, and a smaller community in Yemen, the vast majority of surviving Judeans dispersed to points west of the Holy Land, around the Mediterranean. In time, those who settled in Egypt and other parts of north Africa, Lebanon/Syria or Turkey were subsumed into the Muslim empires that emerged in the seventh century and ruled the region until the modern era. Those who settled in Europe ultimately became Italian or Ashkenazi (central/east European) Jews.
In the modern era
The western bias of modern Israel was entrenched by the first five waves of Jewish settlers, who spearheaded the Zionist dream of re-establishing a sovereign Jewish presence in the Holy Land between 1882 and 1940, and hailed almost exclusively from central or eastern Europe, fired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and Marxist theory.
These pioneers, like Mark Twain a few years earlier, were dismayed by the sight of a countryside that had been stripped of its native oak woodland by centuries of Ottoman occupation, and focused their settlement and tree-planting efforts almost exclusively on the green and pleasant lands of the Galilee and the central coastal region (modern-day Tel-Aviv and its vicinity and northwards).
In contrast, settlement of the arid Negev region began only decades later, in 1946, and even then mainly for the political purpose of establishing a Jewish presence prior to the expected partition of the country into a Jewish and an Arab state.
An outpost of Europe
Opponents to Zionism often accuse modern Israel of being a colonial foreign entity in the Middle East. While this isn’t true insofar as the Holy Land is the Jewish people’s ancestral land, it is true that Zionist thinkers and founders, hailing almost exclusively from Europe, envisaged a Jewish state as a non-contiguous outpost of it—rather like Alaska or Hawaii would become a few decades later in relation to the continental US.
Theodor Herzl—founder of the international Zionist Organization and “Visionary of the State [of Israel]” as set out in his books Der Judenstaat (the State of the Jews) and Altneuland (“OldNewLand”)—imagined the future Jewish state as a sun-drenched version of genteel Vienna, with German as the main written language, and people engaged in European pastimes such as going to the opera and enjoying the theatre.
In the 1920s, in the new town of Tel-Aviv, German-trained architects rejected the traditional local, “Oriental” architecture of Palestine in favour of the “clean” geometric shapes of the modernist Bauhaus School of Architecture, and sought to exploit the city’s near-blank slate to make it the world’s first “White City” in the International Style (with various adaptations to accommodate summer glare and heat).
Meanwhile, in the countryside, the first generation of modern Israeli landscape design explicitly sought to recreate in British Mandatory Palestine panoramas that recall the eastern Europe of their own, or their parents’, countries of birth.
Conversely, efforts to draw settlers to the southern, desert regions largely failed. Even when Israel’s revered founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion tried for years, on ideological grounds, to attract people to the desert Negev Region by championing its virtues and setting a personal example of retiring to a small kibbutz in the very heart of it — it was to no avail. Israelis ignored his personal example in droves.
Of those who did settle in the region, many gave up and moved to greener pastures further north. (Case in point: a kibbutz that my friends and I were sent to in the western Negev before and after our military service, as part of a national effort to infuse struggling kibbutzim with young blood, was still recovering from having half its members abruptly leaving it a decade earlier for a kibbutz in the Central Region.)
Even the capital of the Negev, Be’er Sheva (the Beersheba of biblical fame), struggled for decades for respect and recognition until the past decade, when land shortage and real estate prices in the Central Region, coupled with an extension of the fast rail network from the Central Region, persuaded many Israelis to settle in surrounding dormitory towns, and helped its university become popular with youngsters.
The core confict
The desire to create a European setting in this corner of the Middle East highlights the core conflict in the vision of the original Zionists, between the desire to return to the ancestral homeland, while remaining part of the West.
The core conflict in the vision of the original Zionists is between the desire to return to the ancestral homeland, while remaining part of the West.
As long as the Jewish population was predominantly of European origin, this aspiration was optimistic, but culturally conceivable. But when, in the decade after Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, a million Jewish immigrants flooded in from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries—more than doubling the existing Jewish population—it became a lot less tenable.
Suddenly, over half the Jewish population in the country was not European. Indeed, some of the new immigrants (collectively dubbed Mizrahim—“Easterners”) were alarmingly similar in appearance to Arabs. Euphemistic expressions of dismay abounded. The national poet and revered author, Haim Nahman Bialik, was even rumoured (wrongly, as it turns out) to say: “I hate the Arabs because they look like Frenks [the derogatory term for Jews of Middle-Eastern origin]”—a statement all the more shocking as it vocalized the unspoken fear of all Israelis to this day, of being viewed by Westerners as indistinguishable from Arabs.
Intra-Jewish prejudice—which previously had been purely cultural, with Russian Jews looking down upon Polish ones; Polish Jews looking down upon Romanians; Hungarian Jews being made fun by everyone because of their accent; and German-speaking Jews looking down upon everyone else—suddenly took on distinctly racial tones. Some of the more small-minded Yiddish speakers even referred to the new immigrants as schwartzim(literally, “blackies”). (As a ten-year-old, newly arrived from a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Brooklyn where we had spent the previous three years, I remember being puzzled by this. “They’re are not Blacks,” I told my newfound friends in reference to Mizrahi Jews, shortly after my arrival. “They would barely count as Hispanic, in the States.”)
Intra-Jewish prejudice — which previously had been purely cultural […] suddenly took on distinctly racial tones.
As usual in such situations, the established Ashkenazi elite addressed this issue as it did the Israeli Arab question—by sweeping it under the carpet, and hoping it would go away. Poor Mizrahi immigrants (unlike their European counterparts—survivors of the Holocaust) were housed not with established families or in existing neighbourhoods or rural settlements, but in abandoned (or appropriated) Arab homes, or in tented transit camps for months, or years, until suitable housing solutions were found. The lucky ones were each given a small piece of land and bundled together into moshavim (cooperative villages) where, in time, they could eke out a living as farmers (though most had no such background in their countries of origin, where they had worked as small traders, goldsmiths or other craftsmen). The unlucky ones were packed off into cheap mass-housing apartment blocks in “development towns” in the peripheria—i.e., as far away from the established Central Region as possible, in unsettled or formerly Arab corners of the Galilee (like Afulah, or Kiryat Shmonah), or in the desert south. They were then largely neglected—in terms of infrastructure, economic opportunities, and education.
To add insult to injury, the cultural heritage of all immigrants from Arab/Muslim countries — even the illustrious history of the Golden Age of Jewish scholars and writers in medieval Spain under Arab rule, or the extraordinary heritage of Iraqi Jews extending as far back as the Babylonian exile — was also denigrated, or ignored, in favour of an almost exclusive focus, in schools and in the mainstream arts, on European/North American history and Jewish culture. Herzl’s vision, though wrong on the German language issue, became partially borne out—but not in a good way. To this day, the arts, theatre, television, and literature are resolutely Western-oriented, with only the occasional token retrospective of “exotic” Eastern culture.
While the first generation of Mizrahi immigrants were too meek and conditioned by their countries of origin to challenge authorities over their treatment, their children were not. In the early 1970s, after simmering through a childhood of discrimination and cultural disregard, this second generation’s resentment came to the boil with the formation of a protest movement pointedly called the “Black Panthers” (much to the bemusement of the original Black Panthers in the US, whom the Israeli Black Panthers once sought for a meeting of solidarity), and launched a series of demonstrations that prompted the then-Prime Minister Golda Meir to dismiss them as “not nice people.”
When Mizrahi Jews continued to be largely ignored, six years later they caused an almighty upset by voting out the established, Ashkenazi Labour Party that had held a monopoly of power since the founding of the Jewish community’s political infrastructure in the 1920s—marking the start of its gradual decline to its current irrelevance, and the fracturing of the secular Ashkenazi establishment.
For at least a generation after the mass influx of Mizrahi Jews, many Ashkenazi parents lived in dread that their children might marry them. Even today, this concern is still prevalent among the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox in Israel (as amusingly portrayed in the recent film Matchmaking) — though thankfully much less so among secular Israelis. In the forty or so members of my own army group, for example, nearly a third ended up marrying each other (my wife and I included), and remarkably, in every single instance, the couple was “mixed”—i.e., an Ashkenazi with a Mizrahi or Sephardi. (Even more remarkably, perhaps, all those couples are still together.)
The real obstacle to peace
Much has been said about the Arab-Israeli conflict in its century-long history: that it is a fight over land, or between Judaism and Islam, or a cultural clash between East and West. None of these claims, however, put the finger on the true, underlying, emotional cause.
To do so, we must remember the old Holmesian (i.e., Arthur Conan Doyle’s) adage:
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
If Israel happened to be somewhere in Europe, Jewish Israelis would have long ago made peace with its neighbours, and even intermarried and integrated with them, as quickly as you can say “Jewish American assimilation.”
But it isn’t. It’s smack dab in the middle of the Muddle East.
So while the Arab-Israeli conflict is certainly rooted in a fight over (a very small) land, the religious conflict is merely a smokescreen fanned by religious zealots on both sides to drum up support for religious institutions and political parties, and the East-West narrative is merely a euphemism for what really keeps Jewish Israelis up at night—namely, the fear that, in time, they will be considered a truly Middle-Eastern (i.e., non-Western) country.
This, then, is the crux of the issue:
As long as Israel is in a nominal state of war against the Arab world, it can continue to present itself as a Western enclave within the Middle East.
But once peace is established—not a “cold peace” such as currently exists with Egypt and Jordan, but a true one, with normalised relations and open borders, as within the European Union today—cultural integration with its neighbours will become inevitable.
In such a true peace, Jewish Israelis would be able to flock to the cafés of Beirut, the ski slopes of southern Lebanon, and the souks of Damascus—not, as they currently do, to Dubai, which lies 2600 km to the east, on the other side of the Arabian desert, which they can pretend they’re visiting as an exotic destination, like Europeans, but as the next-door neighbours that they really are, with similar landscapes, flora, fauna, and food. They would (finally!) gain a conversational command of Arabic (not just its swear words, or a bastardised version of its slang, as currently is the case), start watching Arab soap operas and listening to Arab pop singers, and possibly even learn to read it fluently. Over time, inevitably, some mixed marriages (gasp) would occur, and in a few generations—as happened in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in the pre-Zionist era—Jewish Israelis may become simply “Jewish Arabs”, much as the descendants of Crusaders who remained in Palestine eventually became Christian Arabs. (The definition of an Arab is not religious, racial, or even ethnic—but cultural: a person from Western Asia or North Africa, who speaks Arabic as a first language.)
But that scenario terrifies most Israelis—as it would confirm them as truly Middle Eastern. So they prefer to pay the price of living by the sword, in a perpetual state of war (with all the horror and casualties that that entails), just to preserve the precious image of a Western, European country, rather than become an integral part of the Middle East.
A true peace scenario terrifies most Israelis, as it would confirm them as truly Middle Eastern.
A Thoroughly Western Country
Accordingly, the projection of Israel as a white, Western country lies at the heart of every aspect of its presentation to the world, and to itself:
- Television newsreaders and presenters are preferably fair-haired and/or blue-eyed:
- In fact, judging by Israeli advertising and billboards, you would be forgiven for thinking that it is a country of primarily blond or fair-haired people:
- When over a million and a half immigrants arrived from Russia following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, such was the satisfaction with this demographic “whitening of the mix” (an actual approving comment, made only half in jest), that authorities were willing to overlook the fact that a sizeable proportion of them were not technically Jewish.
- Middle-Eastern-style pop music – so beloved of the Mizrahi Israelis – is studiously referred to as “Mediterranean”:
- In my day job as a translator and editor of Israeli academic papers and books, references to Israel as a Western country are such a recurring motif, that the expression “Methinks she protesteth too much” comes to mind.
- For most Israelis, two of the proudest moments in the country’s history were when it was first allowed to participate in the Eurovision Song Context (to which it promptly dispatched its blondest singer), and in 2010, when it was formally accepted in the OECD, which was seen as confirmation of its status as a Western country.
Indeed, so profound is the Western/white self-image, and so detached are most Israelis from current Western norms, that an oblivious racism prevails that is positively Victorian in its innocence. In a Hebrew book by Israeli palmistry expert that I was asked to translate fifteen years ago, I came across the following gem:
“The short upper joint of the thumb is typical of the Eskimos, and other primitive people,” wrote an Israeli palmistry expert.
(I politely declined, after picking my jaw off the floor.)
“Why don’t you understand?”
Which is why Israelis are genuinely perplexed by widespread objections or outrage in the West at the IDF’s wholesale destruction of Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7th. The explicit or subtextual message in all Israeli or pro-Israeli efforts of justifying Israel’s operations – such as Ran Harnevo’s YouTube video, as I mentioned in a recent post – is invariably:
“You should support us (whatever we do), because we’re white, Western and modern, like you (and by the way, if you’re not careful, you, too, will fall victim to those nasty, dark, Muslim Arabs).”
When foreigners disagree, the only possible explanation is that they must be antisemitic:
This, then, is the demon that needs to be vanquished for Israel to finally find peace, in every sense of the word. As every psychologist knows, no one resolves their inner conflicts until they come to terms with who they really are.
The Israeli Western/European/white complex is the psychological obstacle not only to resolving the conflict with the Palestinians and fully accepting its own Arab citizens, but from doing the obvious, which is becoming the engine of economic growth and development and democratic reform of a prosperous Middle Eastern (or at least, a Levantine) Union.
Will that ever happen? Possibly, but only — as Winston Churchill once said about the United States doing the right thing — only after it has exhausted all other options.
One thing is certain. In the long term, Israel cannot have its cake and eat it, too. It cannot claim to be Western, while blatantly using religious criteria to define nationality, flouting Western conventions of treatment of refugeesand non-Jewish residents in general, and ignoring the rules of war.
It cannot claim to be a democracy, when half of the population in the territory it controls is Muslim Arab, and most of those (the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are denied Israeli citizenship, yet also denied a sovereign state of their own, and corralled in South-African-style bantustans, with little or no freedom of movement, and subject to routine harassment, military raids, and imprisonment.
At some point, if Israel doesn’t come to its senses by itself, its Western allies will have to sit it down, and tell it in so many words:
“Look, face it. You’re a Levantine country—Middle-Eastern, but with some Western attributes and an identity complex — but that’s OK. Most Western countries are ethnically mixed, too, now, and have learned to accept ethnic minorities as bona fide nationals. As climate change renders half the world uninhabitable, causing over a billion people to move to temperate zones, this trend will only accelerate… Since we’re all going to hell in an environmental basket anyway, we may as well make life as comfortable as possible. The Titanic has already hit the iceberg and is sinking, so while we’re still alive, stop squabbling over who has the right over your little cabin, and enjoy the hummus.”
Will it listen? Time will tell. The last time an attempt was made to establish a European enclave in the Middle East — the Crusader Kingdom – it was similarly bloody, and lasted just shy of two hundred years. If Israel is still around as a viable sovereign entity after the same duration (193 years since the first Zionist settlers of 1882 = 2075), it will only be as a country that has come to terms with its geographical location and identity, and is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy that does not cherry-pick which of its residents are worthy of citizenship based on religion. Ironically, only then would it be truly worthy of membership of the club of Western liberal democracies.
The alternative is the Samson Option – which is another story.
Mark my word—and your calendars.
Notes by Autumn Light 