The Founding Myths of Israel

National myths need not mean fabricated stories: in the study of national identity, they can refer to narratives that organize historical experience around shared origins, symbols, and aspirations.[1] Modernist approaches understand national identity as a modern social construction, perennialist approaches emphasize older roots, and ethno-symbolist approaches connect modern nationalism with historically deep identities and symbols.[1] These distinctions are particularly relevant to accounts that connect modern Zionism with the Jewish people’s longstanding relationship to the Land of Israel.[1][3]

Israel’s official founding narrative combines historical continuity and national self-determination with practical state-building and international recognition.[3] It also includes commitments to Jewish immigration, the Ingathering of the Exiles, development for all inhabitants, equal social and political rights, and peace with neighboring states.[6] The Declaration of Independence is a primary expression of these commitments, rather than evidence by itself that every promise was fully realized.[6]

Founding narratives are not confined to the declaration or to military history: they also concern the Hebrew-speaking “new Jew,” the people’s army, Hebrew labor, the melting pot, and making the desert bloom.[7][8] Nor do they form a wholly uniform tradition; accounts of the War of Independence have differed over military strategy, Soviet assistance, and the role of the Irgun, among other subjects.[9]

The Declaration of Independence places Jewish statehood within a history of connection to the land, exile, enduring hopes of return, modern Zionist nation-building, and international recognition.[3] Its account links the restoration of sovereignty to the Jewish people’s historic and natural rights and to the United Nations’ 1947 resolution.[6] The official state history similarly traces Jewish connection through biblical times, foreign rule, and diaspora, presenting modern Zionism as the political expression of Jewish self-determination.[10]

Pre-state institution-building supplied an important foundation for this account of national renewal.[10] Labor organizations, health services, cultural centers, academic institutions, and a Hebrew press helped make the Jewish community highly organized by the middle of the twentieth century.[10] The official historical presentation connects these developments with Jewish acceptance of the 1947 partition plan, Arab rejection, the declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, and attacks by Arab countries and local Arab militias.[10]

Jewish statehood was an established Zionist objective before the Holocaust.[11] Restrictions on Jewish immigration under the British White Paper of 1939 strengthened the drive for sovereignty, while the Biltmore Program of 1942 made a Jewish state an imminent political goal.[11] The Holocaust added urgency and anguish to that existing objective, while the destruction of European Jewry deprived the emerging state of a major potential source of people and resources.[11]

The postwar refugee crisis gave the search for a Jewish refuge immediate human significance.[12] Europe’s Jewish displaced-person population reached approximately 250,000 in 1947, while Britain intercepted more than 50,000 Jewish refugees at sea between 1945 and 1948 and sent them to detention camps in Cyprus.[12] In 1947, Britain returned the Exodus 1947, carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors, to the British-occupied zone of Germany.[12] The incident attracted international attention and helped move public opinion toward recognition of a Jewish state; survivors subsequently began arriving in Israel immediately after independence, and many fought and died in the 1948–1949 war.[12]

The declaration brought historical, legal, and civic arguments together in a single public act.[13] Its opening section summarized Jewish historical links to the land, another grounded statehood in a people’s natural right to self-determination, and subsequent portions proclaimed the state and articulated justice, peace, equality, and freedom.[13] David Ben-Gurion delivered it on May 14, 1948, at a small gathering whose attendees had been invited secretly the previous day; its radio broadcast helped turn the occasion into a shared moment of national memory.[13]

The document’s civic language accompanied its affirmation of Jewish sovereignty.[3] It promised equal social and political rights regardless of religion, race, or sex, appealed to Arab inhabitants to participate in building the state, and called on neighboring states to establish peaceful relations.[3] Openness to Jewish immigration and the Ingathering of the Exiles stood alongside religious and cultural freedoms and development for the benefit of all inhabitants.[6]

The War of Independence supplied another central foundation of national memory.[4] Fighting began as a civil war between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine in late 1947, before the declaration, and five Arab armies entered after independence in May 1948.[4] Israeli memory traditionally framed the conflict as a defensive struggle for the new state’s survival, whereas Palestinian memory emphasized displacement and the destruction of Palestinian society under the name Nakba, or catastrophe.[4]

The heroic account acquired cultural form before historical scholarship became its principal interpreter.[9] Israeli writing in the 1950s and 1960s often portrayed victory as miraculous, while poetry, theater, films, fiction, textbooks, songs, commemorations, and political argument shaped public understanding.[9] Common motifs included the purity of Jewish arms, overwhelming Arab superiority, fear of destruction, and the claim that Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to leave temporarily pending an Arab victory.[9]

A review in the Jewish Review of Books interprets this traditional account as the culmination of the Jewish quest for statehood and return to Zion.[14] It describes the “few against the many” image as affirming the necessity of a Jewish safe haven after the Holocaust and the moral justification of victory following Arab rejection of partition.[14]

Historical reassessment gathered momentum in the 1980s, facilitated by declassified documents and shaped by generational and political differences.[15] Tom Segev questioned familiar assumptions that Jews had exhausted every opportunity for peace, that Israel had been a weak David facing an Arab Goliath, and that Palestinian departures primarily followed Arab leaders’ instructions.[15] Research on the refugee problem became a particularly important part of the challenge to established perceptions of the conflict’s origins.[16]

The scholarly record continued to develop after those initial interventions.[17] Further declassification of Israeli cabinet protocols from 1948–1953 and materials from the Haganah, Israel Defense Forces, and Defense Ministry archives enabled renewed examination of the Palestinian exodus.[17] The successive opening of sources made reassessment an ongoing research process rather than a single, completed revision of the founding story.[17]

Israeli school textbooks provide concrete examples of how founding narratives are transmitted and reconsidered.[2] A study of the 2022–23 textbook corpus examined 107 books approved for state and state-religious schools, including all eight approved civics textbooks and most modern-history textbooks.[2] Those sectors represented 74 percent of Hebrew-language students; Haredi and Arabic-language curricula were outside the study’s scope.[2] Its findings therefore concern the specified corpus rather than every Israeli school.[2]

Within that corpus, competing perspectives appeared through both historical content and terminology.[2] One chapter discussed the names War of Liberation, War of Independence, War of Establishment or Sovereignty, and Nakba, explaining that names express different perspectives.[2] Curricular additions addressed Palestinian experiences and narratives, partly drawing on the new historians of the 1990s and subsequent public and academic discussion.[2]

A fourth-grade example presented several reasons for Arab departures during the war: fear, calls by Arab leaders to leave temporarily, and expulsions during battles.[2] It also stated that those who remained became Israeli citizens.[2] Examples from higher-grade books addressed the Nakba, Palestinian exodus and expulsion, and disagreements about the causes and significance of displacement.[2] These examples illustrate particular textbook treatments, not a single account shared by all books.[2]

Early Zionism was also taught alongside material about the Arab population.[2] One quoted textbook supplied approximate figures of 400,000 Arabs and 25,000 Jews in the land during the 1880s and asked students to examine the claim that it had been “a land without a people.”[2] The exercise made a familiar slogan an object of historical inquiry rather than simply reproducing it as a description.[2]

The classroom’s relationship with public memory could become politically charged.[2] A textbook author recalled that a 1999 book challenged the “few against many” formulation by arguing that Israel possessed more trained fighters and superior technology, even though its opponents had greater overall manpower.[2] The resulting dispute reportedly lasted about six months, generated frequent editorials, and brought the author before a Knesset education committee.[2]

Changes in historical teaching also expanded the range of Jewish experiences receiving attention.[18] Discussions of curriculum included greater treatment of Jewish history outside an Israel-centered framework and fuller accounts of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities, rather than a predominantly German-centered presentation.[18] Schools’ ability to choose among history textbooks further complicated the idea of one centrally uniform narrative.[18]

National identity was transmitted through symbols and ritual as well as formal instruction.[7] The Zionist meta-narrative connected Israeli identity with Jewish identity and portrayed the “new Jew” as an authentic national-Jewish figure associated with a Hebrew-speaking society in the Land of Israel.[7] Holidays, rituals, symbols, myths, values, and beliefs could consequently be understood as Jewish while also distinguishing the new society from the Diaspora.[7]

State-centered symbolism gave sovereignty and national unity an institutional expression.[19] In the study of Israeli statism as a civil religion, myths and symbols helped legitimate state institutions and policies.[19] Traditional religious language could be recast in military terms: a biblical expression of trust in the Lord became “Israel trust the IDF,” while an army-base banner declared, “In the beginning the IDF created the soldier, and the IDF created the nation.”[19]

Literature offered a less uniform treatment of the “new Hebrew” than a simple heroic stereotype suggests.[20] The Sabra, or native-born Israeli, was commonly associated with confidence, toughness, and distance from the Diaspora.[20] Fiction by the Generation of 1948 nevertheless represented encounters with Holocaust survivors through both disdain and superciliousness and warmth and openness.[20] Some works criticized insensitive treatment by state authorities and other institutions while still locating survivors’ integration within the Zionist vision.[20]

Contemporary documentaries have extended this examination into popular culture.[8] The four-part series Myth Machine examined the melting pot, Hebrew labor, the people’s army, and making the desert bloom, placing each within the circumstances and motives of its emergence.[8] It also considered populations it portrayed as harmed by these narratives, especially poorer or disadvantaged groups, while recognizing their role in the state’s establishment.[8]

Among the questions raised were how Hebrew labor changed after 1967 with the availability of Palestinian workers and how immigration from the Soviet Union altered the labor picture.[8] The series also asked whether the people’s army functioned as a melting pot and discussed the acronym “TBR” for young people admitted to elite units without interviews because of their background.[8] These were questions and examples presented by the documentary, not independently established conclusions of the accompanying review.[8]

The documentary 1948 – Remembering and Forgetting used diaries and archival footage to connect Israeli and Palestinian memories of the war.[21] Its treatment included the politicization of archives and a report by then attorney general Yaakov Shimshon Shapira concerning alleged war crimes.[21] It also revisited the military balance, citing a claim that the Haganah had more fighters than the Arab armies while acknowledging Arab advantages in military quality and weapons; the review criticized the film for insufficiently examining that comparison.[21]

The founding narratives linked Jewish historical identity to the exercise of modern sovereignty.[7] Their image of a Hebrew-speaking national society supplied a cultural vocabulary through which statehood, Jewish belonging, and a distinction from Diaspora life could be expressed together.[7] State-centered symbols likewise presented institutions, particularly the military, as embodiments of national Jewish unity.[19]

The declaration’s significance extends beyond its account of origins to its stated civic purposes.[3] Jewish immigration, equality, religious and cultural freedom, participation by Arab inhabitants, and peaceful relations with neighboring states appear within the same founding document.[3][6] Its combination of national restoration and civic commitments made both elements part of the state’s official founding language.[3]

Remembering 1948 entails different national emphases. Traditional Israeli accounts describe the War of Independence as the culmination of Jewish statehood, return to Zion, and the need for a safe haven after the Holocaust, while Palestinian memory emphasizes the Nakba, the destruction of Palestinian society, and mass displacement.[4][14]

A Jewish Review of Books essay argues that collective memory circulates through family, school, museums, commemorative sites, public ritual, folklore, documentaries, entertainment, and social media.[22] Applying that framework to Israel, it contends that memory has emphasized British opposition and the Yishuv’s response while giving less attention to international actors and divisions between Labor-led institutions, the Irgun, and Lehi.[22]

The narratives have also changed with Israeli society.[7] Research on the Jewish component of Israeli identity describes a weakening of the Zionist meta-narrative and its partial replacement by a universalistic-humanist narrative beginning in the 1980s and 1990s.[7] A 2022 Maariv opinion article argues that the new historians encouraged a more complex account of the past but that this reassessment had not substantially reached the wider public, despite continuing academic, cultural, and political discussion.[23]

The term “founding myths” encompasses disagreements about historical explanation as well as the political uses of memory.[1] Disputes concern which events a narrative emphasizes, how evidence is interpreted, and whether a national framework is being supplemented or displaced.[18] Even terminology carries perspective: War of Independence, Nakba, and the scholarly designation “1948 War” do not resolve the underlying disagreements simply by naming the conflict differently.[24]

The Palestinian exodus is a central example. One INSS review estimates that 600,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs were outside Israel’s postwar lines, while another account places the number of refugees above 700,000.[25][4] Displacement began before independence; thousands fled or were expelled during the fighting, including from Lod and Ramla, and Israeli authorities prevented refugees from returning after the war.[4][26]

Explanations differ over the relative weight of fighting, fear, leadership decisions, and expulsions.[25] Benny Morris examined departures from more than 350 villages and identified varied local causes, including combat, fear of violence, forced expulsion, and, in some cases, massacres.[15] His work challenged the claim that the refugees generally left voluntarily, while a later review says he rejected a preplanned mass-exodus thesis and still found instances of forcible expulsion.[14][26] Other interpretations assign greater responsibility to Jewish forces, while Yoav Gelber and Mordechai Lahav emphasize the comparatively limited role of expulsions.[25]

Military comparisons likewise require distinctions between stages and types of capability.[9] Jewish forces possessed advantages in personnel, equipment, logistics, and organization through much of the war, while Arab forces held substantial advantages in air power, artillery, and light armor during the first month after the May 15 invasion.[9] The “few against many” slogan expressed genuine existential anxiety without describing the balance throughout the conflict.[9]

Revisionist works themselves generated criticism.[14] A Jewish Review of Books review describes Simha Flapan’s 1987 book as challenging seven claims concerning partition, Arab initiation of war, voluntary Palestinian departure, Arab unity, the inevitability of invasion, Israeli weakness, and exclusively Israeli peace-seeking; the review criticizes its arguments and historical accuracy.[14] Other reviews characterize the new historians’ challenges as extending to British policy, military strength, tacit cooperation with Transjordan, and refugee responsibility, while distinguishing Morris’s acknowledgment of expulsions from a thesis of a predetermined mass exodus.[27][26] Disagreement also surrounds later portrayals of Lydda and the balance between flight and expulsion.[26]

Sternhell’s The Founding Myths of Israel constitutes a separate interpretive intervention.[5] Translated by David Maisel and published by Princeton University Press in 1998, the 419-page book contains an introduction, six chapters, notes, a glossary, bibliography, and index.[28][5] Its thesis holds that Mapai leaders, including Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson, subordinated universalist socialism to national state-building and were poorly equipped after independence to realize socialist social transformation, although their communal ideology sustained the state into the 1970s.[5][29]

Curriculum disputes illustrate the political stakes.[18] In a 2000 debate, Yoram Hazony argued that A World of Changes reduced coverage of Zionism, Israel, and the Holocaust from 60 percent to below 30 percent and replaced an Arab-invasion map with one of Palestinian flight.[18] Israel Bartal countered that selection need not imply a political agenda and that Zionism had never possessed one unified ideology or narrative.[18]

Other debates concern interpretation rather than settled findings.[30][31] A Mosaic essay reads the declaration’s description of the land as the Jewish people’s birthplace as statesmanship shaping a national story, noting biblical accounts of peoplehood emerging outside the land.[30] A separate account emphasizes successive drafts, limited participation, internal disagreement, and Ben-Gurion’s decisive influence rather than an entirely consensual drafting process.[31]

The relationship between Holocaust and statehood also attracts competing interpretations: pre-existing Zionist aims must be distinguished from the Holocaust’s effects on urgency, Jewish experience, and public opinion.[11] A 2016 argument against attributing statehood to the Holocaust emphasized earlier institutions and the San Remo Conference, while debate over Zionism’s wider character juxtaposes anti-colonial self-determination with colonialist interpretations.[32][33] A Globes column additionally questioned nationalist interpretations of Yigael Yadin’s archaeological identifications at Masada and the so-called Solomon’s stables.[34]

Specific allegations require particular caution.[35] The documentary Tantura revived claims based on Teddy Katz’s 140 hours of interviews with 135 witnesses; filmmaker Alon Schwarz alleged that soldiers killed 200–250 male residents after the battle.[35] The account includes admissions, denials, and scholarly challenges to methods and conclusions, leaving the alleged scale and circumstances disputed rather than established.[35]