The Founding Myths of Modern Israel

Jewish national restoration, the creation of functioning state institutions, and victory in the War of Independence are central themes in accounts of Israel’s foundation.[3][6] The Declaration of Independence connects statehood to the Jewish people’s historical attachment to the land, dispersion, continued hope of return, and modern Zionism.[3] Alongside that account of national continuity, it establishes civic commitments concerning immigration, equality, religious freedom, development, and peaceful relations with neighboring states.[3]

The language of “myth” does not necessarily designate an account that is wholly invented: national narratives may combine a factual core with selective or distorted interpretation.[7] The choice of a starting point, the events included, and the experiences omitted shape the historical and political meaning of a narrative.[8] The study of Israeli national identity consequently encompasses both events and the ways historical memory, religious writings, archaeology, and secular and religious symbols have been brought together in accounts of statehood.[1]

The subject includes several related but distinct bodies of writing: interpretations of the 1948 war, studies of labor Zionist ideology, examinations of security consciousness, and criticism of broader claims about Israeli and Palestinian identity.[2][4][9] It is not limited to criticism from one political direction: historical reassessment has addressed Israel’s creation, Holocaust survivors, and the “melting pot” absorption policy, with challenges to established historiography emerging from both left and right.[10] Academic treatments have brought traditionalist and revisionist historians and sociologists together to examine Israel’s origins and the influence of New History on public understanding of the past.[2]

The Declaration of Independence places Jewish historical and traditional attachment to the land at the beginning of its account of statehood, rather than presenting Israel solely as a response to twentieth-century events.[3][11] Its modern historical sequence includes the First Zionist Congress of 1897, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the League of Nations Mandate, the Holocaust, and the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution of November 29, 1947.[3] These strands bring together historical continuity, political organization, international recognition, and the urgent consequences of persecution within a single founding document.[3][11]

Before independence, the Jewish community in Mandate-era Palestine developed political, social, and economic institutions that provided infrastructure for statehood.[6] On November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, proposing Jewish and Arab states and an internationally administered Jerusalem area.[12] The ADL describes the Jewish side as accepting partition and the Arab side as rejecting it.[6] A Ynet chronology says violence followed the vote, with large-scale Arab assaults beginning in January 1948; Palestinian Arabs, assisted by volunteers from neighboring countries, held the initiative during the early phase, before Jewish forces moved onto the offensive in early April.[13]

David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s establishment in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.[11][12] The declaration grounded that act in the Jewish people’s natural and historic right and the General Assembly resolution, while specifying that provisional state institutions would operate from the termination of the British Mandate at midnight on May 15.[14] After the declaration, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded; hostilities ended through armistice agreements in 1949, although Iraq did not sign an agreement.[13]

The diplomatic path to recognition included disagreement within the United States government: the United States supported partition, but the State Department recommended trusteeship rather than immediate statehood and warned of possible war.[12] President Harry Truman nevertheless recognized Israel on May 14, the day of its proclamation.[12] The Soviet Union also recognized the new state soon afterward.[6]

Memories preceding independence also entered interpretations of Israel’s security outlook.[15] Historian Hillel Cohen treats the 1929 riots, in which Arab rioters killed 133 Jews, as a formative trauma for the Yishuv that strengthened the image of the besieged Jew confronting an Arab aggressor.[15] His examination also includes killings of Arabs by Jews, including a Jewish police officer’s shooting of members of the Awn family.[15] Cohen connects the riots to the weakening of hopes among some Jews for integration into the Arab world and to the strengthening of a security ethos.[15]

An individual account from those events concerns Shmuel Tvania-Shivli, who survived the Gurji courtyard massacre as a baby after being mistaken for dead and left overnight in a morgue in his dead mother’s arms.[15] He later joined Lehi and fought in the War of Independence.[15] Cohen expressed his approach to these histories in the words, “I try to hover above national truths. My own, as a Jew and Zionist, as well as the Palestinians.”[15]

A major phase of historiographical reassessment began in the 1980s, when Israeli scholars questioned established histories of the pre-state and early-state years using recently declassified documents.[16] Generational and political differences also contributed to this development.[16] Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis, published in 1984, challenged beliefs that Jewish leaders had exhausted possibilities for peace, that Israel had been a weak “David” facing an Arab “Goliath,” and that Palestinians had principally departed at Arab leaders’ insistence.[16][17]

Benny Morris began his refugee research in 1982 after newly opened archives became available to him, and his work led to The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, published in 1988.[18] His investigation examined departures from more than 350 villages and identified causes that varied by locality, including expulsions and, in some instances, massacres.[16] Further declassification in Israel and abroad, including operational records of the war, subsequently enabled him to revisit earlier published accounts.[5]

The opening of archives did not produce a single replacement narrative.[2][17] Historical writing through the 1980s had commonly emphasized Arab rejection of partition, the attack on Israel, Arab leaders’ supposed instructions to leave, and the departure of Palestinian leaders.[17] Earlier exceptions included Rony Gabbay, who assigned responsibility to both Arab and Jewish sides, and Aharon Cohen, who examined actions by Jewish forces and later the Israel Defense Forces.[17] Later work included Morris’s allocation of responsibility to both sides, more critical interpretations associated with Ilan Pappé and Simcha Flapan, and arguments by Yoav Gelber and Mordechai Lahav that expulsions were limited rather than the principal explanation for the exodus.[17]

The Declaration of Independence combines its account of Jewish self-determination with promises that the state will remain open to Jewish immigration, develop the country for all inhabitants, and guarantee equal social and political rights irrespective of religion, race, or sex.[3] It also promises freedom of religion and culture, protection of holy places, full and equal citizenship for Arab inhabitants, and peace and cooperation with neighboring states.[3][11] These provisions establish the founders’ stated civic principles alongside their historical rationale for sovereignty.[11]

Labor Zionism supplies another major application of the concept of founding myths.[4] Zeev Sternhell’s The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State appeared in a 1998 Princeton University Press edition translated from Hebrew, comprising 419 pages and six chapters.[4] The book examines Mapai, the Labor party, and the socialist commitments claimed by its founders.[4] Sternhell interprets nationalism, rather than socialism, as the movement’s primary organizing force.[19]

In Sternhell’s interpretation, leaders including David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson employed socialism more as a rhetorical justification for the national project than as a practical blueprint for a just society.[20] His account identifies a tension between universalist socialism and the particular national commitments necessary to build a Jewish state.[4] It also follows Mapai’s difficulties in implementing socialist change after the War of Independence and the persistence of communal ideology into the 1970s, when a capitalist ethos took hold.[4]

Tamar Amar-Dahl’s Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine applies the concept to two ideas she identifies as foundational: Eretz Israel as the land of the Jewish people, and a security or safety myth.[9] She links the latter to Jewish experiences of persecution, the Holocaust, and the 1948 war, interpreting these experiences as supporting a perception of enduring hostility and the necessity of strong military power.[9] Her argument connects these ideas to Israeli political discourse and obstacles to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[9]

Amar-Dahl also approaches nationalism as historically constructed rather than the straightforward expression of an ancient, naturally continuous national unit.[9] She invokes Ernest Gellner’s formulation, “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around.”[9] This framework addresses how national histories are formed, while the declaration’s own framework emphasizes the Jewish people’s historical continuity and enduring attachment to the land.[9][11]

Other works apply the language of myth to particular historical or political propositions.[21][7] Ilan Pappé’s 2017 Ten Myths About Israel examines claims that Palestine was empty when the Balfour Declaration was issued, that Jews were a people without a land, that Zionism is Judaism, that Zionism is not colonialism, and that Palestinians departed voluntarily in 1948.[21] Its scope also extends to the 1967 war, Israeli democracy, Oslo, Gaza, and the two-state solution.[21]

Shaul Arieli’s Kakha Bediuk Kara? (12 Israeli Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict) similarly asks Israeli readers to reconsider narratives underlying their national outlook.[7] Its examples include “a land without a people for a people without a land,” denial of Palestinian peoplehood, and the assertion that the mufti instructed Palestinians to flee in 1948.[7] Arieli’s stated approach is to distinguish “the hard facts” from biased interpretations rather than classify national narratives as entirely true or entirely false.[7]

The framework has also been applied to events long after independence.[7] A review of Arieli’s book treats Ehud Barak’s claim after the failed July 2000 Camp David summit that there was no Palestinian partner for peace as a political myth, while assigning part of the responsibility for the summit’s failure to Barak.[7] Another opinion essay challenges the idea that the Holocaust decisively caused Israel’s establishment, emphasizing earlier Zionist immigration, institution-building, and international legitimacy, including the Peel Commission’s 1936 description of the Jewish community as a “state within a state.”[22] The essay further argues that the Holocaust devastated the human resources available to Zionism rather than simply facilitating statehood.[22]

The War of Independence occupies a central position in competing understandings of Israel’s origins and the Palestinian refugee problem.[23] Itamar Rabinovich contrasts the Israeli narrative of national independence and victory over forces that rejected partition with the Palestinian and wider Arab narrative of the Nakba, or catastrophe.[23] He presents these accounts as shaping subsequent arguments over the causes, responsibilities, and consequences of the war.[23]

Rabinovich quotes Morris explaining the New Historians’ initial concentration on 1948 through both the availability of documents and the war’s character as a “central, natal, revolutionary event.”[23] In that interpretation, explaining the war affects how the broader Zionist-Israeli experience is understood.[23] A separate historical review likewise identifies the refugee question as the most consequential challenge to earlier accounts and describes a dispute extending over decades and generating further studies.[24]

The scale of displacement helps explain that prominence: estimates place between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs outside Israel’s lines at the end of the war, while another estimate gives a total of up to 750,000 people leaving their homes.[17][25] One multifactor account includes flight from fighting, departures associated with Arab leaders’ advice, and Palestinians forced to flee by individuals or groups fighting for Israel.[25] Morris’s research documented expulsions ordered by Israeli commanders and serious abuses by Israeli soldiers, without arguing that expulsion was official Israeli policy.[18]

Historical treatments distinguish several approaches to the Nakba’s chronology and continuing meaning.[26] Said Zidani places it between the partition decision of November 29, 1947, and the conclusion of Israel–Arab ceasefire agreements on July 20, 1949, and describes two-thirds of Palestinians as uprooted beyond Palestine’s borders.[26] Other writers emphasize the Nakba as a past event and focus on resolving the consequences of the 1967 war, while still others use the concept of an “ongoing Nakba.”[26]

The debate has also examined how national narratives select themes of military weakness, moral conduct, and victory.[27] Yoav Gelber identifies recurring Israeli themes such as the war as a miracle, the “purity of Jewish arms,” Arab numerical and material superiority, and assertions that Arab leaders urged Palestinian departure.[27] His account also identifies Arab narrative themes involving a premeditated Jewish expulsion plan, Deir Yassin, and Plan Dalet.[27] As an example of postwar public perceptions, his essay recounts an Egyptian weekly’s reported poll after the early-1949 Rhodes armistice negotiations: 79 percent of a 20,000-person sample believed Egypt had defeated the “Zionist gangs.”[27]

Rabinovich traces seven propositions challenged by Flapan’s 1987 The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities: Zionist acceptance of partition as a plan for peace; Arab rejection as the origin of war; voluntary Palestinian departure in expectation of reconquest; a united Arab effort to expel Jews; the inevitability of war following invasion; a defenseless Israeli David facing an Arab Goliath; and Israel’s consistent pursuit of peace without an Arab response.[23] Rabinovich criticizes Flapan’s arguments and historical accuracy, distinguishing the book from the later academic work associated with Morris, Pappé, and Avi Shlaim.[23]

Reassessment has extended beyond the war’s military and diplomatic history to the treatment of Arabs, Mizrahi Jews, Holocaust survivors, and women.[28] A review of Anita Shapira’s history presents her as accepting important discoveries by New Historians while criticizing their tendency to emphasize some parts of the past at the expense of others.[28] Her account includes expulsions from Lydda and Ramle and subsequent restrictions on Arab return to villages, without interpreting the war as having begun with an Israeli intention to cause a general exodus.[28]

The wider cultural importance of the debate remains a subject of commentary.[29] A Maariv opinion essay argues that academic, political, and cultural discussion since the late 1980s has not substantially reached the broader public.[29] It urges Israelis to understand the Nakba as a foundational Palestinian collective trauma while also considering the war’s multiple arenas and changing balances of power, rather than accepting a one-dimensional account.[29]

Disagreement concerns both the meaning of “myth” and the interpretation of evidence: founding documents establish the claims and commitments made by their authors, while books identifying myths advance particular historical arguments rather than an agreed inventory of falsehoods.[11][21] The declaration’s equality provisions likewise establish stated commitments, not evidence by themselves of subsequent implementation.[3]

Archival revision has generated substantial countercriticism.[23] Rabinovich reports that Shabtai Teveth, Efraim Karsh, and others accused New Historians of misrepresenting evidence, weak archival practice, and politicization; he also describes the Karsh–Morris exchange as becoming personal.[23] Avi Beker argues that revisionist accounts underplay Arab rejection of partition and the war’s religious context, across disputes over British policy, refugees, military strength, Arab coordination, and failed peace efforts.[30]

The extent of planned expulsion remains a major divide.[31] Gelber rejects both a general Arab-directed flight conspiracy and a deliberate general Jewish expulsion, arguing that Arab leaders tried to stop flight and that deportations were partial.[27] Plan Dalet, drafted in March 1948 to secure Jewish-held territory, provided for expulsion in cases of resistance and military rule otherwise; historians disagree about whether it constituted a comprehensive expulsion plan.[31]

Specific allegations also remain disputed.[32][33] Interpretations of killings at Lydda differ over testimony and policy, while Teddy Katz’s Tantura thesis—based on 140 hours of interviews with 135 witnesses—prompted veterans’ challenges, a signed retraction, and revocation of his degree.[32][33] Filmmaker Alon Schwarz later argued that the recordings supported the occurrence of killings and criticized a narrative of military moral purity; other academics and veterans disputed the methods or conclusions.[33]