Sublime

In their different ways they all want Zionism to be a natural identity-building process. They want to merge the healing of a people with the cultivation of a land.

Yet those markets about which Naomi Shemer had sung had not been uninhabited.

“Let us not forget even at this hour that we must live with the Arabs in this land,”

Judaism argues that despite the irreducible differences between faiths and cultures, all people are the children of one God.

Later, Israelis would refer to the new national mind-set—a worldview that was especially deeply rooted in the military’s top brass and Israel’s intelligence community—as the conceptzia, the “conception.” Rank-and-file Israelis as well as their leaders had complete faith in the IDF’s military superiority.

The orange grower is a Sabra, a native of Palestine, who knows the Arabs, their tongue, and their ways.

One of the most stunning gestures of Judaism was to overturn the whole idea of a hierarchy of knowledge,18 for if there are inequalities of learning, they will be replicated through all other social structures, giving some people unwarranted power over others. This is the great insight of the Jewish vision, from which all else followed: A free soci

Wherever he goes, my great-grandfather will be adamant. “Palestine has never yet adopted another population,” he will claim. Arguing with the critics of Zion, he will insist that Palestine is absolutely suitable for “the teeming millions who are in distress in the East of Europe for whom a home might have to be found with a minimum of difficulty an