The Sabra transformed
On October 7, when Hamas prosecuted its unholy massacre it did more than slaughter human victims. It punctured as well Israel’s image as a sophisticatedly-armed, righteous military power that over the years the world has come to share.
Israelis’ idea of themselves goes right back to the origins of Zionism, when European Jews could only dream of the transformation. Think of the contrast. First there was the shtetl male, black-suited, pasty-faced, retaining an eighteenth-century costume, complete with payot (sidecurls) and black beaverskin hat. Then the more assimilated version, his skin still pale, with the give-away haunted look in his eyes. But for ardent Zionists there was the dream of a different version: the muscled, tanned kibbutznik working the land in shorts and open-necked shirt. This was the dream that came true.
The dream come true was the ‘sabra’, embracing the female too. No-nonsense, sharp-shooting, as good with a rifle as her brothers. Sabra, Hebrew for the native prickly pear, ‘tough on the outside, sweet on the inside’, as Israelis have liked to tell it. Strictly speaking applicable to first-generation Zionist Jews born in Palestine, it quickly caught on, and after 1948 became the affectionate soubriquet for any Israel-born Israeli.
It was Hannah Arendt, the twentieth-century philosopher and Holocaust survivor, who predicted that a Jewish state established under the conditions that brought it into being would necessarily ‘degenerate’ into another Sparta. It is difficult to deny that Arendt’s Sparta has arrived. Though Israelis may still like to think of themselves as sweet under their gruff exteriors, the dominant image today is less the suntanned sabra than a heavily-armed Israeli Defence Force soldier, not to mention Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
Yet from David Ben-Gurion onwards Israel has been a militarised society. With few exceptions, three years of military service are compulsory for school leavers, after which they remain on reserve. Its most celebrated leaders were military officers before entering politics; a number were Haganah or Palmach veterans from the pre-1948 Jewish militias fighting the British. And in 1977, when Israelis chose Menachem Begin for their prime minister, they voted for a former anti-British terrorist. Out of this toughness came the difficulty native-born sabras had in accommodating the Holocaust survivors who came in huge numbers after 1948, when the Jewish state was born. It took years for the shame of the survivors’ apparent weakness to dissipate, and even today, as Israeli historian Tom Segev observes, it is ‘very difficult to distinguish between the genuine feeling we have and the political manipulation of the Holocaust’.
Israel is counted a democracy, the only Middle Eastern democracy, it is often said. It has the elements – elections for the peaceful transfer of power; freedoms of press and speech; citizenship for minorities, including Palestinians inside its borders who are allowed to vote and even run for Knesset seats. A closer look, however, provides a different picture. Long before 2018, when the Knesset passed its Basic Law characterising Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, valorising Hebrew as the national language and suppressing mention of the Nakba, Arab Israelis (so-called, effectively obliterating their Palestinian heritage) had been enduring second-class citizenship, affecting all aspects of their begrudged habitation – where they can live, the schools they attend and what can be taught there. Their lower status combined with the official treatment of them amounts to a form of apartheid, if not as brutal as that experienced by those in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In his landmark 1995 The Founding Myths of Israel, the esteemed Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell characterised Israel’s democracy as tribal rather than liberal. Using the term ‘nationalistic socialism’ to avoid the more loaded ‘national socialism’, he pointed to Central and Eastern European collectivist responses to Napoleon as Zionism’s model. Thus its origin lies not in social democracy’s universalism, nor in today’s post-Holocaust human rights conventions, but is deeply entwined with the biblical, revanchist mandate for returning to Zion. Regardless of any superficial secularism, the driving myths of militant Zionism draw on selections of the Hebrew bible to sanction full control of the land.
Why is any of this important? Why is history important? Immediately after October 7, and however strong the condemnation of the atrocities committed by Hamas, Israel and its uncritical supporters have either dismissed or rejected as immaterial any attempt to establish a wider context for them. But as the days grind on, and the horrific toll in human suffering mounts in Gaza, first from Israel’s relentless siege, now from its ground invasion, its ultimate aim is becoming ever more apparent.
For Netanyahu’s Israel, the Palestinians, on a bantustanned West Bank and in a flattened Gaza, aren’t people with rights of their own, but simply impediments to be swept away – all in the name of ‘security’ and its god-given ‘right to defend’.
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.