In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

103 4 “An Example for the Nation” Politicizing the Operation’s Commemoration in the 1950s May [God] will it that the innocent blood Spilled in the Jordan Valley a week ago be atoned for In a unifying and spirited effort by all of us To prevent gratuitous disasters in every way. . . . Their avenues of afflictions converge In the glorifying tapestry of the tale of how we won our freedom And illuminate it in a sublime glow. Their names and the memory of their sacrifice will forever remain alive in the nation’s hearts. From a speech by Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, marking the seventh day of the Ma’agan disaster, 5 August 1954 Introduction According to Ernst Cassirer, “Myth is one of the oldest and greatest powers in human civilization. It is closely connected with all other human activities—it is inseparable from language, poetry, art and from early historical thought.”1 Much ink has been used to explain the socionational need for myths, especially those that constitute the foundation stones of formative nations. However, in addition to the myth itself, the very way in which the myth is constructed, like the nation-building process itself, is a key to the existential dynamic of a developing society. By giving such a society an opportunity to confront and vanquish its fears, the process permits the nation to exorcise its demons, ultimately enabling it to express and fulfill its hopes and aspirations. The development of a myth must be preceded by the recognition of a symbol or paragon, which the dictionary defines as “a model of excellence or perfection.” In the mid-nineteenth century Abraham Lincoln noted that the factors that shape a society’s chosen models also dominate its public emotions and “shape public sentiment stronger than the legislator or jurist.”2 As I will demonstrate, in the 1950s Israel’s political elites were thoroughly familiar with this rule and allowed it to determine the way the country’s models were constructed and used. Where do people find the paragons or symbols that serve as the foundations of their society? Some seek them in their distant past in order to invest processes of the present with legitimacy. For example, the Shah of Iran did this when he portrayed himself as the successor to Cyrus the Great. Others build a continuum of symbols that connect—and bridge—the distant past with the recent past to justify a situation in the present, as Germany did in the 1930s. Still others, like the founders of the Soviet model in the USSR, settle for contemporary paragons who reside in close chronological proximity to those who derive from them the courage to continue their struggle. In the 1950s all three models alternated and constituted the building blocks of the resurgent Jewish nation.3 In the endless “group photo” of the heroes of Zionism that began to fill up, Masada leader Eleazar Ben Ya’ir (73 BCE) stood alongside Theodor Herzl, post–Second Temple rebellion leader Shimon Bar-Kochba (132–135 BCE) lined up next to Joseph Trumpledor, the first Aliyah pioneers of Bilu (“Beit Ya’akov Lekhu Venelkha”) rubbed shoulders with second Aliyah members of Hashomer, and the activists of the World War I pro-British underground group Nili (“Netzach Israel lo Ishakare ”) stood near the defenders of Kibbutz Hulda in the 1930s. At the center of that photo were the seven Yishuv parachutists of World War II, dressed in British officers’ uniforms, who had perished far from the dazzling sun and sizzling sand of their old-new Mediterranean homeland. The group photo presented in the first part of this book changed substantially in the course of subsequent events. In the 1940s one could still identify personal character traits in the symbols portrayed in this photo. During the course of the 1950s these particularistic traits became blurred as they evolved into what Tuvia Friling has called “symbolic images.”4 In the 1940s the parachutists were still individuals. By the 1950s the public had merged the seven paragons into a monolith of sorts—“the parachutists”— with their most conspicuous collective representative being Hannah Szenes. During the 1940s commemoration still focused on the individual personalities, who were cited as epitomes of a specific Zionist ethos of physical valor. By the 1950s they had become an abstract concept, with their commemoration used as a tool to transmit general political and social messages to the Israeli public. This shift entailed a process of abstraction...

Share