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Practically all peoples, nations, and societies have recourse to a treasury of legends , tales, or poetic fictions stemming from their more or less remote antiquity. These are mostly enacted by supernatural beings or by human heroes expressing , in terms of fable or story, interpretations of the world and idealized conceptions of life, and they sometimes serve, as well, as models and examples. Such myth formations often have their roots in animism, survive through the various prerational stages of cultures, and become, in modern societies, metaphors and other metarational forms for expressing ideas that are conceptually hard to formulate . Sometimes, actual historical events as well, because of their traumatic effect, solidify into formative concepts with mythical characteristics. THE OVERSTATED MYTH OF JERUSALEM In Switzerland, the figure of William Tell stands as the unyielding personification of the will for freedom and independence. His crossbow stands as a mark of virtue; Gessler’s hat as an emblem of unendurable oppression; the Tell Chapel as a site of strength and courage; the Rütli meadow as a tableau of ideally like-minded and resolute men—symbols of a specifically Swiss identity. And it simply does not matter if the historian denies the authenticity of these legends. We are dealing with ideal-concepts of a predominantly rational-acting society. In Israel, the dominating influence of myth on politics, on the sense of identity, on historical consciousness, on culture as expressed in behavior, and on other aspects of society is particularly strong and obvious. At the same time, the timelessly valid messages of tradition occupy a less prominent spot in the foreground than do the verbal formulas in which they are bound up, and which are taken literally. Thus their meanings are so alienated that myths often serve to justify and to support unproductive attitudes and measures. The historical, psychosocial, religiohistorical, and cultural origins of this phenomenon cannot be properly dealt with here. We must content ourselves with two examples. The myth of Jerusalem has established itself deeply in the consciousness of a broad section of Israeli society as the “holy” city of the glorious days of King The Power of Myths in Israeli Society Historical Realities and Political Dogmatism Ernest Goldberger 227 David and King Solomon, as the fountainhead of a continuous Jewish existence in that land, as God’s locus, as the focal point of religious practice, where the First and Second Temples stood and where ultraorthodox and nationalist groups hope that a Third will soon be established. In the cultic poetry of the Psalms and in the writings of the prophets, Jerusalem is sung over and over again. The city appears innumerable times in prayers, finding entrance as the “golden” or the “eternal” in songs and sayings, and it is the object of theurgic yearnings and oaths. IMPEDIMENTS TO A COMPROMISE Official circles unrelentingly pump up this myth to justify their demand that Jerusalem remain the “eternal” and “undivided” capital of Israel and of the Jewish people. Right-wing nationalists successfully fought against Shimon Peres’s candidacy for prime minister in 1996 with the assertion that he wished to divide Jerusalem. In the summer of 2000, when former prime minister Ehud Barak flew to Camp David for negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, the cry went up that he wanted to divide and bargain away Jerusalem. Through this compound of religious, ideological, and nationalistic charges, Jerusalem has grown into what it remains: a chief impediment to compromise with the Palestinians. It stands in the way of pacification of the Middle East, which the whole civilized world longs for. Thus has a myth intervened fatefully in contemporary history; it does not serve, rationally, a productive ideal but has degenerated into the dogma of an irrational policy. Already in 1898, Theodore Herzl was shaken by the discrepancy between the fiction and the reality of Jerusalem. Thus, he confided to his diary: “The dull precipitation of two millennia full of barbarity, intolerance and uncleanliness lie in the evil-smelling alleys.” But when a myth—in this case, Jerusalem— hardens into the official dictum and doctrine of the country’s leadership, historical truth, frequently misrepresented by leading Israeli politicians, must face the challenge. Thus in 1998, a “Three Thousand Year Celebration” made it seem that the city had been founded as the religious center of the Israelites in 998 BC. In a speech, then-mayor Olmert erroneously invoked King David as star witness to the continuous Jewish history of the city. Prime Minister Sharon, as well, in...

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