David Ohana

It is claimed that Zionism as a meta-narrative has been formed through contradiction to two alternative models, the Canaanite and crusader narratives. These narratives are the most daring and heretical assaults on Israeli-Jewish identity. The Israelis, according to the Canaanite narrative, are from this place and belong only here; according to the crusader narrative, they are from another place and belong there. The mythological construction of Zionism as a modern crusade describes Israel as a Western colonial enterprise planted in the heart of the East and alien to the area, its logic and its peoples. The nativist construction of Israel as neo-Canaanism demands breaking away from the chain of historical continuity. These are the greatest anxieties that Zionism and Israel needed to encounter and answer forcefully. The Origins of Israeli Mythology seeks to examine the intellectual archaeology of Israeli mythology, as it reveals itself through the Canaanite and crusader narratives.

Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders

The Origins of Israeli Mythology

The temptation to resort to violence runs like a thread through Albert Camus' works, and can be viewed as an additional key to understanding his literary productions and philosophical writings. His short life and intellectual attitudes were almost all connected with brutality and cruel circumstance. At the age of one he lost his father, who was killed as a soldier of the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. He passed his childhood and youth in colonial Algeria, no doubt experiencing degrees of inhumanity during that difficult period. In his first years in conquered France, he was editor of an underground newspaper that opposed the Nazi occupation. In the years following the Liberation, he denounced the Bolshevist tyranny and was witness to the "dirty war" between the land of his birth and his country of living, France. Camus' preoccupation with violence was expressed in all facets of his work-as a philosopher, as a political thinker, as an author, as a man of the theatre, as a journalist, as an intellectual, and especially as a man doomed to live in an absurd world of hangmen and victims, binders and bound, sacrificers and sacrificed, and crucifiers and crucified. Three main metaphors of western culture can assist in understanding Camus' thinking about violence: the bound Prometheus, a hero of Greek mythology; the sacrifice of Isaac, one of the chief dramas of Jewish monotheism; and the crucifixion of Jesus, the founding event of Christianity. The bound, the sacrificed, and the crucified represent three perspectives through which David Ohana examines the place of ideological violence and its limits in the works of Albert Camus. *** "The author takes a refreshing approach-which is to say he does not rehash existentialist approaches to Camus's work. Ohana exhaustively traverses Camus's works, going far beyond his philosophical essay Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Students and scholars of philosophy, political science, and literary studies will benefit from this work." Recommended --Choice, Vol. 55, No. 5, January 2018 Subject: Philosophy, Albert Camus, Literary Criticism]

Albert Camus and the Critique of Violence

This book examines the role of messianism in Zionist ideology, from the birth of the Zionist movement through to the present. Is shows how messianism is not just a religious or philosophical term but a very tangible political practice and theology which has shaped Israeli identity. The author explores key issues such as: the current presence of messianism in the Israeli public sphere and the debates with jewish settlers in the occupied territories after the 1967 war the difference between transcendental messianism and promethean messianism the disparity between the political ideology and political practice in the history of Israel the evolution of the messianic idea in the actions of David Ben-Gurion the debate between Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Isaiah Leibowitz, J. L. Talmon and other intellectual figures with Ben-Gurion the implications of political theology and the presence of messianic ideas in Israeli politics As the first book to examine the messianism in Israeli debate since the creation of the Israeli state, it will be particularly relevant for students and scholars of Political Science, modern intellectual history, Israel studies, Judaism and messianism.

Israeli Messianism and Its Critics

Political Theologies in the Holy Land

The book brings forth various perspectives on the Israeli "homeland" (moledet) from various known Israeli intellectuals such as Boaz Evron, Menachem Brinker, Jacqueline Kahanoff and more. Binding together various academic fields to deal with the question of the essence of the Israeli homeland: from the examination of the status of the Israeli homeland by such known sociologist as Michael Feige, to the historical analysis of Robert Wistrich of the place Israel occupies in history in relation to historical anti-Semitism. The study also examines various movements that bear significant importance on the development of the notion of the Israeli homeland in Israeli society: Such movement as "The New Hebrews" and Hebrewism are examined both historically in relation to their place in Zionist history and ideologically in comparison with other prominent movements. Drawing on the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff to provide a unique Mediterranean model for the Israeli homeland, the volume examines prominent models among the Religious Zionist sector of Israeli society regarding the relation of the biblical homeland to the actual homeland of our times. Discussing the various interpretations of the concept of the nation and its land in the discourse of Hebrew and Israeli identity, the book is a key resource for scholars interested in nationalism, philosophy, modern Jewish history and Israeli Studies.

The Concept of Moledet

Birth-throes of the Israeli Homeland

Robert Wistrich

A dozen essays document the evolution of national myths in Israel as the heroic figures and events of independence and survival transmute into blind fanaticism, great-power manipulation, and traditional colonialism and genocide. Without passing any judgement on the changes, they delve into the meani

Myth, Memory and Trauma

The Shaping of Israeli Identity

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

David Ohana

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