Producing National Identity:
Museums, Memory and Collective Thought in Israel
“Those who control the past, control the future.” (George Orwell, 1984)
How do representations of the past affect our understanding of it? How are historical representations incorporated into collective memory? To what degree are ideas of national identity embedded in collective memory, and what role do museums play in the creation of this collective memory? In this essay, I explore these questions in the context of collective memory, museums and public culture in modern Israel. More specifically, I examine the state’s representational practices vis-à-vis the colonized Palestinian society.
History is often taken for granted as a natural or objective representation of past events. Revisionist historians and others concerned with questions of historiography have taken to task this (self) representation of a scholarly tradition. Historians do not merely collect and present the past, but actively assert interpretations of the past into academic production itself. These representations, in turn, get incorporated into cultural narratives in order to make sense of both the past and present. However, the way in which events are selected for national popular memory is not a politically neutral or objective process. The way that the past is represented in public memorials is – often as not – informed by contemporary concerns, so that the history that is written is often from a statist, class, or conservative tradition which encourages public memory to support a nationalist enterprise. While the Orwell quote provided above points to the deliberate control of the past by an entity seeking control and power, I am interested here in the more subtle ways in which the writing and representation of history in modern Israel – especially when presented as an objective compendium of facts – also serves an implicit political function which affects both Israeli as well as Israeli-Palestinian relations.
This paper is concerned with how national collective memories are produced and sustained in modern Israel. In particular, I am interested in a) the role of the state in producing, selecting, and organizing collective memories for its citizens and b) the role of museums – as public and state-sanctioned spaces – in both constructing memories and therefore a common interpretation of the past. As Eviatar Zerubavel has noted with regard to the relevance of collective memory to nation-building, “Acquiring a group’s memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity, and familiarizing members with that past is a major part of communities efforts to assimilate them”. [1] For whom are these museums built and what message(s) are they intended to convey? Museums, notably historical and cultural museums, implicitly and explicitly construct national narratives for presentation to both citizens and outsiders. Their function is to memorialize the collective past. In looking at the role of museums in contemporary Israeli culture, we might ask who is encouraged to consume and experience them. What role does “display” play and how does this pertain to the ways in which particular objects are chosen, hidden, or organized for display?
Like history, museums are often considered neutral spaces in which past events are objectively collected and presented. The political function of forgetting or suppressing other events is often overlooked. According to Stuart Hall, “Museums do not simply issue objective descriptions or form logical assemblages; they generate representations and attribute meaning and value in line with certain perspectives or classificatory schemas which are historically specific”. [2] As opposed to history books, museums are places where history is “experienced” through visual and audio images, temporary exhibitions, interactive sites, educational programs, and permanent collections.
My interest in museums as political spaces peaked after visiting a number of museums in Israel. As a human rights activist working both there and in the Palestinian territories, I couldn’t help questioning how visual culture interacted with both Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. I was especially curious to see how Palestinians were represented in Israeli museums. Rather than go to museums that would have obvious nationalistic images – such as military or combat museums – I chose historical and heritage museums, as well as archeological sites that are not usually considered as propagandizing a particular nationalist message. I expected that the ongoing conflict would lead Israelis to represent Palestinians in ways that were negative or dehumanizing. It is common for national museums built by the dominant ethnic group to legitimize their rise to dominance by dehumanizing the subordinate group. In Ecuador, for example, I saw national exhibits in which indigenous Amazonians were portrayed as starry eyed dreamers lying around in hammocks. One display showed a man in a hut surrounded by magazine advertisements of speedboats and high technology, while he "slept". My visits to a dozen history, heritage, and archeological sites and museums in Israel left me surprised, then, at the general lack of representations of Palestinians at all. They were indeed "invisible” in the presentation of the past, and in terms of their importance to the geographical area of Palestine.
Before examining the question of Palestinian invisibility in Israeli museums, it is necessary to look at the stories that Israeli museums actually do tell. These are mostly stories about settlement and the founding of Israel itself, and repatriation of the Jewish community to its biblical homeland. As with most nations, the way that history is told is of utmost importance to their sense of a collective identity. Israel is no exception. But what makes Israel particularly interesting is the fact that its practices of historical construction are so explicitly politically charged. As the conflict with Palestinians continues, Israel, through museums and other national institutional projects, is constantly attempting to prove legitimacy. One wonders whether it is mere coincidence that, according to Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, Israel has more museums per capita then any other country in the world. Museums appear to play a major role in state-making practices.
Israeli Archaeological Sites
It is not surprising that archeology plays an important role in foundational narratives of the Israeli state. Anchoring the Jewish people to the land that modern Israel is built on is essential to the question of legitimacy and right. Archeological sites that I visited (The Masada, Caesarea, Acre and others) tell surprisingly similar stories. While discussing the many peoples who have conquered the land of Israel, the sites clearly focus on the contributions of Ancient Israeli groups, thereby downplaying the role of other populations in the region. After focusing on ancient Israel, the timeline in these exhibitions usually speeds up in going over the many people who have conquered – and once dwelled in – the land. Approaching modern history, the timelines slow down for the period of the Ottoman Empire (mid-sixteenth century through 1914), then progress quickly through time to the establishment of the modern Israeli state. It is often specifically detailed how, under the Ottomans, the region went into “decline” due to the Ottoman Empire’s devaluation of the area. The extended portrayal is that only the modern Israeli state understood the significance of the site and land, and worked to maintain it. This narrative clearly legitimizes Israel’s “ownership” of the site, at the same time that ancient pre-exilic sites are retold in nationalist terms, yet also legitimizing Israeli ownership and right to the land.
Archeology is not only used for political legitimacy in Israel proper, but throughout the occupied Palestinian territories as well. Dotted throughout the territories are numerous sites that Israel considers of great significance (for instance, Jacob’s Well which is located outside of Nablus). Once a site is “found” or discovered to have significance to the Jewish people, it is developed. Lands surrounding the area are protected and accessible to visitors. Of course, the location of these sites on the property of Palestinian families and homeowners is taken for granted as a benefit of the “Jewish people”, without any compensation offered to Palestinians whose private property rights are violated. The sites generally require additional military security forces presence allowing, in a sense, the continued expansion of the Israeli military into the occupied zones.
Palestinian villages throughout the occupied territories are fearful whenever Israeli archeologists show interest in particular sites in their communities. For instance, while visiting the small Palestinian village of Yasuf in the center of the West Bank, I was informed of how Israeli archeologists had recently been trying to determine if the site on which the village was located had any connection to an Israeli community of 2000 years before. The villagers were nervous that evidence of a connection might be uncovered, thus further threatening the village. Yasuf already suffers from the presence of an Israeli settlement built on their former lands on a hillside overlooking their village. The settlers, most of them religious militants who believe that God gave all of “the land of Israel” to them (which they believe includes the West Bank, and parts of other countries as well) regularly invade the village to “picnic” in the gardens to which they believe they have a “right”. They arrive in unannounced caravans armed to the teeth to “enjoy” the gardens of “Israel”. Villagers in Yasuf were rightly concerned that if an archeological site proved that ancient Israelis had a presence there, not only would the site be developed and protected by the state, it would further give legitimacy to claims of settlers nearby.
The Masada and other archeological sites are hugely popular among Israelis and serve to build connections between “heroes” of the past and modern soldiers. The Masada is of particular interest; its story remained obscure for centuries due to an absence of archaeological data, yet it has become one of the most important symbols for the modern state of Israel.
The Masada is an ancient fortress built on a hill overlooking the Dead Sea in the Negev desert. The only reference to it is by the ancient Roman Josephus Flavius who wrote of the 960 Jewish rebels who, in 73 A.D., chose to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Full-scale excavation of the site did not start until 1963, and it is still underway. In the meantime, the site has been equipped with a base to summit cable car, parking garages, museum and gift shop to accommodate the many visitors.
The precise history of the mass Masada suicide is still subject to considerable debate. The more important question for me, however, is how this story became so rapidly incorporated into popular culture and nation-building rituals, while remaining subject to ongoing scholarly debate. In addition to being the most popular tourist site in the country, the Masada is also the site to which Israeli soldiers go to take their oaths to defend the state of Israel. The popular patriotic slogan “The Masada shall not fall again” symbolizes the ties between ancient heroes and the modern Israeli soldier, while the tourist gift shop offers material tokens celebrating the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israeli scholar Ben-Yehuda believes that “using archeology to legitimize specific “pasts”– real or imaginary – is a potent concoction to use when one wants to forge identities and create cohesion by fostering a strong sense of a shared past (and hence future) among nations of immigrants”. [3] In fact, as anthropologist Philip Kohl has argued, archeological data is often manipulated for nation building purposes: “nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented past”. [4]
Heritage and Illegal Immigration Museums
Over the past couple of decades Israel has seen an explosion in the building of both local heritage museums that celebrate the success of early settlements and “illegal-immigration”. Heritage museums celebrate the Zionist settlement and “mastering of the land”. They stress the difficult natural and political climate that the settlers had to endure and memorialize their productivity. Illegal immigration museums, in contrast, draw attention to the success of illegal Jewish immigration during the British blockade, in which European Jews entered the British controlled area clandestinely. Illegal immigration museums commemorate the struggle of these Jews who – under oppressive European conditions – made the long and difficult journey to Palestine. It is a story of "homecoming".
In a recent study, Tamar Katriel, an Israeli professor charted both sorts of museums. She suggests that these two types of museums, working together, provide evidence of how particular stories are cultivated in museums to provide “important clues to the ideological motivations and cultural images that inform processes of identity formation and social legitimation”. [5] Katriel found that many museums had actively ignored recent historical discoveries that debunked popular ideologies. For instance, there is a famous Zionist story about conquering the swamps in the Jezreal valley, and the story is celebrated as proof of Zionists conquering and making productive inhospitable land. Scientists, however, have recently determined that no such swamps ever existed. These particular stories, among many others that Israeli historians have recently investigated were found to be simply untrue. Katriel, when she confronted museum curators and tour guides with these facts found that, while they were familiar with such evidence, they rejected them as “academic” and not of “the people”. The pioneers that came to Palestine to create a “new society” in hostile and unproductive land is one of the most important and powerful myths that grounds the Israeli national narrative. Integral to these stories of pioneers conquering an inhospitable nature is the belief that Arabs, in contrast, were unable to make the land productive. The pioneering museums stress this vision of remaking the land where the Arabs couldn’t as another justification of rightful ownership.
The new Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is interesting in many regards. The museum is laid out over a large area and displays are spread out throughout the different buildings. Through different media, the museum represents and memorializes the Holocaust tragedy. Memorializing the Holocaust has produced museums throughout the world and, while we are told that the Holocaust has universal meaning for all humanity, the Israeli Holocaust History Museum also relates the story in a manner slightly different than elsewhere. In a message that has clear nationalist tones, the museum connects the survival of Israel to the events and survivors of the Holocaust.
Similar to the Masada, the Holocaust History Museum is also a popular destination point for soldiers. On one day in December 2004, I witnessed over a dozen military units, armed and in uniforms, receiving tours by their commanding officers. After asking one of the museum personnel how common it was for military units to visit the museum, he said that it was “very often”. I assume that the reason that the military makes it a priority to bring their soldiers to the museum is to “remind” them that the Holocaust is not something of the past, but a constant threat. Instead of the Nazi’s however, their current “enemies” are the Arabs in the Middle East who, as I was told many times in interviews with soldiers, would as quickly exterminate them if given the opportunity.
Also of note regarding the Holocaust History Museum is the gift shop on the premises. While I would admit that selling “gifts” about the tragedy of the Holocaust is very difficult, what was troubling was the fact that so much of the gift shop was devoted to the IDF (Israeli defense force) and nationalistic images. In fact, in the windows facing the courtyard outside of the shop, T-shirts were displayed with IDF symbols on them. One shirt showed a military jet racing through the sky with the words “don’t worry America, Israel stands with you”. Besides shirts, other IDF paraphernalia included hats, toy weapons, posters, and such. Perhaps museums such as the Holocaust History Museum as well as archeological sites such as The Masada serve an indispensable public function for the state.
It is particularly disturbing that the Holocaust and the terrible suffering on the part of European Jews are being used as justification for the state of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. Many of the Israeli practices against Palestinians parallel Germany’s treatment of the Jews leading up to the Holocaust: the construction of hundreds of checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza where Israeli soldiers interrogate, humiliate, and beat Palestinians who are not guilty of anything besides being of the “wrong” ethnic group, tear-gassing of pre-teen children who attempt to attend school, the complicity and quiet tolerance by Israeli civilians of attacks against Palestinians, assassinating Palestinian leaders and suspected fighters without trials or charges, the wholesale destruction and seizure of Palestinian personal property for the benefit of Israel and its Jewish citizens, and so on and so on. These disconcerting similarities are recognized not only by those in the west, but by a growing amount of ordinary Israeli citizens as well as the Israeli military personnel themselves. Even Irena Klepfisz, daughter of a member of the Jewish fighter’s organization in the Warsaw ghetto, asks the question of what should be remembered about the Holocaust by writing:
“What is it that we have been asking everyone to remember? Is it not the fields of Ponary and those nameless fields on the outskirts of dozens of shtetleckh that we’re all pledged to remember? Am I to feel better that the Palestinians from Rufus were not shot by the Israelis but merely beaten? As long as hundreds of Palestinians are not being lined up and shot, but are killed by Israelis only one a day, are we Jews free from worrying about morality, justice? Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?” [6]
Like other critics who recognize the universal significance of the Holocaust and the suffering that Jews have experienced, I don’t believe that it is necessary or relevant to make the connection that only a strong nationalist and/or colonialist state can heal the traumatic wounds. Jewish philosopher Marc Ellis questions whether “Jewish empowerment at the expense of another people represents a healing for the Jewish people or whether Jews can only be healed of the trauma of the Holocaust when Palestinians are healed of their own trauma of displacement and humiliation”. [7]
Like in other museums, the war of independence occurred not against the Palestinians who were the indigenous occupants and still the large majority of owners of the land, but against the British. Just as the gift shop markets items that are out of place in the context of the Holocaust, representing the birth of Israel as a war for independence against British occupation is similarly out of context. I doubt that other Holocaust museums in the world include this history. Indeed, the history of the Holocaust as told in the Israeli museum ends with the British Blockade of Palestine preceding the establishment of Israel. The goal of the blockade was to stop large-scale immigration before a regional solution could be found. A short film that that ends the exhibit shows the long and difficult journey made by European Jews to Palestine and the struggles they faced in slipping by the British. While this is an important aspect of early Israeli history, placing it in the context of the Holocaust is out of place.
The Holocaust History Museum unfortunately makes its message feel less than universal. Rather it felt as if the establishment of Israel and the suppression of the Palestinians are somehow directly related to the Holocaust. Palestinians, because they are in conflict with Israel, are denied and believed not entitled to these universal meanings. This has been evidenced by the fact that Yasser Arafat, on a diplomatic visit to Washington D.C., was denied the right to visit the Holocaust museum there.
The museums of Israel maintain the belief that the development of Israel, the return to the holy land promised by God, the return from the 2000 year exile, as well as compensation for suffering, is legitimate.
Another role the museums provide is to celebrate the “new Jew” who was able to brave the elements – both nature and the inhospitable Arabs – and succeed where others could not. The idea of the “new Jew”, as opposed to the Jew in exile indicates a break with the past. The idea of “new beginnings” is, as Israeli sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel writes: “often manifested in explicit allusions to ‘revitalization’ and rejuvenation, not to mention actual efforts to socially engineer a new type of person who would embody a dramatic historical break between the old and new ‘eras’, as in the highly ambition Zionist attempt to replace the old ‘exilic’ Jew by the young Israeli Sabre”. [8]
Of course this narrative focuses primarily on European Zionist Jews. Largely absent from this national narrative were the non-European Jews who came from the Middle East and Africa. While they are represented somewhat in museums, they are not given the heroic image of the Europeans even though their immense suffering and determination to trek massive distances by foot to Israel has been well documented. Also absent is the Jewish orthodox narrative that would acknowledge the generations of Jewish life in Palestine before the Zionist movement took hold or the many alternative Jewish voices in Palestine that sought a bi-national state with the Palestinians instead of a state limited and defined for the Jewish people. Such “alternative” Jewish narratives and aspects of history that don’t fit neatly into the official national narrative are almost as invisible as the Palestinian narratives themselves.
The Non- and Misrepresentation of Palestinians
While museums teach about why Jews and Zionists have legitimacy to the land, I was surprised to find that Israeli museums have simply erased Palestinians from the history of the region. In the same way that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been erasing Palestinian presence from the landscape (the separating wall, bypass roads, removal of Arabic from road signs, the erasing of the “Green line”, as well as Palestinian villages from road maps), museums have also been successful in removing Palestinians from the history of the land.
Where Palestinians are presented, they are done so as “Arabs”. For it is argued by many Israeli historians that the Palestinians, as a people, never existed – even though there has been a continued identification between the Christian and Muslim Arabs of Palestine as such since the 13th century. In any case, for many museum curators and some Israeli historians, suggesting that Palestinians not only existed but also enjoyed a thriving culture, viewed as unique by other Arab peoples, would be treasonous in that it might provide legitimacy to “Palestine”. Referring to them simply as Arab inhabitants, no different from Egyptians, Syrians, or Jordanians, removes their identity and legitimacy to the land. As such, the debates about legitimacy and right are as much a political battle as the military conflict itself.
Standardizing a national historical narrative for the benefit of privileging one group over another is surprising in these days of multiculturalism and pluralism. Here I am referring to the standard history that one continually runs into at museums that trace the history from ancient times through the Ottoman Empire, to the British Occupation, and then to the state of Israel. Palestinians are continually conveniently missing from this essentially state-sponsored version of history. This can be seen at most museums including the popular King David Museum in Jerusalem. The museum charts the history of the city from ancient times to the present. Entering the museum, one is asked to watch an animated history of the city. While the animation was humorous in that it was incredibly graphic (constantly showing battle scenes where heads of the losing armies were cleanly sliced off), the story is a military one. It privileges the battles and wars rather than social and religious aspects. This museum, like the Holocaust and other museums, removes Palestinians from the history of the city. Then it ends with a celebratory expression of Israel’s founding. Perhaps the celebration suggests that of the end of the conflicts over the city and the returning to its rightful people? Nowhere does the cartoon or exhibit give credence to the fact that Jerusalem, up to the 1967 war, was regarded as the capital of Palestine. A temporary photo exhibit of life in the city in the early 20th century did show scenes of Palestinian and Jewish social and economic life. But I believe that given the contexts as laid out in the way that the history of the city and the nation are laid out, it gives the impression that they are merely parts of a native “Arab” population.
As elsewhere in other Israeli museums, such Arabs as represented in photos, statues, and displays are usually pictured as a part of the cultural and economic scene before the “refounding” of Israel. But in these cases they are presented in typically orientalist manners. Usually the photos and display or wax figures present Arabs in traditional dress and involved in traditional occupations. Further, they are shown in gender and class ways which are represented as clearly non-western. They show women doing agricultural work in the fields, men as small shopkeepers, families at special ceremonies, etc. Of course, showing Palestinians in a way that is “traditional”, suggests that they are memories of the past. Not only were Palestinians not represented in the history of the land, there were no exhibits that included contemporary views of Palestinians in the current makeup of Israel or the region. It is as if the Palestinians, or “Arabs” in the Israeli view, are merely remnants of the past – as “history” – as memory of what was “before”.
For Israel, Palestinians played no special role in the birth of the nation, or in the success of it. Rather they have been seen as the reason that the nation has not been more successful. In Israel, Palestinians are simply the remainders of an ancient and failed culture. Further, they are usually referred to only in relation to Zionists and Jewish settlers, as a way of creating an us vs. them dichotomy. As Katriel says: in the heritage museums, “museumified Palestinian peasants typically appear in the guise of anthropology’s “timeless other”, like ancient forefather figures whose “primitive” tools are symbolically appropriated by [being] given biblical names and having Jewish pioneering tales associated with them”. [9]
Like in museums, Israeli citizens have been trained not to “see” Palestinians. It is not that they are not there (in fact, according to a 2005 U.S. government report, the Palestinian population in Israel and the Occupied Territories has actually grown larger than the Jewish population), [10] but political, visual, cultural, and legal barriers have been erected that obscure the view. Indeed, it has recently become illegal for Jewish citizens of Israel to visit Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza, for so called “security reasons”. The Israeli citizens I have met that ignore this law (mainly human rights workers, peace activists, teachers, social workers, and journalists) claim that the reason that it was made is to prevent Israeli peace activists from working with their Palestinian counterparts, as well as to make the realities of the Occupation less visible to the Israeli public. Indeed, by controlling what can be seen or how it is viewed, the state manipulates how Jewish citizens understand their history and contemporary situation. It appears that the government believes that the work of Jewish Israeli citizens, who work with Palestinians in the occupied territories, may make Israel’s state-making project less successful.
Even the Israelis who travel in the Occupied West Bank to the Jewish only Israeli settlements (settlements are illegal under international law) don’t necessarily “see” Palestinian communities and their plight accurately. While driving on Jewish-only road systems that criss-cross throughout the territories, connecting settlements to each other as well as to Israel proper, encountering Palestinians is limited. Israeli drivers would see Palestinians walking along the roads that they are prohibited from driving on, crowded behind Israeli military check points, or the occasional collection of impoverished Palestinian houses on the roads. The roads, along with the so-called “Security Barrier” (a massive wall that runs hundreds of miles long and meanders throughout the territories) makes it possible to avoid Palestinian villages as drivers skirt past the ‘ghettos’ Palestinians live in. Again, I would suggest that the loss of the visual aspect of seeing Palestinians in the West Bank, like the museums, serve to reinforce the view that Palestinians are insignificant.
Museums in Israel work with other elements to produce and construct myriad symbolic and visual representations of Israel, the Palestinians, and the conflict that continues between them. The State, media, and other institutions, including museums, clearly play an important role in the maintenance of these national narratives. Rather than objective and innocent sites of learning, experiencing, and remembering, museums function as important political tools.
Similar to other modern nations, the Israeli state uses its museums to popularize ideas about history and ethnic differences, and to assert the ethnic dominance of one group over another. Like other settler-colonial societies, it also has no intention of sharing the land with the Palestinians. Perhaps the presumption on the part of the Israeli state is that the indigenous population does not deserve access to its own land or that it is incapable of improving its lot. The question is “why?” Does it believe Palestinian populations to have natural or essential defects? Or is it because the official Israeli historical narrative is that the state settled on “vacant” lands? The answer is likely a combination of the above, with the consequence that the idea of both internal and external enemies further consolidates a sense of collective identity and national unity. Israeli museums are integral to the process of creating and maintaining nationalistic myths, and are therefore important to understand as sites that perpetuate the ongoing conflict.
John Petrovato is a Bookseller in Boston, MA. and a dedicated human rights activist. He co-organizes the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.
Endnotes
1. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2003), 3.
2. Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage publications, 1997), 4.
3. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Sacrificing Truth: Archeology and the Myth of Masada (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity books, 2002), 3.
4. Philip Kohl, ‘Nationalism and Archeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 27, 1998, 223.
5. Tamar Katriel, ‘Museum Narratives and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Israel’ (lecture given at the conference ‘Narrative, Ideology, and Myth’ in Tampere, Finland, 2003 and posted on internet). Also see Tamar Katriel, Performing the Past: Study of Israeli Settlement Museums (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum associates, 1997) and ‘Remaking place: Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums’, in Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, eds., Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany: SUNY press, 1997).
6. Irena Klepfisz, in Marc Ellis, Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto press, 2002), 28.
7. Marc Ellis, Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto press, 2002), 11.
8. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 90.
9. Katriel, Performing the Past, 154.
10. United States Department of State: Israel and the Occupied Territories in ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – 2004’, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (Feb, 2005).
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