The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew
by Oz Almog
University of California. 352 pp. $28.00

Israelis today are facing a challenge as severe and as dangerous as any since the founding of the state. Whether they will meet it successfully depends on many things, military preparedness being foremost among them. But high on the list of critical factors in any crisis is that nebulous and ill-defined quality, national character. In the case of Israelis, much has been written over the decades about that character, for good and for ill—which makes this book by the Israeli sociologist Oz Almog all the more welcome. For it is a look back at a generation of Israelis—the first generation—who were themselves called to meet the test of history.

Almog’s subject is the Sabras, a subset of Israel’s founding cohort whose members were born and bred in Palestine, and whose ranks include such large historical personages as Ariel Sharon and the late Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, and Yitzhak Rabin. Beginning with the very name, Sabra, drawn from the Hebrew word for the pear cactus and suggesting a prickly exterior hiding a soft interior, this is a generation whose outstanding qualities have long been the stuff of one of Israel’s major myths.

And yet, though Israel’s post-Zionist historians and intellectuals have been busy for some time now deconstructing, demystifying, and demythologizing modern Jewish history, not all myths, as Almog shows, are falsehoods. In fact, he finds “a fairly large congruence between the positive mythological image of the Sabra and the fundamental traits” that make up its profile.

Almog focuses his lens narrowly: not on all Jews born in the Yishuv, the Palestinian Jewish community, but on an elite group of no more than a few hundred men and women whom he calls “the generational nucleus.” Drawing on rich and varied source material—poems, diary entries, letters, and newsletters of youth movements and army units—he presents a sympathetic group portrait of these “classic Sabras” who in addition to helping found the Jewish state developed an array of symbols, styles, and practices that became the seedbed of the Israeli identity.

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At home in the land and in the Hebrew language as their immigrant parents could never be, the Sabras were the embodiment, both physically and spiritually, of Zionism’s project to create a “new Jew.” According to the standard Zionist analysis, centuries of suffering and humiliation in the Diaspora had rendered European Jews sickly, cowardly, and neurotic; the idealized Sabra was, by contrast, youthful, slender, tall, muscular, and healthy, known for bravery, camaraderie, and insouciance—and, above all, for patriotic devotion to the homeland. This “new Jew” would restore Jewish pride and honor, building a state in Palestine, defending it at all costs, and securing its future.

The mettle of the Sabra generation was tested in Israel’s war of independence, which broke out immediately upon the proclamation of the new state in 1948. A large literature commemorates those native-born Jews who fell in battle—and they fell in disproportionate numbers, evincing a remarkable readiness to sacrifice themselves for the cause. “I will try,” one soldier wrote with grim purpose to his girlfriend, “to overcome the yearning for life that your letters awaken in me. . . . [T]oday the thought of life and fear of death are, in my opinion, luxuries that we cannot afford.”

It was during and immediately after the 1948 war, Almog writes, that the Sabra’s moral prestige “peaked”—and justifiably so. Not that he skirts the indictment of this generation on the part of post-Zionist historians, especially when it comes to the crimes allegedly perpetrated by Israelis in the course of that war. Neither ignoring nor attempting to justify acts of expulsion or other instances of brutal behavior, Almog states matter-of-factly that the “Sabra soldier was not saintly and his weapons were certainly not always pure” (the allusion is to the doctrine of “purity of arms” promulgated by the Israel Defense Forces). Nevertheless, he concludes on the basis of careful analysis, “in comparison with soldiers of other armies, the Sabra was a ‘restrained fighter,’ ” and one who by no means reveled in the Arabs’ defeat.

Still, absolved though he is of the sins of militarism and chauvinism, the Sabra does not emerge wholly without flaws from Almog’s portrait. The collectivist culture of the time and place instilled a tendency toward conformism that became evident not only in the Sabras’ common manner of speech and dress but, most disturbingly to Almog, in their ideological uniformity. The central mechanism by which this uniformity was ensured was the intensive socialization in the values and symbols of Zionism that Sabras underwent as children and youths. In songs and stories, in textbooks and in the general press, the Zionist message was constantly reinforced—with the result, according to Almog, that “the young Sabra lived in an ‘ideological bubble’ ”:

The almost complete absence of criticism of the Zionist program or how it should be accomplished testifies not only to the [Sabras’] profound identification with Zionist ideals, but also to their reluctance to challenge them. Any expression of doubt would have been considered heresy. One may suppose that Zionist values received the force of a holy writ and had a kind of absolute validity for the Sabra elite, as if they were the Ten Commandments and thus inviolable.

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One can quibble with Almog about some of this. No doubt the Israeli educational system—not to mention the entire fabric of society—was less pluralistic in key ways than is the case today, and no doubt there was an element of conformism in Sabra culture. But as compared with what? A measure of conformism, after all, is hardly absent in the Israel of today or, for that matter, in any other society. Nor does “conformism” even begin to capture the many ways in which the Sabra generation was itself riven by divisions of various kinds, from the ideological to the social, or take into account the self-questioning and even self-incriminating quality of much of the fiction and poetry that emerged from the Sabra experience.

The deeper impression one takes away from Almog’s book is not of a generation corrupted by conformism but of a generation whose commitment to the Jewish people was—on the whole—deeply felt and utterly sincere. “There is no man too good to die for the homeland,” reads one diary entry quoted by Almog, its ingenuousness almost too painful to absorb from the distance of a half-century. And indeed, especially after the Six-Day war of 1967, such expressions of self-sacrificing patriotism fell increasingly under a shadow in Israel, until, by the late 1990’s, and under the impact of the Oslo peace process, they tended to be derided altogether in favor of a rather different set of attitudes.

Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter sent not too long ago by a corporal in the army to his commanding officer, explaining why he would no longer serve:

Although my moral resistance to the values and actions of the Israel Defense Forces wasn’t nearly as deep and resolved [upon conscription] as that which I now harbor, I intuitively resented having to sacrifice three years of my life because of an order from above. . . . [After basic training] I found myself beginning to doubt some of my most fundamental suppositions: the necessity of the Israeli military, the merit of my military service, and the truthfulness of the values of which the Israeli military boasts.

Like the Sabras of a previous era, this young soldier could be said to represent a cutting edge—the cutting edge, in his case, of radical individualism and the dismantlement of Zionist ideals. Whether in the hills of Nepal or in the gleaming office buildings of Israel’s high-technology firms, many educated Israelis have begun to turn disdainfully away from the demands of the collective and toward the pursuit of their personal desires. For others, the slogans of Zionism—national redemption, love of the homeland, the few facing the many—have come to seem worn out and hollow.

The sources of this tremendous shift in consciousness are many and complex—and under the strains of the most recent violence in Israel its heyday may be passing. But one thing is clear: if, as Almog writes, the Sabra “devoted himself to the nation just as a believer devotes himself to his religion,” he clearly failed to instill a similar devotion in at least some of his children. This alone, however, would suggest the need for a more nuanced rendering of the Sabra mentality than the standard revisionist caricature. Such a rendering Almog offers in his thoughtful and revealing book, which vividly puts before us a generation that, whatever else may be said about it, did stunningly meet the test of history.

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