Word: hebrewism
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...besieged mentality, preferring collective suicide to surrender, Prime Minister Golda Meir replied, ''It is true. We do have a Masada complex. We have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex.'' Yehoshafat Harkabi, once the chief of Israeli military intelligence and now a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University, has one of the clearer minds in the Middle East. He sits in his study at dusk, on Bar Kokhba, a street in Jerusalem named for the leader of a catastrophic Jewish rebellion against the Romans in A.D. 132, an uprising that left half a million Jews dead...
...times,'' says Wiesel. ''Think of all that has been accomplished in 40 years.'' A national home for every Jew in the world, an ingathering from more than 100 countries -- although, of course, 9.3 million of the world's Jews remain in the Diaspora. The resurrection of a dormant language, Hebrew, for everyday use, a constantly renewed and invented tongue that has helped compose a functioning society, and democracy, out of the disparate characters and cultures that have come to the Promised Land from Poland, Morocco, Ethiopia, Mexico, everywhere. The earlier Zionist settlers had paved the way over several generations...
...where Satan tempted Christ. And in the distance to the south, the terrible brow of Masada, where 960 Jewish Zealots committed suicide rather than surrender to the besieging Romans in A.D. 73. Some Israeli army units now celebrate their graduation after basic training under a night sky ablaze with Hebrew characters that say MASADA SHALL NOT FALL AGAIN. Israelis live under constant strain. Graceful manners are not yet a national accomplishment. Israelis' driving is not civilized, although it is not as bad as that in either Boston or Brussels. These days it seems difficult to find Israelis laughing. The soldiers...
...territories, but no longer so reluctantly. Twenty-one years is long enough to allow a generation of Palestinians to grow to adulthood knowing only, and hating, the occupation. But in a land so old, 21 years is merely an instant. Civilizations are piled on top of one another (Hebrew, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Hellenistic, Maccabean, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, on and on), all the laminations that conquerors have left in the earth there -- a rich debris of meanings and promises and desires. The accumulation of passion and memory, so much of it implicated with God, can make...
...many Israelis have turned against them. Another is money: guarding and maintaining the settlements costs plenty. A study by the newspaper Ha'aretz reckons that since 1967, the bills run upwards of $10 billion, excluding military costs in the West Bank. According to Yaacov Shamir, a communications professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, recent polls show that 52% of Israelis are prepared to withdraw from settlements as part of a future peace deal with Palestinians...