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A Nation-in-Arms: State, Nation, and Militarism in Israel's First Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Uri Ben-Eliezer
Uri Ben-Eliezer
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Extract

Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard the ethnie as an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”

Type
Constructing Identity
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 1995 , pp. 264 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1995

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