Summary
Lev Grinberg’s term, as presented by Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, for the belief that the hostile relations with the Arab world are an incarnation of Jewish history conceived as a history of suffering and persecution — a perception solidified in the founding period through the Holocaust and the “War of Independence” of 1948, which depoliticizes the conflict by tracing it back to an unredeemable archenemyship of the “new Goyim” towards the Jews (Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, PDF p.160 / printed p.151).
Details
- Grinberg: “The security myth sprang from the sense of being under an existential threat that is deeply rooted in Jewish history, and in particular from the experience of anti-Semitism dominated by the Holocaust, which is why the security myth stands in the way of a debate on Israel’s realpolitik situation, including the concrete dangers it involves” (PDF p.160).
- For Moshe Zuckermann, the “security question” serves as “cement for the conflict-laden society” and engenders an undisputed consensus on the borders and framework of Israeli society; its unifying effect seemed to wane when the peace process with the PLO opened a deep rift in Israeli society (PDF p.159-160).
- In Amar-Dahl’s reading of Shimon Peres’s 1955 essay “Reconciliation Does Not Mean Security”, two central elements of the security myth are the assumption of a threat of annihilation and the conviction that “the world is against us”, so reconciliation is impossible and Israel can only rely on itself (PDF p.168).
- In the 1980s constellation, the “security myth” is the Zionist Left’s state myth, against the Zionist Right’s “myth of the promised land”: it does not completely exclude peace negotiations as long as security remains guaranteed, and under Peres’s leadership the “myth of peace and security” (Shalom ve-Bitahon) was cultivated as the Zionist Left’s alternative (PDF p.176-177).
- The book’s Conclusion names the myth — there usually as the “safety myth” — one of Zionist Israel’s two founding myths, beside the myth of Eretz Israel as the land of the Jewish people: sprung from the history of Jewish suffering, it assumes hostile relations between Jews and Goyim can never be fully resolved and that invincible military power is essential, so security became the central pillar of the Israeli order and peace is deemed possible only if military control over Eretz Israel and its “Arabs” is maintained; its “ideologization” of security depoliticizes both the conflict and peace (PDF p.196-198).
Related pages
Lev Grinberg, Peace Ideology, Imagined Peace, Civilian Militarism, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine