The Origins of Israeli Mythology Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders [Paperback]

Examines Israeli identity by exploring its historical narratives, such as crusader and Canaanite challenges, and proposes a new meta-narrative - Mediterraneanism.This book provides a new genealogy of Israeli self-perception, a mapping of the Israelis' deep anxieties, states of mind, and metaphors with regard to their spatial and temporal identity. The Origins of Israeli Mythology recovers a phenomenology of the Israeli-Zionist identity discourse by exploring its mythological roots: the messianic drive, the crusader anxiety, the Canaanite challenge, and the Mediterranean option.This book provides a new genealogy of Israeli self-perception, a mapping of the Israelis' deep anxieties, states of mind, and metaphors with regard to their spatial and temporal identity. The Origins of Israeli Mythology recovers a phenomenology of the Israeli-Zionist identity discourse by exploring its mythological roots: the messianic drive, the crusader anxiety, the Canaanite challenge, and the Mediterranean option.We claim that Zionism as a meta-narrative has been formed through contradiction to two alternative models, the Canaanite and crusader narratives. These narratives are the most daring and heretical assaults on Israeli-Jewish identity, which is umbilically connected to Zionism. The Israelis, according to the Canaanite narrative, are from this place and belong only here; according to the crusader narrative, they are from another place and belong there. On the one hand, the mythological construction of Zionism as a modern crusade describes Israel as a Western colonial enterprise planted in the heart of the East and alien to the area, its logic, and its peoples, whose end must be degeneration and defeat. On the other hand, the nativist construction of Israel as neo-Canaanism, which defined the nation in purely geographical terms as an imagined native community, demands breaking away from the chain of historical continuity. Those are the two greatest anxieties that Zionism and Israel nlS3