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

Abstract

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 theethnieas 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.”