The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth

Authors

Abdelwahab Hiba Hechiche

Abstract

Shlomo Sand opens this book with a significant sentence: “Every book is part autobiography” and, consequently, “autobiographical confession” (7). Although he was born in 1946, his early recollection has been marked by a certain residue of the consequences of the Shoa, because as a child he was an eyewitness of the living conditions of people “like his Polish parents moving from one “displaced persons camp to another” (8). But during that same period of his early childhood, his memory resonated with his father’s reminding him that “we had taken someone else’s home” (8).The reader begins to witness an existential ethical debate within the conscience ad consciousness of that child in Jaffa. The reader also is moved into entering the same stream of consciousness between memory and history as the result of Europe’s electing to spit us out or was it? asks Sand in his effort to re-construct what he saw and what he was told. The precocious young Shlomo Sand was to be exposed, certainly fed with two histories, two views of world history: “The Communist Time” and “The Zionist Time,” although the two shared the same idea of progress as a means to a better life.

Recommended Citation

Hechiche, Abdelwahab Hiba (2014) "The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth," International Dialogue: Vol. 4, Article 14.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.ID.4.1.1090
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/id-journal/vol4/iss1/14