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ABSTRACT
Members of generations who participated in seminal national events tend to be identified as ‘canonical’ and become a model for proper behaviour; they are important carriers of memory. However, their privileged status is not guaranteed for long and their position will, at some point, be challenged. It is this dynamic, whereby a generational unit is canonised and then de-canonised, that we explore in this paper. We follow this process as it is manifested in three historical museums in Israel. These museums exhibit the story of the Palmach, a semi-underground militia, whose members were considered among the Zionists as the elite fighters of the 1948 War. When observing their museological representations in the last decades, we uncover the attempt to root the Palmach heritage, on the one hand, while on the other – to revise its content via three practices of de-canonisation. This revision includes the individualisation of war memories; giving legitimacy to critical voices; and dismantling the bond between the generational legacy and the nation. Paradoxically these practices of freeing the veterans from their previous canonical role ensures the preservation of some symbolic capital.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Keren Kehat and Mordechai Naor for their kind assistance and the reviewers and editor of the journal for their useful suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. More on the Palmach on page 6.
2. In contrast, there are generational units that are bound to foundational historical events but do not embody the proper model of behaviour. In fact, they often stand for the very opposite. Such is the Holocaust generation within Jewish-Israeli society.
3. These museological changes are linked to what has been defined as the ‘memory boom’ (Nora Citation1989; Winter Citation2006).
4. Peace museums have been the precursors of this trend (Dekel and Katriel Citation2015).
5. There are virtually no historical museums in Israel that portray Palestinian national history.
6. The four other museums which were originally part of the study are the Yitzhak Rabin Centre Museum, The Hagana Museum, the Juara Museum and the Palmach Cave compound.
7. We asked about the museums’ annual budget in interviews but our interlocutors were reluctant to disclose this information. We managed to find the annual budget of Man in the Galilee Museum for 2018: https://next.obudget.org/i/org/association/580005270?li=1.
8. Museum personnel found it difficult to give the number of visitors under the pretext that much of the activity is educational seminars rather than a mere visit at the exhibit.
9. Roughly 1,100 Palmach members perished in the 1948 war, of a total force numbering roughly 6,000 at its height (http://www.palmach.org.il/en/).
10. For example, museums that glorified the early Zionist communal settlement remained popular (Katriel Citation1997).
11. See museum website: http://yigal-allon-centre.org.il/eng/.
12. The A-Nabi Yusha battle was fought between the forces of Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s Liberation Army (Jaysh al-Inqadh al-Arabi) and the Haganna/Palmach.
13. See museum website at: http://www.reut-museum.co.il/about/(in Hebrew).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Efrat Ben-Ze’ev
Efrat Ben-Ze’ev (DPhil. Oxon., social anthropology) is an associate professor at the Ruppin Academic Center, Israel. She has published in the field of historical anthropology and social memory, including her book, Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and an edited volume (with Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter), Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the 20th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Edna Lomsky-Feder
Edna Lomsky-Feder is a full professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include memory and nationalism, war and military from a culture perspective, young adults and transition to adulthood, and personal narratives. Her most recent book (with professor Orna Sasson-Levy) is titled “Women soldiers and citizenship in Israel: Gendered encounters with the state (Routledge, 2018).