Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Debra and Avi Naider and Jody and Ari Storch. Thank you so much. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or just to say what up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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Welcome back to our epic series on the Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel. Is it self-aggrandizing to call your own series epic? Maybe, whatever, a 3,000 year old relationship sure feels epic to me.
In the last three episodes, we’ve covered the story from the beginning.
God’s promise to Abraham; the Israelites rolling into Canaan with fanfare and swords; the First and Second Temples; nearly two thousand years of exile; the tentative return of Jews to the land of their ancestors.
And now, at last, we’ve reached it. The moment that the modern state of Israel finally came into being. If this were a movie, the story might end there. The dream came true, happy ever after, end scene, curtains and applause.
I hate to break it to you, but there’s no such thing as happy ever after. And that’s where we’re going next: the early days of the state. The gap between the Zionist dream and the reality of a developing country surrounded by enemies. The challenges of braiding together 2,000 years’ worth of wildly disparate customs and identities into a unified nation.
And we’ll start from the beginning, which of course isn’t really the beginning but the continuation of a much, much longer story.
Prologue: Ben Gurion Turns the Pages of History
May 14, 1948. The hall on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv was hot and crowded, thick with the energy of 300 people who had been waiting a long time for this moment.
The 61-year-old man at the center of the dais was five foot three, with flyaway hair and pants belted above his bellybutton. David Ben Gurion looked more like a nerdy grandpa than an architect of history.
But that’s exactly what he was. As head of the Jewish Agency and de-facto leader of the Yishuv, David Ben Gurion stood up to deliver his speech in Palestine. Mere minutes later, he sat back down in a brand-new country with an ancient history: Israel.
The historian Martin Kramer points out that:
Until that moment, very few people knew what the state would be called. In the various drafts of the declaration, the space for the name was left blank. When the diplomats of the Jewish Agency… went to secure an advance promise of recognition for the state, they couldn’t tell the Americans what the name would be.
The letter prepared for Harry Truman, then the precedent of the United States of America, on May 14, extending recognition, was typed as follows: “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new Jewish state.” In soft pencil, someone crossed out “Jewish state” and wrote in “State of Israel.”
Seriously, picture in the show notes.
So: Israel it was. Which meant that the hundreds of people in that stuffy room were no longer Jews of Palestine, but Israelis.
It was both a seismic change and a bit of a non-event – like becoming Facebook official: a declaration of an already-existing status quo. (Shoutout to my fellow Millennials!) Well, back to the story.
Because Ben Gurion’s declaration didn’t exactly create a brand-new country. The Yishuv had functioned as a semi-independent polity for decades:
It had a quasi-government in the Jewish Agency, which handled immigration and foreign affairs, while the national labor federation, the Histadrut, ran factories, shipping lines, and a health-care network that reached every kibbutz and port. The Haganah, a volunteer defense organization, and its elite strike force, the Palmach, had prepared for years, years, to defend a state that didn’t yet exist, as the Va’ad Leumi — the Jewish National Council — debated budgets and education policy in cramped Jerusalem offices filled with determination and stale cigarette smoke.
The state may have been brand new, technically, but it had been rehearsing sovereignty for a generation.
But if May 14th was opening night, May 15th was the unglamorous morning after. The newborn state braced for invasion. Meanwhile, the cabinet argued over exactly how to conjure a single army, currency, and school system from the hodgepodge of institutions that served the Yishuv. A continent away, a quarter million Jews – including my father in law’s family – languished in DP camps, while nearly a million Jews in the Arab world braced themselves for their neighbors’ retaliation. Newly minted Israeli bureaucrats assumed that a flood of refugees would soon overwhelm the state’s meager resources – though no one could predict how many would arrive, or when.
If Herzl was the visionary and Ben-Gurion the builder bulldozer who got things done, the unsung hero of 1948 might have been the clerk hunched over a desk. Zionism, once a revolution of prophets and poets, needed accountants, engineers, and plumbers. If our friend Nehemiah from Episode 1 taught us anything, it’s that holy work sometimes sounds like a hammer – or the shuffle of papers.
And that’s what we’re exploring today: how an ancient longing became daily governance; how waves of refugees, idealists, and skeptics built not just a refuge, but a society. How Zionism learned to operate in practice at the start of this new and profoundly unglamorous chapter of Jewish history.
It was slow and bureaucratic, miraculous and intense, a rebirth 2,000 years in the making. And everyone – from the prime minister to the milkman, from the soldiers at the front to the grandmas at home – had a role to play.
Chapter One: Brick by Brick
What early Israelis lacked in money, safety, or certainty, they made up for in grit, desperation, and faith. But rather than wait for divine salvation, they built it themselves. Their theology was hard work. Their god was the state. And their icon was the New Jew – bronzed where the Diaspora Jew was pale; strong where the Diaspora Jew was weak. If the Diaspora Jew had pleaded for tolerance, the New Jew confronted his enemies through the scope of a rifle. The Diaspora Jew had bent under history, but the New Jew made her own – in flawless Hebrew, to boot.
Of course, these Diaspora stereotypes are “problematic,” as the kids say. Early Israelis might have scoffed at concepts like generational trauma, but in the 1950s, every Jew lucky enough to be alive viscerally understood the price of life in the Diaspora, as dictated by Hitler and a world that didn’t stop him until it was too late.
That price was one out of every three Jews on the planet.
Imagine every single Jewish person you know. Now cross out every third person on that list. Then add in an existential war that killed one percent of the Israeli population, and you start to understand the scale of the trauma that haunted the Jewish state in its early years.
And people do strange things in response to trauma.
Like recasting their whole history as weakness.
Like recoiling from any reminder of the Diaspora, no matter how innocuous.
Like imagining that they would have resisted where so many didn’t. They would have taken down a few Nazis – or Cossacks, or Crusaders, or Romans, pick your bad guy – before nobly dying like heroes.
So – in one of the great tragedies of early Israeli history – many Israelis treated Holocaust survivors with suspicion and disdain. These walking ghosts were an inconvenient reminder of everything the New Jew had been fashioned to transcend.
And it wasn’t just survivors. All new immigrants came in for harsh treatment. Native-born kids teased immigrant classmates for their accents, no matter where they were from. Officers urged their soldiers to “walk like Israelis.” Parents would pick their kids up from school and find that the teachers had unofficially Hebraicized their names. Sonia was now Tziyona. Masouda was now Mazal.
This rebranding was carried out without an ounce of shame, an essential component of the national program of shlilat ha-golah, the negation of the Diaspora in favor of a unified Israeli identity.
Shame was an old-world emotion. The native Israeli took her cues from her namesake: the spiky, hard-to-handle sabra fruit, also known as a prickly pear. The nickname started as an insult, as immigrants mocked the rough Hebrew and rougher manners of their native-born Israeli neighbors. But Israelis claimed their new name with pride. True, the sabra is prickly on the outside. But cut past the tough exterior, and you’ll be rewarded with a vibrant sweetness. It’s like a reward.
The sabra was the opposite of the worst possible thing to be: a frier, one of those untranslatable words that can tell you so much about a culture.
A frier is not stupid, but something far worse: the chump who get played. A frier is the kind of sucker who pays full price, waits patiently in line, trusts the system, and then watches someone cut ahead and walk away smiling. A frier hasn’t learned the lessons of Jewish history, because – like a dummy! – he still believes that morality, decency, and laws can protect him.
The sabra was everything the frier wasn’t: tough, street smart, unimpressed by power, allergic to victimhood. Sweet on the inside, but no pushover, because sweetness without a spine was dangerous. So when Israelis recoil at being called frier, they are not just rejecting foolishness. They are rejecting Diaspora vulnerability.
What’s that old saying? The road to Auschwitz is paved by trust in the kindness of the outside world? Something like that.
These sabras, and those new arrivals who idolized them, didn’t stop to consider that maybe – maybe! – some Diaspora relics were valuable, even cherished. Names. Languages. Prayers. Traditions. It all had to go, the baby along with the bathwater. There would be no cracks in the New Jew’s armor – even if she had to change her name, her language, her culture to build this impenetrable defense.
The state would not have survived its wars, its poverty, its absorption of nearly a million immigrants in under five years, without this collective self-sacrifice. But every creed has its cost. As waves of traumatized, penniless immigrants made their way to Israel, they found that Zion was less welcoming than they had dreamed. The Jewish state promised to take in “tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free” after millennia of exile. But absorption didn’t mean acceptance.
Like water, like security, like the fruits that became the young country’s top export in the 1950s, acceptance had to be wrenched from an unyielding land. In a land that devoured its inhabitants, you had to learn to fight back.
But while the sabra ethos supposedly celebrated equality, new immigrants quickly learned that egalitarianism only extended so far. So even though the kibbutzim – socialist agricultural communes – ran on consensus, scorned private property, and championed equal rights for all, the country that these sabras built nonetheless operated under an unofficial social hierarchy.
Secular, Ashkenazi, kibbutznik soldiers at the top – the tough, salt-of-the-earth types who farmed every day and reported to the front lines without fear. Everyone else – the non-farmers, the new immigrants, the religious – was a notch below this Sabra New Jew. And as with most things, the Sabra’s cachet relied in part on his rarity. After all, most Israelis were not Ashkenazi kibbutznik soldiers who had been born in the land. They came from all over. They had different religious practices. They were teachers and bus drivers and newspaper columnists and garbage collectors, not farmers.
Despite this new society’s obsession with agriculture and land, Israel’s largest employer was not a farm, but a sprawling bureaucracy run from dingy offices choked with stale cigarette smoke. Long before independence, the Histadrut — the national labor federation founded in 1920 — had built an economic empire: construction firms, hospitals, shipping companies, even a bank. By 1951, it employed nearly a third of Israel’s workforce. The histadrut was a government within the government, distributing jobs, healthcare, and ideology in equal measure. Even revolutionaries on the front lines of Jewish history need someone to stamp forms and process tax returns.
Historian Oz Almog called this paradox “the heroism of routine.” Teaching, building infrastructure, collecting taxes, and driving buses were all acts of nation-building. They just didn’t receive the same adulation or take on the same sheen of glamour as being a farmer or a soldier.
Every nation needs its myths, no matter how unrealistic. But no one had the time or inclination to understand that the New Jew, the OG Sabra, was just that: a myth. They were too busy building a state under harsh conditions. The young country ran on caffeine, collectivism, and the unspoken terror that if anyone stopped moving, the miracle might notice and leave.
By the mid-1950s, the ethos had become Israel’s background noise. You could hear it in the songs on the radio: “Anu banu artza, livnot u’lehibanot bah” — “We have come to the Land, to build it and to be rebuilt by it.”
You can see it in the black-and-white photos from that time — mothers in fatigues cradling infants, teenagers planting eucalyptus in the rain.
And you can see it in the figures that Israelis idolized. Every Israeli child knew the story of Joseph Trumpeldor, the one-armed soldier who was killed defending a Jewish settlement 28 years before the state existed.
Maybe you remember Trumpeldor from our episode on early Zionist myth-making. Maybe you recall his legendary last words, delivered nobly on his deathbed: tov lamut l’ad artzenu. “It is good to die for our country.”
Personally, I have my doubts that anyone with a bullet in their stomach has the peace of mind for patriotic platitudes. But even if Trumpeldor never said those famous words, he had expressed similar sentiments throughout his entire life. This was how he envisioned the New Jew, quote:
“We must establish a generation of Jews without interests or habits…. Malleable but malleable like steel, the type of metal that can be forged into whatever is necessary for the nation’s furnace. “Is a wheel missing? I’m that wheel! …I’m the pure idea of service, ready at all times, unburdened by any prior commitment. I respond to only one command: Go out and build!
My parents are social workers and psychologists, so I’ll be the first to tell you that having no interests or habits isn’t the healthiest. But the spirit behind his words, the commitment to serve, to sacrifice – that exists to this day.
And there is no better illustration of the lasting resonance of this ethos than the aftermath of October 7th, as the entire country took on the responsibility of defending or rebuilding with a fiery determination.
Volunteers of all ages and backgrounds lined up for hours to donate blood, or food, or clothing, or time. Vacationers abroad immediately rushed back home to get in their IDF uniforms. Reservists shouldered guns, leaving families, jobs, and their lives, without a word of complaint. Bereaved parents took to the streets, mobilizing for other people’s children to come home. Returned hostages immediately began advocating for brothers and sisters still trapped in Gaza.
And it was even more. Druze women kashered their kitchens so they could cook for soldiers. Bedouin soldiers recorded ominous warnings to Hamas in Arabic. Yeshiva students spent hours knotting tzitziyot, ritual fringes, for soldiers on the front.
Grandfathers who could no longer fight spent their days ironing uniforms. Haredi women who had never interacted much with their secular neighbors signed up in droves to babysit, to donate, to help with housework for the mothers whose partners were on their third or fifth or 10th round of reserve duty. Across the country, ordinary citizens poured into funerals and shiva houses to comfort the bereaved. Famous entertainers showed up in evacuated communities and army bases to bring a little joy to whoever they could help.
More than a century after Trumpeldor wrote those words, Israelis proved that his ethos still pulsed like a national heartbeat. If a wheel is missing, be that wheel.
I realize I sound like I’m mythologizing, but this was no myth. This was actual national unity, a renewed commitment to self-sacrifice.
In five years and certainly in fifty, maybe we’ll do a retrospective, poke holes in the national myths created in the wake of 10/7. Because of course, the story is never that simple. The days of unity did eventually give way to a fracture. But in 1950s Israel, those fractures were even more immediate and obvious, the national myths deflating in real time.
Chapter Two: A Head-On Collision
It’s a recurring theme of this podcast that myths don’t always square with the facts on the ground. That’s not unique to Israel or Judaism, by the way – it’s the nature of ideals to collide head-on with reality.
But this is a podcast about the history of Israel. And so it’s also a podcast about all the moments that the state didn’t quite live up to its ideals.
Take the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which pledged that the state will, quote, “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” It’s an astonishing line, written while shells were falling on Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt called it “a miracle of politics.” It was also, unfortunately, not the full truth. An aspiration, not a guarantee.
Not every Israeli enjoyed complete equality, chief among them the new country’s Arab citizens, including the Druze who had fought with the IDF. They were a fraction of the Arab population that had once inhabited the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
To Jewish people around the world, 1948 was a moment of national redemption. But this redemption had a shadow. The flip side of Israel’s independence was the Nakba — the catastrophe that made refugees of more than 700,000 Palestinians.
Not included in that number are the 150,000 Arabs who ended up on the Israeli side of the border. Many were internally displaced, having fled their ruined villages for safer ground. Now, they were citizens of Israel, their identities taking on a new and confusing dimension. Some had just waged, and lost, a war against the new country they were now expected to be loyal to. Most had relatives on the other side of this new border. All understood that very little separated them from loved ones who were now homeless.
And if they felt conflicted about their new country, well, the feeling was mutual. The Jewish state didn’t know what to do with a potentially hostile population, and so, it adopted a suspicious and sorta contradictory stance.
The country billed itself as a democracy. But for the first 18 years of Israel’s existence, its entire Arab population lived under military rule.
Let me be clear. These Arabs were citizens of Israel. They voted and accessed social services and benefitted from infrastructure that the state had built for them, like roads, schools, and Arabic-language radio programs.
But they needed a permit to leave their villages. They risked being detained, or worse, on the roads. They were treated with suspicion and often condescension, subject to curfews and restrictions that seemed to come out of nowhere. Perhaps worst of all, they watched as the state expropriated, aka took, huge tracts of land – land they had once cultivated and owned!! – in the name of “national development.” Most of these citizens were never compensated, or compensated decades late, or compensated inadequately.
Many of these citizens were internally displaced – meaning, they had fled from one village within the borders of what would become Israel to another. Say, Haifa to Lod. Acre to Ramle. And since they were not in their homes when authorities showed up, the state categorized them as “present-absentees,” potentially eligible for compensation, but not for the return of the land that had once been theirs.
The new Israeli government was justifiably nervous about a potential Arab uprising. After all, many of these new citizens had fought against the state. But the local Arab population did not rise up against the state. And by the late 50s and early 60s, even the so-called “hardline” parties, like Menachem Begin’s Herut, were calling for an end to military rule for Arab citizens.
It is not surprising that Israel had a mutually conflicted relationship with its Arab citizens. It is perhaps more surprising that the Jewish state had a mutually conflicted relationship to the Jews it had actively worked to bring to Israel.
I am talking, of course, about the so-called Mizrahim.
I say “so called” because – like so many words we use to talk about identity – this one is made up and imprecise, a catch-all term that lumped together the nearly 800,000ish Jewish immigrants from the Arab and Muslim world.
Mizrahi literally means “Easterner;” in the 50s, it might have been translated as “Oriental,” though that term is now considered outdated. Never mind that countries like Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt are technically west of Israel. Mizrahi isn’t really a geographical term, but a political or even spiritual one. If the early state was founded on so-called Western or European principles – socialism, secularism, even some versions of Zionism – then Mizrahi emerged as an opposite to that ethos. So it didn’t matter that Jews from Iran had very little in common, culturally, with Jews from Tunisia or Yemen. As far as the state was concerned, they were all Mizrahim.
If Mizrahi was a supposedly neutral term, other, far uglier words sprang up to describe this new population. Most Mizrahi immigrants spoke Arabic, in addition to other languages, lending their Hebrew a guttural inflection that their Ashkenazi neighbors mocked. I don’t know who came up with the slur chach-chach, a nasty, racialized way to say “thug” or “hooligan.” But the term’s repeated “ch” sound is a direct mockery of the Mizrahi accent. Turns out even a nation of immigrants and refugees isn’t free of casual racism.
Look, it’s no small thing to absorb eight hundred thousand refugees, mostly penniless, in under a decade. A demographic shift of this scale could rock any country. But the Law of Return, passed in 1950, guaranteed, quote: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh,” or new immigrant, no matter where they came from.
And they came to Israel in droves, as refugees from mostly-hostile lands, many of them stripped of their property and assets. When they finally arrived, they were…disappointed, to say the least.
They found ma’abarot, transit camps made up of canvas tents or corrugated tin shacks that let in mud in winter, dust in summer. They found ugly tenement blocks, built for efficiency rather than aesthetics or comfort, where families of 9 crowded into two rooms. They found themselves living in the so-called “development towns” along the young state’s periphery, a sort of human border. To get to the center, any enemy would have to cut through these peripheral towns.
Worst of all, they found that even in the country of the Jews, they were at the bottom of the totem pole. Egyptian Jews who spoke four languages were shocked to find that they were considered somehow “less than.”. Moroccan Jews waited for months to be placed in apartments, only to find that Ashkenazi immigrants had soared to the front of the line. Religious Mizrahim who had kept their faith vibrant and alive found their customs and rituals dismissed as “primitive superstition.”
Ben-Gurion called this demographic sea change an example of mizug galuyot — the “melting pot of exiles.” But he and other leaders of the ruling party also had some very unkind things to say about these exiles who had gathered in their country, changing its culture in ways they had not predicted. Things like “Mizrahim have no morals.” Or that Moroccans were a “primitive people and a backward ethnic group.” Or that “It’s true. There’s discrimination. It’s necessary.” And when these Mizrahi Jews complained about living in hastily-erected tent cities with no running water, freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer, Ben Gurion dismissively sniffed, “Anyone who doesn’t want to live in the tents needn’t bother coming here.”
Easy for him to say. He had indoor plumbing.
The alienation went both ways. Confusion hardened into resentment. Many Mizrahim viewed their Ashkenazi counterparts with suspicion and disdain. If they, the Mizrahim, were “primitive” and “superstitious,” then the Ashkenazim were cold, cheap, joyless, and terrible cooks.
Today, the ethnic tensions of Israel’s early days have largely abated. Many Israeli families are thoroughly mixed, rooted in a dizzying variety of countries and cultures. At the end of 2025, the Israeli band Hatikva 6 released a song called “Complete Israeli,” about the mashup that Israeli identity has become. He sings about having an Algerian mom and a Polish dad, a wife with Hungarian and Moroccan roots. And then he asks:
What does that make our kids?
Half-half. Quarter-quarter.
Why is no one here whole?
Which part establishes their identity?
If you ask me what they are… they’re completely Israeli.
And I love that, it’s beautiful. Few Israelis today define their identity by where their grandparents were born. They’re just… Israelis.
But in those early years, new immigrants had to grow into that Israeli identity, which required a significant amount of contortion. In a generation or two, though, Israeli identity expanded. If Ben Gurion’s ideal Israeli was an Ashkenazi New Jew, the new Israeli, the Israeli of the 21st century, has far more options for how and what to be.
In the early days of the state, however, few people had the privilege of contemplating their identity. Everyone, regardless of background, was just trying to survive. Ministries were still housed in abandoned British buildings. Files were carried in fruit crates. Food was rationed. Luxuries were scarce.
And yet there was something electric in the air. A hardscrabble ethos that promised a better future. Until that better future materialized, schools would open in tents, theater troupes would perform in bomb shelters, and clinics would keep treating both malaria and existential fatigue.
The country itself was under construction. Drive north from Tel Aviv in 1953 and you’d see rows of eucalyptus trees planted to drain the swamps, white tents shading fields of tomatoes and cotton. Slowly, the tent cities graduated to tin shacks and then cinderblock buildings along the edges of the state. Moshavim sprang up all over. If the kibbutz was a socialist collective where decisions were made by consensus and private property didn’t exist, the moshav was a gentler model for those who wanted both community and privacy. Still agricultural, at least in the early days, but without the whole extreme socialism thing.
The country’s development was uneven, but relentless — water, roads, housing, power lines. With few natural resources, Israelis mined audacity instead. The same engineers who built canals during the day tinkered at night with drip irrigation, a homegrown innovation that would later feed half the world’s arid regions.
Jews had once been the world’s “rootless cosmopolitans,” good for little beyond lending money and collecting taxes. But the State of Israel was a defiant thumb in the eye of a world that had allotted the Jews this narrow role. Here they were, working the same soil their ancestors had tilled, reclaiming the birthright from which they had been estranged for so long.
While bulldozers roared, another kind of development was underway — a cultural one. The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language had already transformed daily life: children now learned math and history in the tongue of the prophets. The Habima Theatre, founded in Moscow in 1917 and relocated to Tel Aviv, became the national stage, performing Shakespeare in Hebrew translation. Writers like a young Amos Oz chronicled the contradictions of this new society — heroic yet haunted, communal yet restless. “I was born and grew up in a place where history itself seemed to be born,” Oz later wrote in A Tale of Love and Darkness.
As a guy who was born in New Jersey…. can’t say I empathize with that.
By the early 1960s, Israel was no longer a frenzied outpost but a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. As the Knesset debated budgets, newspapers loudly criticized the government. The currency changed from pounds to lira. (NERD CORNER ALERT: The shekel wouldn’t show up til 1980 – stay tuned for an upcoming episode on that! I promise, this is much more interesting than it sounds…) The country had universities, theaters, and a symphony orchestra. Still no air conditioning, though, which really makes you question the list of priorities…
The mood was practical, proud, and just a little self-satisfied. In 1956, Ben-Gurion quipped to an American journalist: “In Israel, to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” Of course, sometimes, it’s impossible to soften reality. Sometimes, reality just stinks.
Chapter Three: An Unpleasant Interlude
I’ve definitely told this joke before, but it bears repeating.
At the beginning of time, God is chatting with the angels, showing off the amazing land he’s created for the Jewish people. It has everything. Milk! Honey! Mountains! Mlawach! All the good stuff. The angels are amazed. You made all this for the Jewish people? That bunch of kvetchers? What did they do to deserve this? And then God cackles mischievously and says “Wait till you see the neighbors.”
Eyyyyy!
Okay, yes, the joke is older than my grandpa. But it perfectly describes the first three decades of Israel’s existence. Because not everyone was happy about the Jews’ return to the land of goat milk and date honey. And by “everyone,” I mean “the entire Arab world, including all four of Israel’s neighbors: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
The War of Independence ended in 1949.
But the war on Israeli civilians was just getting started.
At the edges of the new state, just across from the hastily-erected armistice lines, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab refugees lived in camps outside the new state. Most were impoverished; more were enraged. The armistice lines were supposedly patrolled by the UN-appointed Mixed Armistice Commissions, so… the boundaries between Israel and its neighbors were extremely porous. (Yes, I’m throwing shade.)
Hundreds of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank spent their nights sneaking into Israel. These infiltrators were called fedayeen — Arabic for “those who sacrifice.” Some just wanted to gather the crops or animals or stuff they’d been forced to leave behind – and I totally get that. Some came to steal, and to be honest, I get that too.
But others came to kill. And that’s where my sympathy ends. Between 1949 and 1953, the fedayeen murdered more than 300 Israeli civilians, largely immigrants living near the armistice lines.
At first, the military hit back with small, fast retaliatory raids. But when pregnant 39-year-old Susan Kanias and two of her young children were murdered as they slept in their apartment near Tel Aviv, the Israeli government decided to adopt a new policy towards fedayeen attacks.
It boiled down to Make them pay.
Make them regret they ever messed with us.
Raise the price on our lives.
And there was one guy to lead the charge.
In 1953, Ariel Sharon was 25 years old, the sabra son of tough Russian immigrants. He spent his youth herding sheep, plowing fields, and arguing with everyone. Even as a child, Sharon had the bedside manner of a bulldozer – blunt, brilliant, and undeterred by authority. Which is an interesting trait in a military man.
Sharon refused to let the fedayeen bleed his country dry. He established an elite commando unit, handpicking soldiers to fight behind enemy lines. And within 24 hours of the attack on the Kanias family, Unit 101 was ready to hit back. They named their operation Mivtza Shoshanna, after the four-year-old girl who had been murdered in her mother’s arms.
The objective of Mivtza Shoshanna was to retaliate. To deter future attacks. It was not to kill dozens of civilians and generate a storm of international condemnation.
But that is what happened. And everyone tells a conflicting story about what went wrong. Did the soldiers thoroughly search the houses before blowing them up? What orders did they get, exactly?
No one agreed.
In public, Ben-Gurion acted horrified, dissolving the unit because that’s what you do when someone’s head has to roll. Behind the scenes, though, he defended Sharon’s logic of deterrence. The raid on Qibye – not to mention the commander behind it – came to symbolize something deeply Israeli. A kind of daring, improvisational attitude, both dangerously effective and dangerously sure of its own necessity. Those early years established Israel’s military DNA: preemption, self-reliance, and constant readiness. Ben-Gurion called it “defense through initiative.” The nation was too young and shaky to absorb serious losses. Any defeat could be existential.
So the government officially rebranded and expanded their existing intelligence apparatus, establishing the Mossad, which collected intelligence and carried out operations abroad. The Shin Bet, for internal security. And Aman for military intelligence. Each with the same mandate: “Never again surprised, never again defenseless.” Moshe Dayan reflected somberly that the Israeli nation would have to learn to live with a sword in its hand.
This wasn’t a metaphor, though the weapons changed over time.
In a blighted town at the edge of the desert, Israeli scientists were working on a top-secret weapon. Who needs swords when you have a nuke? To this day, the Israeli nuclear program is the world’s worst-kept secret; the Israelis have still never confirmed or denied their nuclear capability.
Of course, throughout the 50s, ordinary citizens had no idea that their government was building a nuke. They relied on more traditional methods of self-defense. The frontier kibbutz became a strategic weapon — half farm, half fortress. Children practiced hiding under desks when the siren wailed. Women took turns on night patrol. They were right to be wary. Even the most idyllic-seeming kibbutz could turn into a slaughterhouse.
You may have heard of Nahal Oz: the kibbutz just east of Gaza, close to an army base of the same name. Today, both the kibbutz and the base are infamous for the carnage they suffered on October 7th. But the 66 IDF soldiers and 15 civilians murdered at Nahal Oz were, sadly, not its first casualties. In 1956, Ro’i Rotberg was 21, a New Jew par excellence. He had fought in the War of Independence, studied agriculture, believed that coexistence was possible. His diary was full of irrigation notes, lists of chores, poems scribbled in margins.
On the morning of April 18, Rotberg was attacked by infiltrators from Gaza, as he rode his horse along the fields near the border. The one mercy they showed him was an instant death by gunshot. When the IDF managed to retrieve his body from Gaza, they found it mutilated and abused.
The next day, at his funeral, Moshe Dayan delivered a eulogy that became one of the most quoted texts in Israel’s history — austere, sorrowful, unflinching:
“Let us not cast blame upon the murderers today. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the truth in all its harshness: this is our fate — to be a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house.”
The eulogy was printed in every paper, studied in schools, memorized by soldiers. Because Dayan spoke not as a politician but as a prophet of tragedy. This was what it meant to be Israeli. To dwell alone, to be forever on guard. It turned out that Jewish sovereignty did not erase vulnerability. It simply redefined it.
Dayan was equally unflinching about Israel’s role in the suffering of the Palestinians. His eulogy captures Israel’s founding tragedy in a single breath: Both moral awareness… AND the wrenching knowledge that survival requires force. More than 60 years later, that formula has not changed.
Chapter Four: War All the Time
Ro’i’s Rotberg murder was not the only notable event of 1956. In October of that year, Israel invaded the Sinai Desert, in cahoots with Britain and France.
In a perfect world, the Suez Crisis wasn’t Israel’s problem. Then again, in a perfect world, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser wouldn’t have spent his time promising to eliminate the Jewish state, or cut off Israel’s access to the Red Sea, or funded and trained the fedayeen.
The Suez Canal Crisis was not Israel’s problem. But Egypt was. So, working with Britain and France, but fighting independently, the IDF launched a surprise attack. It was a stunning military success… with a brutal diplomatic fallout. The US and USSR both demanded Israel withdraw immediately – a rare agreement for empires that hated each other.
Israel left Sinai, but its generals learned an intoxicating lesson. Despite their size (small) and their weapons (unimpressive), the IDF could easily take on a regional giant like Egypt. Israel was vulnerable, but it had major chutzpah.
It was this chutzpah that led to the country’s most shocking victory to date.
In 1967, Nasser once again took to the airwaves to trumpet his plans to destroy the Jewish state. For good measure, he cut off Israel’s access to the Red Sea and started massing troops in the Sinai. Syria and Jordan joined in. Israel braced for a war of annihilation. After weeks of indecision, the Israeli government gave the IDF the go-ahead to attack preemptively.
Three hours later, the Egyptian airforce was a hole in the ground. Six days after that, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were begging for a ceasefire as Israel humiliated them thoroughly, taking – or taking back – a significant chunk of territory in the process.
The Sinai. Gaza. The Golan Heights. The West Bank. East Jerusalem. In under a week, the Jewish state had nearly quadrupled in size.
Paratroopers broke down at the Western Wall, which they had not been allowed to touch for 19 years. The promise of Next year in Jerusalem had not quite come true in 1948, as the Jordanians took control of East Jerusalem, with all its sacred sites. In June of 1967, Next Year in Jerusalem became not just a promise, but a reality.
To most Israelis, 1967 was a miracle. To religious Zionists, it was a sign. A portent of the Messiah’s imminent arrival. Out of that belief grew Gush Emunim, “The Bloc of the Faithful,” which reshaped Israeli politics. Its primary injunction was to settle the land – specifically in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – and prepare the world for the Third Jewish Commonwealth.
There was just one teeny tiny fly in the ointment: The West Bank was already populated. Suddenly, a massive population of Palestinian Arabs was now under Israeli control. So while some Israelis rejoiced, heading to the Judean hills to stake their claim to the Messianic future, others warned that occupying another people would not end well for the country.
The triumph of 1967 marked the beginning of a moral hangover that is still ongoing — a creeping sense that Zionism, once a liberatory movement, had inherited an empire of ambiguity.
It’s no coincidence that Handala showed up two years later.
If the sabra was the iconic Israeli – prickly on the outside, squishy within – Handala was the Palestinian answer, drawn in simple black-and-white. In 1969, the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali published a cartoon of a 10-year-old barefoot refugee child, stunted by exile, unable to grow until his people returned home.
Where the sabra projected toughness softened by sweetness, Handala projected permanence and dispossession. One figure faced forward into sovereignty. The other turned away, insisting that the story was still unresolved.
Handala took his final form in 1973, the same year that Egypt and Syria surprised the Jewish state with a devastating two-pronged attack that claimed hundreds of lives.
It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Soldiers were fasting, or in synagogue. Tanks were unmanned, outposts guarded by a skeleton crew. No one expected the scale of the devastation, only six years after the miracle of 1967. And though Israel managed to turn the tables, ending the war with its tanks pointed towards Cairo and Damascus, the victory felt hollow. 2,645 soldiers were dead, thousands wounded, and hundreds languished in Egyptian or Syrian prisons.
The Yom Kippur War shattered the Israeli myth of invincibility. The euphoria of 1967 faded. And the Israeli people wanted answers. The Agranat Commission, tasked with investigating what had gone so terribly wrong, released a scathing report faulting military intelligence and the IDF. Though the report did not blame Prime Minister Golda Meir, she resigned anyway. Her entire government soon followed.
For the next fifty years, the Yom Kippur of 1973 was considered Israel’s darkest day. A symbol of hubris, a reminder of fragility. Israelis thought they were done with that lesson. That they had internalized the humility they needed to survive in this neighborhood, without underestimating their enemies.
They were wrong.
But we’re not there yet. We still have so much left to cover in our final episode, next week – including the ongoing battle for the country’s soul.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Amir Tsemach, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week for Part 5, the final part in this saga.