political destiny, identify themselves with a political state, pay its taxes, serve in its army, work for its future, share its fate-and, if necessary, die for it.
In this sense, we in Israel are a nation, unmistakably and irrevocably, for better or for worse. Our nation comprises all of us, from Dan to Elat, but it does not include a Jew in Brooklyn, Paris or Bucharest, much as he may sympathize with our country and feel an affinity for it.
The difference between Jewish fathers anywhere in the world and Israeli sons is much more than the usual contradiction between generations; it is a mutation. A different mode of life, nutrition, climate, political reality and social environment could not but make the Palestinian-born son vastly unlike his ghetto-born father. It is not uncommon for a young Israeli in the United States or Europe to hear the exclamation: "But you don't look like a Jew!" This dubious "compliment" still carries a grain of truth. The robust, tall, often dark-blond and blue-eyed sabra, is, indeed, even externally different from his Jewish ancestors, much as the average Australian or American differs from his English great-grandfather. Jewish culture, created in the Diaspora by a persecuted, religious-minded minority, does not appeal to an Israeli generation which has a somewhat exaggerated sense of freedom. That part of the Jewish religion based on the Talmud and the Halacha, both products of the Diaspora, has in Israel degenerated into party slogans; the Bible, however, the most powerful book in Hebrew literature, is immensely popular, and archeology became a national fad long before Moshe Dayan started to dig. Significantly, in day-to-day modern Hebrew usage, Israelis have unconsciously come to use the term Jewish when they mean foreign Jews or new immigrants or religion, and to call Hebrew everything connected with themselves: We never speak about the Jewish army, the Jewish nation, the Jewish settlement or Jewish labor, but the Hebrew army, the Hebrew nation, the Hebrew settlement and Hebrew labor. Thus, long before the idea of a