ciety, what the French call mystique, may linger on long after the reality upon which it was based has disappeared and made a new approach necessary.
An ideology is not just a set of ideas which can be changed easily. It is bound up with vested interests on many different levels. It exists in the textbooks of schools and in the mental set of generations of teachers, thereby molding the minds of boys and girls born into a new reality. Social institutions, with their hosts of functionaries and economic enterprises, are based upon ideology. Political parties fighting for the advantages of political power perpetuate the philosophies imprinted on them since their inception; this is particularly true in Israel, all of whose political parties were founded in Europe before their leaders even came to the country. It is natural that a political regime which led Zionism to its heroic period is not one to relinquish power voluntarily and easily. The Zionist ideological and political superstructure, therefore, still exerts an immense influence in Israel. The establishment of the state has not changed this; indeed, it has changed very little in the personal and political composition of the leading class in the country. Therefore it is very difficult to answer a question like: "Is Israel a Zionist state?"
For many young people in Israel, the word Zionism is derogatory. In sabra slang, "to talk Zionism" means to talk nonsense, to use highfaluting slogans devoid of concrete meaning. To the practical sabra mind, pragmatic by nature, it has long been obvious that some fundamental tenets of Zionism have not stood the test of time; yet these same sabras may unconsciously cling to Zionist ideas which they know to have been proved false.
The fundamental tenets of Zionism can be defined as follows: (a) all the Jews in the world are one nation; (b) Israel is a Jewish state, created by the Jews and for the Jews all over the world; (c) the Jewish dispersal is a temporary situation, and sooner or later all Jews will have to come to Israel, driven, if by nothing else, by inevitable anti-Semitic persecution; (d) the Ingathering of these