By Meron Benvenisti
''Now that i'm seventy years of age, it's my prerogative to provide a summing up,'' says Meron Benvenisti, the world over recognized writer and columnist, Jerusalem local, and scion of Israel's founders. Born in Palestine in 1934 to a Sephardic father and an Ashkenazi mom, Benvenisti has loved an strange vantage element from which to contemplate his homeland's conflicts and controversies. all through his lengthy and provocative profession as a pupil, an elected authentic, and a revered journalist, he has remained in detail concerned with Israel's social and political improvement. half memoir and half political polemic, Son of the Cypresses threads Benvenisti's personal tale throughout the tale of Israel. the result's a shiny, sharply drawn eyewitness account of pre-state Jerusalem and Israel's early years. He memorably units the scene through recalling his father's emotional trip from Jewish Salonika in 1913 to Palestine, with all its attendant euphoria and frustration, and his father's pioneer commitment to inculcating Israeli early life with a ''native's'' attachment to the place of birth. In describing the colourful and vigorous Jerusalem within which he grew up, Benvenisti recollects the various demanding situations confronted via new Jewish immigrants, who chanced on themselves not just in clash with the Arab inhabitants but in addition with one another as Sephardim and Ashkenazim. He revisits his personal public disagreements with either Zionists and Palestinians and stocks indelible stories equivalent to his boyhood reviews of the 1948 conflict. In remembering his existence as an Israeli sabra, Benvenisti bargains a brilliant checklist of the old roots of the clash that persists this present day.
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A vote was taken, and the decision was twelve to three in favor of having the society be open to everyone. However, the subject came up once more, this time in the context of the drafting of the membership application. ” Y. Yisraeli requested that the words “values of Zionism” 22 A Founding Father be added. In the end, the wording of the original draft was retained, with the proposal to omit the requirement regarding “national values” being defeated seven to five. Some of the society’s hikes were easy and short, but some were long treks that traversed remote and hazardous regions.
Those sabras who most closely approach the “native” ideal find in the landscape a source of personal satisfaction and pleasurable experience, but they reject its nationalization and insist on personalizing their love for it. Those who still strive to bind human beings in chains of indoctrination, obligating them to love their homeland, are not only fighting a losing battle, it appears that they are also trying to preserve principles that, although not explicit, are inherent in the cult of Knowing the Land—the alienation and dispossession of the Other.
Late recognition For many years my father felt that the true value of his achievements had not been publicly acknowledged. All the honors he had received, including having been named Worthy of Jerusalem (Yakir Yerushalayim) in 1969, did not satisfy him. ” The judges’ rationale for awarding him the prize included the following: From the very beginning of his active career, he strove to form devotees of Knowing the Land into an organized body and with friends founded the Ramblers’ Society, which was the first group in Eretz Israel to deal on a permanent and ongoing basis with the organization of excursions and lectures and with conveying knowledge of the homeland.