WRITING AND REWRITING THE ZIONIST NATIONAL NARRATIVE

Kibbutzim in Palestine devoted sections of their haggadah texts read on the first night of Passover to responses to the impact of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936-1939 on their lives. Selected passages from these haggadah texts are analysed with the purpose of discerning the ways that they contributed to the ongoing construction of the Zionist national identities of kibbutz members. The analysis indicates the emergence at the time of a consensus among kibbutz members about how to tell the story of the Arab Revolt and how to situate it in the larger narrative of Zionist history and of Jewish history as a whole.