Dec. 4 Answers

1) The Canaanites were a group of people lead by Yonatan Ratosh, Binyamin Tammuz, and Yitzhak Danziger whose goal was to eliminate any sort of Diaspora. They believed that both Arabs and Jews came from a common place in Israel and should live there together. They believed that this Middle Eastern identity predated both Judaism and Islam and thus they all stemmed from an ancient Hebrew people. They advocated an ancient Israeli culture and Hebrew universalism.

4) The Holocaust survivors were ready and willing to help Israel move forward. The problem with integration was that the survivors had a victim, “last Jew on Earth,” mentality that forced them to want to tell everyone about being a survivor. This irritated everyone else, because Israel was in a state to move forward and not live in the past, no matter how tragic it may have been. The new Israelis wanted to take back their land and expand on Israeli culture involving defining the New Hebrew man; they were wholly uninterested in Diaspora depression. They also felt guilt whenever they saw a survivor because there were many Jews that could have been saved that were not. They felt self-loathing based on their inadequacies during the war and decided to take out this anger on the survivors. This, in turn, created objection and antipathy of the survivors of the Holocaust making social and political integration difficult.