The two most daring and heretical assaults on Israeli-Jewish identity, which are umbilically connected to Zionism, are the Canaanite and the crusader narratives.

The two most daring and heretical assaults on Israeli-Jewish identity, which are umbilically connected to Zionism, are the Canaanite and the crusader narratives. … Those are the two greatest anxieties that Zionism and Israel needed to encounter and answer forcefully.

Zionism thus became the Promethean passion of Jews in the modern era.

The national renewal was bound up with a myth special of its kind, a myth ex nihilo with a dual task: to criticize the past and to replace it with an alternate reality.

Ahad Ha-am and Berdichevsky represent two opposing traditions (Hegelian and Nietzschean) with respect to the concept of time in the historical culture of the nineteenth century.

Canaanism was not satisfied with the Hebraization of the Jewish homeland, but rather demanded the Hebraization of the entire Middle East.

There is a dialectical relationship between historical analogy as myth and the historical present, in which each of them shapes the other in its own image: The myth bestows significance on the present, but at the same time it is molded retroactively according to the needs of the present.

Yet one should remember that this Mediterranean history is not merely a nostalgic indulgence, but also a model to inspire Mediterranean politics.

The Mediterranean cultural discourse seeks to detach the region from conflict and to fashion a broader cultural framework in which Israelis and their Arab neighbors are not alone with each other, but work together in a broader context and partnership.