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| | Israel Palestine Forum - Israel's Culture of Martyrdom |
 | | The central chapter in the construction of Israeli martyrology was, of course, the Holocaust, but it began well before, according to Zertal, who traces it to the cult surrounding Joseph Trumpeldor, the first hero of the Jews who settled in Palestine."Never mind dying," Trumpeldor is reported to have said shortly before his death in 1920. |
 | | In 1934 a memorial was erected at his gravesite, and it soon became, for Zionist youth movements, a place of pilgrimage nearly as important as Masada, where, according to the Zionist interpretation of Flavius Josephus, Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in AD 73. |
 | | The remembrance of Trumpeldor's death at Tel Hai, argues Zertal, marked the beginning of a cult of death among Israeli Jews. |
| www.israelpalestineforum.com /content/view/17/0 (6084 words) |
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