of the Land of Israel has become the State of Israel; and the world’s most accomplished Mercurians have been reforged into a new breed of Jewish Apollonians. Europe’s strangest nationalism has succeeded in transforming a radical Jewish “self-hatred” (renunciation of Tevye) into a functioning nation- state. It is a peculiar state, however—almost as peculiar as the doctrine that brought it into being. Self-consciously Western in the heart of “Oriental” darkness and ideologically Apollonian in the face of Western Mercurianism, it is the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe in the postwar—and post–Cold War—world. The Israeli equivalent of such politically illegitimate concepts as “Germany for the Germans” and “Greater Serbia”—“the Jewish state”—is taken for granted both inside and outside Israel. (Historically, the great majority of European states are monoethnic entities with tribal mythologies and language-based high-culture religions too, but the post-1970s convention has been to dilute that fact with a variety of “multicultural” claims and provisions that make European states appear more like the United States.) The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life. And probably no other European state can hope to avoid boycotts and sanctions while pursuing a policy of territorial expansion, wall building, settlement construction in occupied areas, use of lethal force against demonstrators, and extrajudicial killings and demolitions. It is true that no other European state is in a condition of permanent war; it is also true that no other European state can have as strong a claim on the West’s moral imagination. In the wake of the Six-Day War, many people in the postcolonial West enjoyed a vicarious identification with a country that was both European and Apollonian, small but victorious, virtuously democratic yet brash, tanned, youthful, determined, khaki-clad, seamlessly unified, and totally devoid of doubt. However, it was the rise of the Holocaust culture in the 1970s that provided the primary legitimation for Israel’s continued defiance of the changing world. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and especially during Menachem Begin’s premiership in 1977–83, the Holocaust became the central episode in Jewish and world history and a transcendental religious concept referring to an event described as incomparable, incomprehensible, and unrepresentable. Israel’s raison d’être, it turned out, was not so much a repudiation of Tevye’s life as retribution for Tevye’s death; “not so much a negation of the Diaspora as a continuation of its fate in a new way” (as David Biale put it). Rather than representing a permanent escape from the ghetto, Israel became the ghetto’s