1. The Origins of the Modern State of Israel

The Levant (the land on the southeast side of the Mediterranean Sea) was the original homeland of the Jewish people at least since ancient Egyptian times. Through thousands of years, Jewish people spread throughout the Old World, settling in Spain, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran. In Europe, many were known for trade and banking because, as non-Christians, they were allowed to engage in certain business practices, such as moneylending, which were forbidden to Christian populations. After the Middle Ages, many nations conducted pogroms and genocide against their Jewish citizens. The Spanish Inquisition, Czarist and Stalinist Russian pogroms, and the gas chambers of the Nazi holocaust were all attempts at eliminating them. Antisemitism was a very common bias in the West. While less so now than before, people on the extreme right still target Jewish people as objects of hate.

The idea of a modern Israeli state arose as a way to provide a safe haven for Jewish people facing genocidal violence in modern times. It began early in the 20th century with Jewish communes (kibbutzim) in Palestine. The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 on land that had been a British colony (British Palestine). Despite objections from the region’s Arab populations, the country was recognized by the West and the United Nations as an independent political entity. At the core of its founding philosophy, Israel welcomed Jewish people from around the world to come and settle there, making Israel a fairly multi-ethnic state, unified under an umbrella of religion. Under the 1950 Law of Return, anyone who can prove they have at least one Jewish grandparent is entitled to immigrate to Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship.^[1]

The country’s existence is controversial to many people in the region. Consequently, Israel continues to have violent interactions with the indigenous Palestinian Arabs and the Arab people of nearby countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, as well as more distant regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Israel has had conflicts and wars with all of its neighbors, and it maintains a controversial policy of expansion and occupation into the Golan Heights, the Palestinian West Bank, and Gaza. In 2023, these tensions exploded into another brutal war with the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza. This war has brought terrible suffering to both innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians.

2. Geography and History

Israel is bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea, in the south by Egypt, in the east by Jordan, and in the north by Syria and Lebanon (See figure 18.1 below). It includes three occupied/annexed territories. In the far southwest, there is a narrow strip of land known as Gaza, populated by about 2 million people of Palestinian Arab ethnicity. Although officially governed by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, a terrorist/militant group, has ruled Gaza since 2007. To the east of Jerusalem lies the occupied West Bank, which was captured from the Jordanians during the Six-Day War in 1967. The West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority. Pockets in the West Bank have been “settled” by the Israeli government with new communities of Jewish settlers, often displacing Palestinian residents of the region. The practice of settlement is a core policy of the current Israeli government, but is one of the primary sources of the conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian residents of the region. The final occupied territory, the Golan Heights, lies in the far northeast of the country on the east bank of the Jordan River. The Golan was seized from Syria during the 1967 war. In 1981, it was annexed by the state of Israel and is now governed directly by Jerusalem. The capital of Israel is Jerusalem. For a brief period after the country was founded, Israel’s other large city, Tel Aviv, served as the capital, and many countries continue to identify Tel Aviv as the capital because ownership of Jerusalem remains contested.

The region we now call Israel was, in historical times, known as Canaan, Palestine, or, more generally, the Holy Land. The three major Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) all identify the region as their place of origin and designate parts of it as sacred. The region has found itself under the dominion of many empires and cultures. In ancient times, it was ruled by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, and Romans. In the 7th century, the Levant was conquered by the Arabs, who brought Islam to the region. During the Middle Ages, the region was tossed back and forth between Islamic rulers and the Christian crusaders. After the Crusades, the region was ruled first by the Mamluk Sultanate and then by the Ottoman Empire, which held sway right up until the First World War. After the war, the area was ruled by the British, who fostered widespread immigration of Jewish refugees into the region and cemented the idea of a Jewish state in the region.

As mentioned above, since the founding of the country in 1948, the region has been a flashpoint for war and conflict, including the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the 1956 Suez Crisis with Egypt, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1969 War of Attrition, the wars in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and the first Intifada from 1987 to 1993. After a brief period of negotiated peace, the Oslo Accords gave a small measure of self-governance to the occupied Palestinian regions of the West Bank and Gaza, and subsequent peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt. However, the second Intifada was a war between Palestinians and the Israeli government. In 2006, the first Gaza war broke out, which was followed by another in 2014 and the current 2023 conflict. After over 75 years of war, invasions, protests, and terrorist attacks, the establishment of a peaceful coexistence with its neighbors and Palestinian residents seems very distant.

One interesting and more uplifting fact about Israel’s constructed identity is the revival of Hebrew as a language. Never before has an ancient dead language been successfully revitalized as the first language of a group of people. The other languages of the Jewish people, such as Ladino and Yiddish, have not been so fortunate and continue to be highly endangered.

3. A Heterogeneous Melting Pot of Cultures and the Creation of a Dance Idiom

Since it is a relatively new country, Israel does not have an old tradition of music or dance. Instead, it draws upon the traditions of the many different cultures within its borders.

Klezmer dances and music accompanied the influx of Ashkenazi Jews and Chassidim who fled Europe after the Second World War. This tradition also brought along dances from Poland and Romania. One of Israel’s most iconic dances, the Hora, possibly the best candidate for the Israeli national dance, shares its name with the Romanian Hora.

• Klezmer dance
• An old Israeli dance, Od Lo Ahavti Dai
• An old Israeli dance, Ma Na’avu
• A modern Israeli dance done in the old style, Yisrael Sheli

The Mizrahi Jews, who came from North Africa and the Middle East, form another important community in Israel. The Mizrahi brought with them elements of the musical and dance traditions of Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

• A Moroccan-style dance, Debka Mimuna

The Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, moved to Greece and Ottoman Turkey. When they came to Israel, they brought not only Spanish traditions but also Greek and Turkish dance styles.

• A Sephardic-style dance based on a Greek couple dance, Arvolicos D’Almondra
• A Sephardic-style dance based on a Greek line dance, Horon

Being located right in the heart of historical Palestine, Israeli dance shows the influence of their Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian neighbors. In particular, there is an Israeli dance style based on the Arabic dabke, called the debka. Debka dances are done in tight, short lines with a characteristic hand hold, in which you hold the left hand of your neighbor in the small of their back with your right hand.

• Debka Zakariya
• Debka Druz

Finally, the Yemenites, Jews who lived in Yemen in the southern Arabian Peninsula, and whose dances show a clear Arab styling, are another important influence. A characteristic step done in Israeli dancing is even called a Yemenite step.

• Yemenite-style Israeli dance: Salamati
• Yemenite-style Israeli dance: Shir Ere Teimani

Each of these communities brought with them musical and dance traditions that, when synthesized together, comprise Israeli music and dance. One important consequence of this cultural admixture is that there are no “village” Israeli dances. Israeli dances are all choreographed by modern choreographers, often with the goal of creating a unified ethnic identity. When the country was first founded, most dances were choreographed to patriotic songs extolling the virtues of the Israeli state, to songs based on verses of the Old Testament, and to songs praising agricultural life or beautiful gardens. More recent Israeli dances are often choreographed to popular music with more secular (and sometimes very irreverent) themes.

Although their couple dances sometimes have music in ¾ or waltz time, Israeli circle dances most often use 2/4 and 4/4 meters. Many Israeli dance choreographies feature rapid, large movements, turns, arm motions, finger clicking, and clapping. Some contemplative dances include fluid, graceful movements, and repeated step patterns such as the grapevine (a.k.a. mayim step), cherkessiya, and yemenite.

Because of their roots in Eastern European Horas, most Israeli dances are done in circles. Dancers in the 1960s and 1970s tended to hold hands in the circle, but this has fallen out of fashion, and if you go to dance with an Israeli dance group today, they will dance in circles, but they won’t hold hands. There is also a smaller tradition of Israeli couple dances, which builds on Western European dances but with its own Middle Eastern flair.

• Modern Israeli dancing without hands, Bashana Haba’a
• An older-style couple dance, Ma Averech
• A modern couple dance, Ba La

A new, emerging style of Israeli dance converges with the four-wall line dances of the US, in which individual dancers perform, starting by facing one wall. These dances have much in common with American country-western line dances, except that they are performed to Israeli popular music.

• A four-wall Israeli Dance, Hineh Ma Tov II

4. Music

Music for Israeli dance today is mostly pop, flavored by influences from Arabic popular music and the music of the many component communities of Israeli society. While some regional variation exists (e.g., the music of singer Ofra Haza has clear Yemenite tonalities and is sometimes even sung in Arabic), Israeli dance music is more akin to ethnic pop and features electric guitars, synthesizers, and drum sets. These are supplemented with clarinets, accordions, frame drums, and dumbek drums.

Most Israeli dances today are done to music with singing. As mentioned above, many of the earliest dance songs were based on Bible verses and other religious texts, such as the Song of Songs. Yet others were patriotic songs that sang of the virtues of the collaborative life in the kibbutz and of taming the desert environment. More recent songs address the themes found in other popular music styles, such as family, love, loss, prosperity, and obstacles to happiness. Interestingly, despite the current political tensions in the region, very few dance songs address war or conflict.

5. Costumes

Like their music, Israeli folk dance costuming is a modern creation and reflects the fact that the Israeli dance tradition really took off in the 1950s and 60s. Israeli men often wear bell-bottom pants (commonly white), and women wear knee-length “peasant skirts” or dresses. Often these costumes are in blue and white to reflect the colors of the Israeli flag. You still find this kind of costuming in stage performances, but it is rare outside that context. There is a tradition of dancing barefoot, but in recent years, tennis shoes, t-shirts, jeans, and athletic clothing have become the most common attire.

6. Summary

Israeli dancing is perhaps one of the most interesting cases of the emergence of a folk tradition in modern times. Much like the revival of the Hebrew language, it developed as a means of creating a unified Israeli identity from a diverse community of refugees and immigrants, blending those traditions into something unique.

Further Reading

• Bachar and Bachar (n.d.), Bachar, Gamliel, and Isaacs (1975), Berk (1972, 1978), Chochem (1948), Chochem and Roth (1941), Corona (1989), Donaghy (1969), Lapson (1954), Lexova (2000), Nagi (2011), and Roginsky and Rottenberg (2020). See the References for complete citations.

Some Suggested Dances for Teaching

The following links take you to dance descriptions and instructions from my website, Folk Dance Musings, for dances appropriate for teaching to new dancers.

• Al Kanfei Hakasef
• Al Sadenu
• Bashana Haba’a
• Bo Iti El Lagalil
• Chulu
• Dodi Li
• Erev Ba
• Hineh Ma Tov II
• Hora/Hava Nagilah
• Hora Nirkoda
• Klayzmer
• Kuma Echa
• Ma Averech
• Ma Na’avu
• Mayim Mayim
• Numi Numi
• Od Lo Ahavti Dai
• Sapri Tama
• Tzadik Katamar
• Ya Abud
• Zemer Atik

Discussion Questions

Discussion Question 1

Modern Israeli dances have origins in a variety of dance and music styles. But now it is considered a single dance type. What does this tell us about the definition of what a folk dance is?

Discussion Question 2

Many Israeli dance choreographers now live in North America and Australia. Israeli dancing is also done all over the world. In what sense, then, is Israeli dancing “Israeli”?

Discussion Question 3

By melding the unique dance traditions of its immigrant communities, Israeli dance emerged as something new and different. Was this adoption and integration of older dance traditions an example of cultural appropriation? Why or why not?