“A Day of Blood and Valor”: terrorism and social tensions in 1970s Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT On June 13, 1974, four Palestinian militants penetrated kibbutz Shamir in northern Israel, killing three women before being killed by an ad-hoc force of kibbutz members. The attack on Shamir generated a new discourse in Israel about civilian reaction to terrorism and the concept of the citizen-soldier. But this discourse was intertwined with contemporaneous social and ethnic conflicts, as it included comparisons between the events in Shamir and in other communities struck by Palestinian terrorism around the same period. Analyzing the public reactions to the raids on Shamir and other Israeli communities – mainly the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot – this article argues that, in contrast to received opinion, security threats did not serve as a social glue keeping together a divided Israeli society, but rather accentuated ethnic and social tensions plaguing Israel in the 1970s.