most important fact
The most important fact is not that we Israelis used the Arab debka or Yemenite steps or were influenced by a landscape. The artist’s personality is the most impor- tant, more so than the steps he uses, which are really the means of expression just as the crayons for drawing are a painter’s tools.40
Israeli folkdance histories41 thus began crediting the emergence of Israeli folk dance to the spontaneous creations of rural kibbutzniks, living in the land of Israel and reviving Biblical memories. The Israeli folkdance choreographer Yonaton Karmon ex- plained the political importance of such creativity in the 1970s:
We have the reality that we created something from nothing. Sara Levi-Tanai, Rivka Sturman, Yardena Cohen created something that was adopted by all the world as Israeli folk dance. It was created as if from nothing […] My own company spends several months on tours to America, Canada, and South America […] If there wasn’t an Israeli style, no Israeli group would be asked to participate in all the international festivals and people wouldn’t be able to identify Israeli dances.42
The collective forgetting of the appropriation of dabkeh from the exiled indigenous population can thus be seen as contributing to the international community’s acceptance of an inherent (and therefore undeniable) Israeli identity. This perception that Israeli folk dance culture had spontaneously emerged also contributed to the more general notion that the state of Israel had resulted from miracles and divine intervention.43 As Gurit Kadman reflects,
It was clear we had no choice. We had to create dances and this is what happened, starting in 1944 […] This was against all the laws of the development of folk culture the world over. How can one create purposefully, artificially, folk dances […] How is it possible to accelerate a process of hundreds of years into a few years? Only a miracle can bring this about. But, after all, the same is true for the rebirth of the Jewish nation […] a constant miracle is needed […] The hope for a miracle had hap- pened — the indigenous Israeli folk dance was born.44
The influence of the indigenous population of Palestine on Israeli dance was be- ing recollected within Zionist discourse by the mid-1970s,45 although it did not provoke an ethical debate on the actual process of cultural appropriation.46 This might seem
40. Rivka Sturman, as cited in Ingber, “Shorashim,” p. 16. 41. See, for example, Gurit Kadman, “The Creative Process in Present-Day Israeli Dances,” Jour-
