As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes...

As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes a narrative of the past in the Diaspora which is distinctly negative, drawing on images of the Jewish people as passive and parasitic, alienated from nature and labor and accordingly without a living culture. Through his ideology, Gordon establishes an idea of the perfect relationship between people, nature and labor; a relationship that must be withheld in order for a people to be a living, creative culture. Gordon asserts that the Jewish people have been kept apart from the natural sphere in their own land in which they developed as a people, and have been severed from direct contact with nature in the countries where they are living in Diaspora, thus creating a strictly negative†¦show more content†¦In establishing one unified identity to the Jewish people of the past, Gordon is able to counter that identity with an opposite identity for the Jews of the future. If the past is symbolized by the Diaspora experience, the future would be symbolized by their lack of this experience. While the Diasporic Jews are passive, the Jews of Palestine must be active; as the Diasporic Jews are parasitic, the Jews of Palestine are independent: in the Diaspora the Jews are estranged from nature and labor, but in Palestine the Jews will be in harmony with nature and labor; consequently, the Jewish people in the Diaspora was not a living, creative culture, which the Jews in Palestine will be. In this way Gordon uses the Jews’ own past as the negative opposite, when presenting the positive future. Nothing binds a people more tightly together than the need to defend themselves against an external foe. Accordingly, a community’s identity is most clearly discernible when it is defining itself against ‘others’ as a result of a conflict between identities and ideologies. It is through the definition of the people of the Diaspora that we understand everything the people of Palestine is not, and by defining what the Diaspora is not, we know what Palestine is. The use of stigmatizing labels, like â€Å"parasites† and â€Å"not a living culture†, is a way to immediately make the reader aware that here we are dealing with a group distinctly apart from the