Propaganda and Zionist Education

The Jewish National Fund [JNF] is the executive body established by the Zionist movement in 1902 to buy land in Palestine for the Jewish people. Very quickly, however, it became an international organization and soon had branches in many countries throughout the world. One of the tasks of these branches was to mediate between the central office in Jerusalem and the millions of Jews who donated money to buy land. The organization, which is still active throughout the Jewish world, concerned itself with "the marketing of ideology": the dissemination of symbols, knowledge and ideas to the masses of the Jewish people, and converted them into money and real estate property. In the memories of much of World Jewry the JNF is linked with memories of their childhoods and the forming of their identities. The memory was, in fact, fashioned by the Propaganda Department of the JNF which worked through the mass communications media in the Jewish world and made its presence massively felt in the Jewish education networks in many countries. Among the most remembered items are "the Blue Box", the flagship of the organization, and the stamps distributed to schools, which were miniature posters making political declarations. Up until today there has been virtually no research carried out on these aspects of Zionist propaganda which helped to fashion this collective memory and left its mark upon Jewish culture in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Yoram Bar-Gal is Professor of Geography at Haifa University in Israel.