Flag-waving: is it Only for Certain Political Camps?

Earlier in the week, I came across a blog post on an Israeli English-language news site that got me to thinking about expressions of love of country.

Flag-waving:  it's for everybody!

As you may know, yesterday Israel celebrated Yom Atzmaut:  her Independence Day.  But this wasn't just any Yom Atzmaut; this was the celebration of 70 years of the State of Israel.  We love the symmetry of round numbers, so 70 Years seems much more impressive than 69, just as 100 Years (Halvai!) will seem far more impressive than 99.  So, while every Yom Atzmaut comes with a communal joy and celebration, this one in particular was pushed a particularly auspicious occasion.  Israel, like all other countries in the world, finds herself rent by deep divisions among her citizens, in matters related to political philosophy, religion, and ethnicity.  But Yom Atzmaut provides an occasion to transcend those divisions and celebrate together the enduring health and accomplishments of the Israeli nation.

Or, so I thought.

The blog post was by Zimra Vigoda, a Hungarian-born, New York-raised, olah to Israel of 24 years.  Left-of-center politically, Ms. Vigoda wrote about how she recently decided to reclaim the Israeli flag as the symbol of her version of the ideal Israel, rather than ceding it, as she had for some time, to the Right Wing as their symbol.  You can find her blog post here:  http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/reclaiming-the-flag/

I've never been much of a flag-waver - not of the Israeli flag nor of Old Glory, the US flag.  The latter might seem counter-intuitive regarding me, since I served 26 years on active duty in the armed forces of the USA.  Over the years, I took part in many patriotic ceremonies in my official capacity, and I never begrudged the time and energy devoted to such expressions.  But in my private life, I was never one to display the flag and make outward expressions of patriotism.  I don't really know why, although perhaps my having come of age in the 1960's and 70's, and being turned off by the 'love it or leave it' mentality of some self-styled flag-waving patriots, influenced me in this regard.  Besides, that, expressions like flag-waving seemed rather empty to me as they require almost no accompanying commitment.  

Later in life, after my retirement from the military, I began to see that for many of those with a distaste for waving the flag, at the root of that distaste is a deep ambivalence toward, rather than love of, their country.  In reaction to this, I did  begin to do some tentative flag-waving; I took the flag I'd been presented upon retiring from the US Air Force and posted it beside the front door to my home in Colorado, and I took to wearing, at times, an American flag pin.  I decided to dip my toe into the sea of patriotic expression, and try to drop my ambivalence over being publicly associated with the notion of unashamed, and unconditional, love of country.

The Hebrew translates as:  After 70 Years...There's What
to be Proud of.  This was the official theme of the celebrations
of Israeli Independence Day this year.

As there, so too here.  In Israel, as in the USA, there seems to be an ambivalence toward waving the flag and other unbridled expressions of patriotism in certain ideological sectors.  Ms. Vigoda seems to think that this is the Right's fault, although I think that it's really her own - perhaps she thought that, if something is a cherished symbol of an ideological camp that she finds disagreeable, then she couldn't possibly embrace the same symbol.  But her blog post is about how, challenged inadvertently and innocently by her young daughter's eyes, she decided to embrace the flag by assigning her own meaning to the symbol.

This is not a criticism of Ms. Vigoda's post:  quite the opposite.  All parties who cherish what a symbol means - what if means for them - should embrace that symbol and not cede it to a camp, with which they disagree.  For that reason, I have sometimes displayed a US flag in recent years.  And for the same reason, the tears well up when I see the Israeli flag and sing Hatikva.

Happy Anniversary, State of Israel!