>> and the Zionist ethos > I find this sort of statement very odd in what otherwise sounds like a lightweight but timeless telling of what they've found. Corr

>> and the Zionist ethos > I find this sort of statement very odd in what otherwise sounds like a lightweight but timeless telling of what they've found. Correct. Times of Israel [1] shares some other quotes and connects this particular purpose statement not to the research but to the response: > Since the study results were publicized last week, there have been hundreds of “interesting reactions” on Hebrew social media and news sites, Stiebel said. [...] “It is interesting how personally people take this. These are events that happened 2,000 years ago! Masada is a kind of mirror into Israeli society – how we look at Masada shows a lot of the political and social changes society has undergone.” Where the quote in question is in the [...] above, with some other remarks. So the comment that this is part of “Israeli DNA and the Zionist ethos” I think is not meant to necessarily denigrate those ideas, but just to comment on the fact that stories are important, we take them as part of our identity, these research results don’t have to threaten the soul of the narrative (i.e. there's no claim that the siege didn't happen or wasn't brutal or didn't last longer than expected), but you do have these kinds of nationalist conservative factions who register even the slightest tweaks to their internal narratives (3 years to 3 months) as personal attacks on their own identities. He's just labeling the group that is most prone to this, but I don't think he means the labeling to be pejorative. (Roughly the Christian equivalent is that I know a lot of folks who use “fundamentalist” and esp “fundie” as pejorative, but I also know a bunch of Christians who bear that title proudly.) [1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/masada-legend-upended-the-romans-came-saw-and-conquered-quickly-and-brutally/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/masada-legend-upended-the-roma...