Abstract: This article centres on stylized commemorative events staged in Israel in 1962 and 1982 to mark, respectively, 80 and 100 years since the consensual beginning of the “First Aliyah,” the first wave of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine. Focusing on protocols of 1962 and 1982 Knesset sessions, commemorative medals, military parades, summer camps, and local commemorations, it shows that multiple completing Zionist parties used the rhetoric of “firstness” to negotiate and redefine primacy in light of the political present. Drawing from scholarship on settler memory in other settings, it also positions the settlement event as not a onetime historical occurrence but a sacralized referent used to frame and justify ongoing settlement and participate in historical erasures.
