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Journalism of Courage
Israel has been rather busy over the past 60 years establishing the basics of a nation-state, so it8217;s understandable that the country has taken until May 29 of this year to indulge in one of nation-statehood8217;s finest luxuries: Choosing a national bird.
Israel is heaven for people who love birds8230; The biodiversity only added to the difficulty of choosing a single bird to represent the whole country. The concept of a bird representing a country is inherently ridiculous. Birds mock borders. They are the epitome of statelessness. Which means that Israel has had to pick a representative stateless animal for a state created by one stateless people and that rendered another people stateless. The decision-making process has been typically Israeli, democratic but fragmented and confusing. A panel of Israeli ornithologists whittled the list down to 10 species, the only requirement being that the birds nest in Israel.
But the winner, declared on May 29, was the hoopoe, a bird with almost too much symbolic meaning, even for Israel. In Greek mythology the tyrant Tereus, after cutting out his wife8217;s tongue and unwittingly banqueting on the corpse of his son, was changed by the gods into the hoopoe.
Excerpted from Stephen Marche8217;s 8216;Flight of Fancy8217; in The New Republic
