Virtually any definition of "culture", in the commonly-used sense, would include such things as academic institutions, literature, the arts, theatre, music, etc. A society is said to have a cultural life when it has these institutions, or amenities, which are lively and in constant, popular use.

"Civilization", I believe, is more fundamental than the above. It is something that cannot be government-subsidized, something that is not necessarily expressed in concrete institutions. If you take a French peasant and a Parisian intellectual and eliminate whatever sets them apart, what's left - i.e., what they have in common - will be the French civilization. I remember reading an anthology of Chinese stories set in villages and small towns in the early 20th century, and being struck by the sense of a deep-rooted civilization in which even the illiterate peasants were steeped, containing traditions and concepts going back untold generations, including beliefs, customs, notions about the world, aesthetic conventions, etc. The same thought occurred to me when I visited Egyptian villages, and it was reinforced by the sight of the villagers and their children spending their free days strolling about the ancient monuments of their pharaonic past. (Amitav Ghosh's book In an Antique Land brings out the sense of continuity in rural Egypt extremely well.) Civilization, then, is something organic, something taken for granted by the people who share in it, who inherit it as their world.

No one can deny that in Israel there is quite a lot of culture - there are many academic institutions, museums and galleries, publishing houses, theatres, orchestras, fiction, poetry, art, creative people and a sophisticated public. What is missing is an underlying civilization. There a brittle, superficial quality about the Hebrew culture, though to the people who are immersed in it it's real enough and constitutes the bulk of what they know and experience culturally. If American and other Western elements keep pouring in, this is pretty well the case in much of the world today. But secular Israeli society is still an artificial creation, even though some of its members have behind them two-three generations in this place. The establishment of Hebrew as the spoken and written language dates back only to the early decades of the century, and the parents of most native-born Israeli adults did not themselves speak Hebrew as their first language. This puts Israel in the category of immigrant countries, and I'll draw comparisons with the US, Canada & Australia further on. We also had "folk songs" invented for us, along with "folk dances" and their costumes. The music was generally borrowed from Russia, along with some other sources, e.g., Yemenite Jewish melodies. A body was appointed - or appointed itself - to supervise the revived language, and continues to do so, making changes in usage, pronunciation and meaning of even common words, and distributing instructions to newspapers and publishing houses, who accept them as though they were laws. But the society as a whole remains a hotch-potch, a strange kaleidoscope, consisting of many pieces which move against one another in various combinations, but do not mesh into a whole. The recent massive Russian immigration and the influx of foreign workers are shaking up the pieces some more.

Some writers, aware of this condition, have attempted to alter it by inventing a thicker, deeper Israeli society. Meir Shalev's novel Roman Russi, which some reviewers compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude, sought to project a picture of an Israeli village as though it had existed for untold generations. The book was pleasant to read, but was as phoney as a 3-dollar bill. That villa ge, if the truth were told, would have been settled no earlier than the 1920s or '30s, on land acquired from Arabs, and the old folk in the novel were not Hebrew-spe@king old Israeli peasants, as depicted, but Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who had transplanted themselves physically and mentally to the nascent Zionist reality. So the charming novel was essentially bogus. Other novelists have tried to create similar images: Amos Oz in Black Box invented a kind of Israeli landed gentry, and so did Binyamin Tammuz in Minotaur. There are probably many other examples that I don't know about. By contrast, Hanoch Levin and a few other writers and dramatists tackled the real stuff of Israeli society, though focusing on its urban Ashkenazi side. The only Jewish society in Israel which may be said to have a civilization is the orthodox community. It hasn't any culture - there are none of the above-listed manifestations of culture in any of the orthodox communities - but they do have a civilization, in the most organic, deeply-rooted, unquestioned form. They need not fear literary reviews of their writings, visual arts they have none, their music is never new, their festivals and celebrations are as repetitive and familiar as the seasons, their moral values and social customs are taken for granted. The greatest innovation in their world might be a new kind of wig for orthodox women - provided it receives the sanction of the rabbis. This civilization, which is very old and far-flung - much the same customs and mores prevail wherever there are observant Jews [see the new French film about the Jewish garment district in Paris!] - may not be especially attractive, but it is solid as a rock. There is also in this country another civilization, an autochtonous one, that of the Palestinian Arab population. It is likewise a very old civilization, organic and deeply footed. It includes some variants, chiefly that of the Christian minority, but it shares basic concepts and mores with the vast Moslem/Arab world. Here too there is very little cultural life, in part because Arab society in Palestine/Israel has been repressed and deprived of amenities by the dominant power. But it doesn't need concert halls and galleries to be un@st@bly a civilization. Comparisons with immigrant societies are very revealing. In the United States, the immigrant society par excellence, the foundations were laid by the original English settlers, who imported their civilization from the old country, lock, stock and barrel. Language, religion, mores, customs, everything derived from the British Isles, and only slowly did various environmental adaptations creep in. en other ethnic groups be gan to pour in, they had to fit in with the established, dominant civilization which had been laid down by the Founding Fathers. Their impact was imperceptible, in part regional - the Yankee differing from the Southerner, etc. - and took a long time to affect the general trend. To this day, despite the marked predominance of the Jewish minority and the contributions made by the Blacks, Italians, Irish, Latinos etc., it is still very much an "Anglo-Saxon" country in terms of its bedrock civilization.
Much the same may be said of Canada (except there the French conimunity brought in its own civilization), Australia and New Zealand. In Latin America, too, the foundations were laid by Spanish or Portuguese settlers who imported their Iberian civilization with them. The presence of Indian elements, whose autochtonous civilization was largely devastated by the conquistadores, affected the outcome, but slowly and (in most places) marginally.
In this country the Zionist settlers had resolutely discarded their Jewish civilization along with their Jewish dialects and orthodox practices. In their place they invented the New Hebrew Man, "Ari Ben-Canaan", "our sweet prickly Sabras", etc. The tenuous Jewish tradition which they retained - chiefly as a network for drawing and holding together the very disparate immigrant Jewish communities - consists today of rather irritating constraints on foods, marriage laws and the like, as well as a calendar of Jewish holidays which the Yishuv leadership and then the State adopted and imposed (largely, though not entirely, for political expediencies). This is probably the one vestige of the genuine civilization, but being isolated from the rest of the organic structure it does not signify very much. Indeed, it suffers the fate of all religions in the secular, westernized world, but whereas elsewhere the underlying civilization can survive the secularization of its traditions, this society lives in an uneasy limbo. The attraction of orthodoxy for certain individuals in secular Israeli society lies in the awareness of its deep-rooted civilization, with the added charm that it is "our own" - meaning, that the road leading to it is wide-open and free of the obstacles of assimilation into an alien civilization, however appealing. Modern Israelis who join the orthodox community feel that they're re-attaching themselves to their "roots", i.e., their grandparents and forefathers, thus gaining a sense of security-in-continuity which is lacking in secular Hebrew society.
In the famous conversation between Ben Gurion and the Hazon-Ish, the latter argued that the secular society must give way to the orthodox, just as on a narrow road an empty cart gives way to a full one. The secular intellectuals were right to protest that their "cart" is full too, perhaps even fuller. However, theirs are not the same kind of goods. The orthodox cart, packed full, trundles around with the same load for centuries, the goods in the secular cart are always subject change, in response to cultural fashions.
In turning its back on Jewish civilization, with its strong diaspora nature, Zionism needed to hark back to the ancient, pre-exilic past. It threw a bridge across 2000 years, linking Bar- Kokhba & Trumpeldor, the Macabees & the Palmah, Massada & the Middle East conflict. It meant skipping over not only two millennia of history, but blurring a good many historical facts about the far side. For example, that the language spoken in Judea in its last two-three centuries was not Hebrew but Aramaic, that the actual dimensions of the Kingdom of Judea were a fraction of the land claimed by the Zionists, that most of the Jews did not live in Judea but all over the Roman empire. But since the purpose was to provide a national mythology to substitute for a local past, historical accuracy mattered little. Skipping over two millennia was also convenient for eliminating the Arabs from the picture. (References to the substantial non-Jewish communities in the country ri ght through the ancient era were played down.)
The "Canaanite" movement took this trend further, to a more romantic extreme. This is not the place to analyze its various features, but it undoubtedly was a concentrated form of the general tendency. Thus, for example, the names given to children changed from the traditional ones - Ha im, Reuven, Rivkah, Hannah, Sarah, Shimeon, Moshe, Esther - to biblical names that had never been current in the diaspora: Omri, Anat, Yoav, Osnat, Ido, Itai, etc. These had the flavour of an earlier pre-exilic era, signifying a break with the intervening millennia and all of the Jewish past. Against this background, the attempts by Yonatan Ratosh and the artist Danziger, for example, to hark back to the pre-Judaic, "Canaanite" culture, the worship of Ashtoreth and Baal etc., can be seen as a logical development. However, beyond romantic imaginings, sufficient perhaps for poetry and visual arts, this could no more fill the place of a bedrock civilization for the Jewish settlers in Palestine than did the mainstream offerings, such as Moshe Shamir's "A King of Flesh and Blood" and the sanctioned cult of Massada and Bar-Kokhba. [The latter at least referred to a more accessible, better documented period.] The "Canaanite" movements may be seen as a vivid illustration of the problems faced by a community torn from its organic civilization and given nothing but mythology to replace it.