Mount Herzl
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It is also the burial place of three of Israel's prime ministers:
- Levi Eshkol who led Israel during its Six Day War victory in 1967
- Israel's only woman prime minister Golda Meir
- Israel's only assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (and his wife Leah Rabin, a well-known peace activist in her own right).
Israel's main military cemetery is located in the area around Mount Herzl, and fallen soldiers who had shown special merit or bravery often get buried there (roughly analoguous to Arlington National Cemetery in the US). However, the soldier's parents can ask for him or her to be buried closer to their home instead, and their wishes are invariably respected.
It is a place that is generally venerated by modern Israelis, and is the focal point of commemorative and celebratory proceedings related to the State of Israel.
It is officially described: ''"In 1903 Theodor Herzl wrote in his will: "I wish to be buried in a metal coffin next to my father, and to remain there until the Jewish people will transfer my remains to Eretz Israel. The coffins of my father, my sister Pauline, and of my close relatives who will have died until then will also be transferred there."
Herzl died a year later and was interred in Vienna. Forty-five years later, in 1949, Herzl's remains and those of his relatives were brought to Israel and reinterred in a burial site in Jerusalem, whose location had been determined by a special state commission. Sixty-three entries were submitted in the competition for the design of the national pantheon. Joseph Klarwein's proposal was chosen, and the site was accordingly laid out in 1951. From then on, Mount Herzl has served as the national cemetery, where Zionist leaders, the presidents of Israel, prime ministers, and Speakers of the Knesset are laid to rest. On the northern slope of Mount Herzl is the military cemetery of Jerusalem, and to the west is Yad Vashem, which commemorates the Holocaust. These three sites together comprise Har Hazikaron (the Mount of Memory)... To the east rises the Mount of Olives, where Jews have been buried for the past three thousand years. Between these two poles, two other peaks mark the Jerusalem skyline: Mount Moriah, the religious focal point of the city, where the Temple stood; and Givat Ram, Israel's center of government...The tour of Mount Herzl is a visit to a cemetery and a memorial site."'' [link]
Some of Israel's "New Historians", such as Dr. Ilan Pappé of Haifa University, have since the 1980's criticised the above and similar descriptions as being "one-sided" and "designed to oblitrate the past of the land". Dr. Pappé pointed out, for example, that a location easily visible from Mount Herzl - but never mentioned in any official document - is the site of the former Palestinian village Deir Yassin, whose conquest and destruction by Israeli troops in April 1948 was accompanied by an infamous massacre.
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