Two weeks before Israel's 60th anniversary the House and Senate voted unanimously to pass resolutions honoring "the founding of the modern State of Israel" and "reaffirming the bonds of close friendship and cooperation between the United States and Israel." Before the House vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi weighed in on the deliberations saying, "I urge our colleagues to speak with one voice, and support this resolution recognizing the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel. In doing so, we not only commend Israel, we also bring luster to this House by associating ourselves with that great state of Israel." To further commemorate Israel's anniversary, Pelosi reserved time throughout the month of June for a weekly series of floor speeches.

Israel Independence Day has been celebrated within Jewish communities in the United States since Israel was founded. Traditionally the celebrations were organized by synagogues or Hebrew schools. Children would sing Ha'Tikvah, the Israeli national anthem, and read scriptures on the Promised Land. But these days the anniversaries are geared toward the broader public, making headlines in places where there are large Jewish communities, but also in areas where one would be hard-pressed to find a single person identifying as Jewish. Not only are the anniversaries endorsed by celebrities and political committees (this year's "National Committee" includes former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the three presidential frontrunners, and all living secretaries of state), but the organizers offer a dizzying array of festivities, requiring careful planning by those hoping to partake in all the revelry.

Israel Independence Day falls on May 8 this year, but in the US the festivities run from early April through the beginning of June. With all the events going on around the country, have you planned how you will celebrate Israeli independence?

Mark Your Calendar

If you really had your act together, you could have booked a trip to the Holy Land with Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel (CUFI) tour. Scheduled for ten days in early April, the Celebrate Jerusalem tour featured a Night to Honor Jerusalem, a Middle East Intelligence Briefing, a luncheon at the Jerusalem Convention Center, a Jerusalem Unity Rally Walk, and a "special CUFI salute" to Israel's 60th anniversary. Best of all, you would have gotten to hear Hagee's rallying speech, in which he announced his pledge of $6 million for Israeli causes (mostly settlement-related) and declared that ''Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban."

For those who missed the Hagee tour, not to worry. You can get a taste of Israel from the comfort of your own suburb. If you live in north Jersey, jaunt on over to Teaneck, where West Englewood Avenue will double as Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street, featuring "wonderful vendors, delicious food and fabulous music."

If you live in Atlanta, you get to see all the major Israeli cities right in Zaban Park with the "re-creation" of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, the Negev, Sefat and Haifa. The Atlanta events promise "interactive family activities, such as camel rides, rowing across the Dead Sea, and climbing Masada."

If you prefer to celebrate in more traditional ways –with parades, marching bands and fireworks– there is bound to be a festival in your vicinity. Just google "Israel@60" and the name of your town.

The Israel Hobby

But there's far more on offer.

If you're a poetry or film buff, drop by an Israel@60 reading or film festival. If you're a bookworm, join a 60th birthday book club. If you're a cyclist, register for a 5k, 10k or 60k "Ride with Israel@60" race. If you like to pamper yourself, try Dead Sea Spa Days. If you're an art lover, why not amble into an exhibit commemorating Israeli independence? If you enjoy cooking classes, sign up for a pita-making or Israeli hors d'œuvre class.

Not into falafel? Other options beckon.

If you're an American Idol addict, check out the Israeli Idol Competition. If The Amazing Race is more your thing, run in the 2nd Annual Amazing Israel Race. If you prefer to learn a new language, launch a "Café Ivrit" club and commit to speaking 60 minutes of Hebrew each month to honor Israel's 60-year history. If you're a budding filmmaker, try your luck in the Israel@60 video contest. If you're a famous blogger, well, you guessed it: Blog til you drop on 60bloggers.com. (Or mark your personal blog with the Israel@60 icon.)

If you live in New York or Los Angeles, take in an Israel@60 show at Radio City Music Hall or the Kodak Theater. If you're an Indiana Jones-type, go on an Israel@60 archaeological dig, or watch one on video. If all this sounds too tame, put on your citizen-journalist hat and go flightseeing on the "Intellicopter," where reporters get to learn everything there is to know about Israel in a guided helicopter tour.

With so much going on, you won't even have time to wonder why we're seeing such a proliferation of festivities.

The Sellabrations

In economic terms, you could say that Israel Independence Day has "market dominance." When most people think of Israel Independence Day –if they contemplate it at all– they think of it in terms of Israel's national narrative.

But it looks like Israel Independence Day may be losing some of its market share. Unable to market the brand to at least two demographics (Muslim and Arab Americans) and losing market share to a generation transformed by a deeper understanding of military occupation (whether in Palestine, Iraq or Tibet), a quality of desperation seems to underlie the latest efforts to sell the holiday.

While advocates of Israel Independence Day still market the holiday to the country as a whole, they're increasingly turning to niche markets like health & wellness and adventure travel to achieve their main objective: market saturation.

But is it working?

According to Marc Ellis, a Jewish theologian and professor of American and Jewish Studies, the festivities that mark Israel's anniversaries have little public support in the US, even in the Jewish community: "Look at what happened with Israel's 50th. They planned a lot of things, but it just sort of fizzled. This is typically what happens."

Ellis thinks the celebrations fizzle for a variety of reasons. First, despite the attempts to make it seem otherwise, Israel isn't a top priority for most Americans, even Jewish Americans. Opinion polls, including one recently commissioned by a prominent Israel advocacy group, confirm this. (News flash for MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who recently surmised that Israel is the "one key concern" of Jewish voters.)

But Israel's anniversaries fizzle for other reasons, as well. The most obvious is that many people don't see much to celebrate. Blaring Kool & the Gang as loud as you can won't block out the roar of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. And if the myriad celebrations have anything in common –aside from their glorification of Israel– it is that they all downplay the decades-long war. The party planners seem to think they can erase the image of Israel as it really is by evoking the Israel of legend and lore. (If you google "Israel" and "make the desert bloom" you'll see how often they try.)

But the edifice of legend is cracking. M.J. Rosenberg, director of the Israel Policy Forum, recently wrote about the reluctance of young Jewish Americans to embrace the Israel of lore, saying in a newsletter that "The Internet generation is not into tired organizational talking points which mix facts and myths in equal measure." Rosenberg argues that, "you can't defend the occupation and sell Israel at the same time."

For those trying to sell Israel to the public, opinion polls show that, while Americans tend to sympathize more with Israelis, most people believe that Israelis and Palestinians share the blame for their conflict –along with the United States. A BBC World Service Poll released in early April describes the American public as "nearly evenly divided" in their opinions on Israel. This doesn't jibe with a narrative that casts Israelis as innocent transplants who got stuck in a bad neighborhood, but are thriving just the same.

The frenzy around Israel Independence Day can be seen as an attempt to freeze history back to 1948 when the public's support of Israel was mostly unequivocal.

People vs. Projects

There is a new ethos now: If you feel for one side, you should feel for the other. Those who subscribe to this view condemn all violence against innocent civilians. They put the needs of the people, Israelis and Palestinians, before everything else. You could call them the People-First Movement.

The advocates of this movement, many of whom are American Jews and Israelis, believe that the official Israeli story has to be outsold by a new narrative. This means, first, acknowledging all that happened in 1948, including al-nakba: the organized killings of Palestinians, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, and the expulsion of over seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their land. And it means looking at the US-backed occupation, the fact that Israel commands an army, and all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank live under the reach of Israeli power.

The most striking thing about this movement is how grassroots it is. Although it has a growing DC contingent, the movement is comprised mainly of peace activists, faith-based organizations, and campus groups: Which means it doesn't get much attention from the press. Even so, it has certain people worried, and they have mounted a Herculean effort to regain control –with support from the political and religious establishment, evangelical Christian groups like CUFI and the Joshua Fund, lobbies like AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, and newer organizations like the Israel Project, the David Project, and the Solomon Project. You might well call this the Project-First Movement. And it has well-funded campus arms like Stand With Us, Campus Watch, and the Israel On Campus Coalition.

The Project-First Movement has begun to use niche marketing to attract narrower and narrower cross-sections of the American public. The goal is to enshrine ever more abstracted conceptions of Israel in the minds of key constituencies, increasingly on the right.

For these activists, the state of Israel comes first –or so they say. And just as they direct many of their appeals to the most extreme right-wing constituencies in America, they are increasingly aligned with the most hawkish Israeli politicians.

The movement has a grassroots following (and history), but its core organizations tend to be centralized with munificent funding for PR. They administer surveys, conduct focus groups, implement dial testing, and do interviews to fine-tune their campaigns. This might explain why the PR initiatives behind Israel Independence Day tend to be very sophisticated, even if their output seems relatively uninspired.

The Marketing Wars

There is a clear connection between public discourse and policy. Majority support of the status quo has to be maintained if Americans will continue to allow $3 billion of their tax dollars to be allocated annually to Israeli military aid. (And up to $3 billion more in loan guarantees.) And what people hear about Israel, Palestine, and US policy in the region shapes how they think.

Public discourse affects policy in more indirect ways, as well. If the root causes of a conflict are obscured, or if one side is characterized as inherently violent and irrational, then efforts to negotiate a fair resolution will be undermined. (And a people's right to protection under international law will be swept aside.) In a forthcoming book, Challenging Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism, international law expert Tom Farer writes that Israel "has championed the view that groups and governments employing terrorist means either have non-negotiable ends or should at least be treated as if they had them, the view that negotiations or even the examination of the substantive claims such groups make merely feeds the terrorist appetite." The Project-First Movement promotes this narrative above all others, leaving pro-peace policy initiatives dead on arrival.

Although the Project-First Movement is succeeding on the political front, and probably will for the foreseeable future, the People-First Movement has been winning some of the most important narrative wars. In the IPF newsletter cited earlier, Rosenberg describes this trend within the Jewish community: "They are losing the campus battle big time….I'm talking about young opinion leaders who are turned off by the occupation and identify Israel with settlers there and neoconservatives like Feith, Perle, and Krauthammer here. They hate the paranoid style in which all dissent from the status quo is deemed anti-Israel or anti-Semitic and, generally, have no use for the mindless emotionalism and ethnic sentimentality that characterize so much of the organized pro-Israel community. As third or fourth generation Americans, they cannot be won over with scare tactics about the Holocaust or Ahmedinejad."

For the Project-First Movement to prevail –within the Jewish community and in the broader society– it needs to succeed in two gargantuan tasks: it has to construct a narrative that perpetually glorifies Israel, and it has to block all counter-narratives so that even questioning its project is unthinkable.

For the People-First Movement to succeed, it has to achieve only one goal: to humanize the conflict. And this is how they do it:

Through events focused on local organizing, public education, and interfaith dialogue. The main orgs here are peace centers, student and faith-based groups, and indy media outlets.

Through non-violent campaigns to end the Israeli occupation and lift the siege of Gaza. These include everything from action alerts and petitions to boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives to fact-finding tours and direct action in the West Bank and Gaza.

Through policy and media work by advocacy groups. A random list (pulled from my inbox) of different kinds of US-based groups includes the US Campaign to End the Occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace (and their MuzzleWatch and StopCaterpillar sites), Electronic Intifada, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Israel Policy Forum, the Palestine Chronicle, Americans for Peace Now, Al Awda, and SUSTAIN (Stop US Tax-funded Aid to Israel NOW).

In the last decade, there has been a surge of activism in the US, Canada and Europe. Omar Baddar, who works with the US Campaign to End the Occupation, explains that "Activism had died down in the 1990s due to the misconception that the "peace process" was working and could achieve something. Once that fell through, and it became obvious that Israel was choosing illegal territorial expansion over peace with the Palestinians, people felt the need to get active on the issue again." Baddar believes the movement is growing because it engages supporters "democratically and on many different levels."

The commemorations around 1948 provide a focal point for activists. One community in Philadelphia organized "60 Days for 60 Years," a series of events and actions to mobilize support for ending the occupation. Other anniversary events focus attention on specific campaigns like selective divestment initiatives targeting companies that are involved with the occupation.

Several organizations plan cross-country speaking tours to coincide with the anniversary. I met Marc Ellis, the Jewish theologian referenced earlier, before a lecture on Jewish activism against the occupation. He took part in a week of events at the University of Colorado commemorating the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre.

The last group I'll mention is an Israeli organization called Zochrot (which means "remembrance" in Hebrew). Its members post signs on the sites of former Palestinian villages destroyed by the IDF, and they distribute maps identifying these sites. To commemorate the events of 1948, activists in Israel and the US have been displaying Zochrot's maps to show how Palestinians have been cleansed from their land.

The Forecast

Sociologists look at holidays as a form of public ritual. Not only do holidays reflect a society's values, but they serve to mold these values. With Israel Independence Day, we see a reflection of America's strategic and cultural alliance with Israel. But we also see the outlines of a continuing military project: A campaign to sanitize Israel's history and legitimize its aggression against the Palestinians.

On April 24, The Washington Post reported on the Bush Administration's "secret" agreement with Israel to support settlement expansion in the West Bank. But it's no secret that, even since the Annapolis talks in November, the Israeli government has authorized a surge of settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And it's no secret that the US backs virtually all of Israel's policies: its settlements and separation wall, its occupation and siege –policies that have strangled the Palestinian people and resulted in many lost lives on both sides. Because Project-First organizations promote these policies, and thwart people's desire for peace, they are essentially a movement without a people, representing the needs of no one but a narrow fringe of ideologues and PR professionals.

But the peace movement is growing, and it's drawing support from people across the country who think that two safe and viable nations will best serve the Israeli and Palestinian people. Now that would truly be something to celebrate.

Linda Mamoun contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.