The Palmachniks rejected Yiddish in favor of Hebrew and spurned scholarly and entrepreneurial occupations for agricultural and military callings.  For them, the Bible was not a religious guide but a national epic that linked them directly to their ancient land.  They cultivated an identity diametrically opposed to the stereotypical images of the Jews of Europe.  The Palmachniks were physical, practical, unemotional, and self-assured.  They lived by deeds and not by words.  They would not be victims.  In their speech, their dress, and their music, they often emulated the Bedouin, whose culture contrasted so dramatically with the Jewish culture of Europe, but which nevertheless seemed reminiscent of the way of life of Abraham and the other Old Testament patriarchs.

Needless to say, the effort to forge an identity that ignored two thousand years of history was no simple task.  But the problems resident in creating this new identity were not openly scrutinized or explicitly discussed.  The Palmach, it would seem, explored their problem of identity and self-image in the symbolic language of the chizbat.

It was in the period between 1941 and 1948 that the tradition of the chizbat crystallized.  Chizbat is an Arabic word that means “lies.”  The members of the Palmach used the word to designate a type of humorous story that they told.  These stories were told in Hebrew, and included a variety of jokes, anecdotes, and tales that centered on familiar characters in Palmach situations. 

Thus there were chizbat about military training, stealing from the kibbutz, operating against the British police, Arabs, illegal immigration, and playing jokes on the general population.  For the most part, the chizbat remains inaccessible to outsiders.  Its humor encoded a great deal of esoteric linguistic and cultural knowledge.  Many chizbat were Palmach inventions.  Others were well-known tales from oral tradition adapted to new characters, settings, and circumstances.

But the Palmach did not consider all jokes and anecdotes to be chizbat.  The chizbat, in the eyes of the Palmach, had to be somewhat “true.”  Although this sense of truth was never explicitly defined by the members of the Palmach, it did not refer to the recounting of historical fact.  Too many of the chizbat were clear fabrications and concerned events that no one believed actually took place.  A chizbat needed to be true only in a metaphorical sense; it had to strike some basic chord in the Palmach experience.