The short answer might be: happily not, in as much as the Roman army's siege of the Masada fortress concerned not representative Jews and Jewish heros but mostly outcasts - as indicated by the below-summarized research of Nachman Ben-Yehuda and others. Yet, there remain important uncertainties of a generally human nature. And given their possible implications for others, they seem worth pondering. For they have to do with what may be called herd or stampede effects, and outgrowths of religious beliefs, teachings and manifest organizational skills which, in critical situations, might not only fail but stand in the way for subjective superiority, even invincibility impulses not to blind even decision-makers here and there.

Masada "is shorthand for describing a sort of 'they'll never take us alive' attitude. The term 'Masada complex' is part of a modern-day Israeli parlance. The story of the siege that took place here has been adopted as a symbol for the modern Jewish state. Israeli school-children visit the area as part of their curriculum and some Israeli Defense Force (IDF) units hold their swearing-in ceremonies here, replete with the oath that 'Masada shall not fall again'".
 

Sidney Slivko, "The Masada Complex", 17 Mar 1999

    "In about 1963 the expressions "Masada Complex" and "Masada Syndrome" began to be used to describe the attitude that Israel must face on its own insurmountable odds. Discussion about the Masada Complex reached a fever pitch during the early 1970s when the American government tried to convince the intransigent Golda Meir to cooperate with the Egyptians. ... Secretary of State Rogers used the expression and it appeared at least twice in Newsweek, once by the columnist Stewart Alsop, to whom Meir responded: "You say that we have a Masada complex. . . It is true we do have a Masada complex. We have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex."
    To this the Hebrew literary critic Robert Alter responded, "Torchlit military ceremonies on top of Masada are, I fear, a literal and dubious translation into public life of a literary metaphor and a Prime Minister's subsuming Holocaust, pogroms, and Israel's present state of siege under the rubric of Masada might be the kind of hangover from poetry that could befuddle thinking on urgent political issues." And the Israeli Historian Benjamin Kedar, wrote in a similar vein: "But this is a false analogy for two reasons. The bitterest fate that the people of Masada could have expected was far better than that awaiting the Ghetto rebels. Vespasian, Titus and Silva, after all, were not attempting to exterminate a people but to crush a revolt . . . There can be no doubt that the writer of the Book of Josippon is closer to Mordechai Anielewicz of the Warsaw Ghetto and to Danny Masss of the thirty-five who fell in 1948 on their way to Gush Etzion, rather than to Eleazar ben Yair . . .. The rock on the shore of the Dead Sea is a dead end, a cul-de-sac, a dramatic curtain-fall. He who tells his soldiers of the armored corps at the swearing-in ceremony on the heights of Masada that it is owning to the heroism of the fighers of Masada that we are here today, is both deluding himself and deluding others."

Milton Viorst, "The Masada Complex - Zionist and Islamic Ideas and the Mideast Crisis", Alicia Patterson Foundation, 1979

"Many Israelis these days speak, with some mixture of respect and dismay, of the nation's "Masada complex". I think they use the term to mean a fight-to-the-death courage as the enemy closes in around them. But there is a hint in the term that Israel, touched by some hysteria, is setting events on a course that makes a Masada-like outcome nearly inevitable. No doubt there is something pure, heroic, even incorruptible about Masada, and about the current Judaic resurgence. But as long as this spirit governs Israel it is difficult to see how there can be peace. Gaining the West Bank may be a Biblical imperative but Masada, too, is a part of Jewish history, and I am not alone in wondering whether there is not some deep compulsion in the Jewish soul to re-live them both again."

Robert Alter, "The Masada Complex", Commentary Magazine, July 1973

"It may seem surprising that an archaeological site should provide the focus of debate on basic issues of national policy, but given the peculiarity of Israel's location in history and geography, there is a certain appropriateness in that odd link between ancient events and modern politics.
...To every man his own symbol in the making of a past, and so Yadin can blandly assert that the Zealots "elevated Masada to an undying symbol which has stirred hearts throughout the last nineteen centuries...
...In this context, the recollection of Masada is less an inspiring model than an obfuscating obsession, a complex that could pervert moral criteria.
...Besides, Josephus, who seems to have tricked thirtynine fellow soldiers at the fall of Jotapata into killing one another while he cunningly preserved his own life, might have had reason to repair his damaged public image by fabricating a large-scale suicide pact at Masada in which ... See her articles in the Jewish Spectator, "Masada, Josephus, and Yadin" (October 1967) and "Masada Re-visited" (December 1969)...
...History is an intellectual endeavor that seeks to understand the endlessly complicated, ambiguous, shifting facts of what men and women through the ages have actually done, how social change has come about...
...A characteristic strength of the poetic imagination is its ability to pursue the possibilities of present things to the limits of their most extreme realization: the world can be seen in the glaring light of ultimacy, its shadows blacker, its bright surfaces blinding, everything tremulous with a terrible intensity that is only intimated in the realm of ordinary experience...
...We do have a Masada complex...
...In this respect as in others, Israel, by virtue of the very anomalies through which it came into being, must live within the tensions of a paradox...
...Israel has now amply demonstrated its capability to conduct at will pinpoint strikes against terrorist headquarters within Arab territory, to carry out large-scale retaliatory raids by air, land, and sea...
...Kedar comments incisively on this danger: It is desirable that a political leader have a sense of history...
...Kedar begins by characterizing Masada as an Israeli "myth, obsession [in the Hebrew, dybbuk], complex," and he goes on to propose that the symbol of Masada has had such a powerful claim on Israeli consciousness especially because of the Holocaust..."

"Netenyahu and the Masada Complex", Fateh online, editorial

    "Israel will be committing suicide if it withdraws from occupied land, according to Netenyahu. In saying this, he expresses clearly his position towards the entire peace process. Nor does he leave any doubt as to where he stands on the Declaration of Principles known as the Oslo Accord. In his view, that agreement was an attempt to push Israelis toward the rock of Masada to commit collective suicide; and as the protector of Israel, Netenyahu will reject that option.
    If Netenyahu, and other Israelis, are truly afraid, what is the true reason for their fear? Is it fear of an individual "suicide" -- the killing of Jew by Jew, as in the assassination of Rabin? Or is it fear of a collective suicide undertaken in order to prevent an even worse fate, as at Masada? Or is it fear of nothing more than that Netenyahu will lose his position as head of the Israeli government?
    Israeli psychologist Zeveet Abramson has offered an analysis which suggests the last possibility is the real one  ["Like Sara, like Netenyahu", Ma’ariv, Dec. 14, 1997]"

Uri Avnery, "Immortal heroes of Jenin", The Guardian, April 16, 2002

"In the small refugee camp near Jenin, a group of Palestinian fighters from all the organisations gathered for a battle of defence that will be enshrined forever in the hearts of all Arabs. This is the Palestinian Massada, as an Israeli officer called it, alluding to the legendary stand of the remnants of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome in 71 AD. ... A primitive military robot, who sees everything in terms of fire power and body counts, will not understand this. But Napoleon, a military genius, said that in war, moral considerations account for three quarters, and the balance of force for the other quarter."

Speech by Yasser Arafat
United Nations General Assembly, New York 13 november 1974

    "In my formal capacity as Chairrnan of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leader of the Palestinian revolution 1 proclaim before you that when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination.
    In my formal capacity as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leader of the Palestinian revolution I call upon Jews to turn away one by on from the illusory promises made to them by Zionist ideology and Israeli leader ship. They are offering Jews perpetual bloodshed endless war and continuous thraldom.
    We invite them to emerge from their moral isolation into a more open realm of free choice, far from their present leadership’s efforts to implant in them a Massada complex.
    We offer them the most generous solution, that we might live together in a framework of just peace in Our democratic Palestine."
 

"In the past, Israeli leaders often refused to deny the nuclear facts. And the Israelis used to say or think that Israel will use nuclear bombs only in a situation in which the existence of the country will be at stake. Some defined it as 'Massada Complex', a sort of a national suicide."

Scott Ritter, former Chief Weapons Inspector, Concealment Unit, United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), 1991-1998, interviewed by Nathaniel Hurd, The Boston Research Group, 27 April 2000

"But the chemical weapons were always kept in rear area depots and were never forward deployed to the troops.  Never.  The only things that were forward-deployed to the troops were conventional artillery munitions.  The Iraqis would not have released that chemical agent unless Iraq was attacked with weapons of mass destruction or the leader was eliminated.  In that case all bets are off.  Iraq goes out in a Massada complex.  “We’re just going to kill everybody and we’re going to die and it’s going to be a big blaze of glory.”  That’s Iraq’s deterrence.  Here are the weapons of mass destruction.  Take out our leadership and we’ll take everybody out with us."

    "A final point in classification is that although the term suicide is usually reserved for individual self-destruction (or specific types of murder followed by individual suicide, such as those committed by suicide bombers), occasionally there are mass suicides, such as those at Masada in Roman occupied Israel and more recently in Jonestown, Guyana, and mass suicides involving the Order of the Solar Temple, Heavens Gate, and the Uganda Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments.^10
10 Mancinelli WR. Mass suicide: historical and psychodynamic considerations.  Suicide Life Threat Behav 2002; 32: 91-100. [PubMed]"
 

"The Paranoid Streak
How often one hears these sentences in the Balkan in general and in Serbia, in particular: "The whole world is against us", "No one can understand us", "It is all so complicated that it cannot be comprehended nor explained". Theories of conspiracy share venue with superstitions and plangent grievances. A siege mentality prevails and the "Massada Complex" is an ingredient of decision making."
 

    "... the tosafists' silence about the permissibility of the 1096 martyrdoms may fairly be construed as disapproval, Haym Soloveitchick has provided the basis for the opposite conclusion, namely, that the tosafists were strongly committed to the religious behavior of the German-Franco Jewish community of which they were a part – a self-image unique to the medieval Ashkenazic community. Tosafist silence in these circumstances may therefore be construed as tacit approval of the new martyrdoms – at least with respect to the suicides - based on an empathy and an identification with them, and a deep religious conviction, notwithstanding the absence of formal halakhic authorization, that the acts of martyrdom of a pious community could not and should not be challenged. Further support for this conclusion arises from the silent acquiescence of the tosafists in the incorporation in the qinot liturgy for Tish`a be-Av of references to the active martyrdoms of 1096, and the explicit recommendation of suicide by an English tosafist to the martyrs of York, England in the twelfth century.^18
18Kinot for the Ninth of Av, tr. and ann. Abraham Rosenfeld (New York: Judaica Press, 1979), pp. 138-42, 148-9, and especially 168-72. A Christian commentator traced the Jewish suicides in 1190 to an innate tendency going back to Masada; Barrie Dobson, "The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered," Jewish Culture and History (Winter 2000):10. On the tosafist empathy with the martyrs, see Soloveitchik, "Religious Law." On the precedence given to minhag in Ashkenazi Judaism, see Israel Ta-Shma, Minhag Ashkenaz ha-Qadmon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), pp. 86-7, 98."

Diane Wudel, "Suasion and Suicide: Josephus, Masada and the Ambiguities of Ancient Rhetoric", Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Laval University, Québec
May 25, 2001

    "In Josephus' telling of the climactic events at Masada, he portrays Eleazar son of Yair as an orator, delivering not one but two consecutive speeches urging his followers to embrace voluntary death. The first speech fails; the second, however, succeeds even before it concludes, as its hearers, "overpowered by some uncontrollable impulse," hasten to act on their "passion" to slaughter their wives, their children, and themselves. I argue that in the construction of these two speeches and the narrative depiction of this speaker and his audience, Josephus is trading on views of persuasion current in his time--views articulated by figures such as Demetrius, Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus. Eleazar's two speeches, for instance, are stylistically differentiated in ways that critics of the Imperial Age sought to describe. Differences in style are linked, then, to stark questions of what kind of power a speaker may exert over hearers. And finally, ancient critical questions of how one judges speeches, speakers, and audiences bear directly on the question of how Josephus' reader is to respond to the ambiguities of the Sicarii rhetoric of suicide."

Henry Ebel, "The Psychohistory of an Enduring National Identity", Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Spring 1985 (reproduced in: "Jews, Germans and Other Disasters", Bias Bok, 2004)

    "What is so striking about the major theme in Hilberg’s book is that it offers us something very close to a comprehensive psychohistory of “the Jews” – that is, of all of those who have voluntarily considered themselves, over a period of at least two thousand years, as belonging to a specifically Jewish ”group.” Even more dramatically, he has divided this group into two dialectically?linked segments:
     (1) All of those living on Palestinian soil, whether they were living there in 66 A.D., 132 A.D., or 1948 A.D., these being Jews capable of significant and even ferocious levels of “resistance.”
    (2) All of those living in the so-called Diaspora, whether they were living outside of Palestine in the first century A.D., or the 15th, or the 20th – these being Jews just as congenitally incapable of resistance.
    In the closing pages of his book, Hilberg reaffirms this “psychograph” of the Jewish people by observing, with respect to those who live in the Diaspora, that

there has been no radical change in the Jewish position. The Jewish leadership has been retained. Its thinking has been perpetuated. In all the post?war Jewish activities we can see only an intensification of Jewry’s two traditional reactions, the appeal and the tendency to flight. (p. 763)

    The fact that flight is likely, now, to be flight to Israel does not, in Hilberg’s opinion, change the essential nature of his dialectical portrait of Jewish group?identity.
    I have suggested that Hilberg is giving a psychohistorical portrait of the ”group” that identifies itself as Jewish because of the very nature of the task that he has set himself in The Destruction of the European Jews. He is talking about people who define themselves not within the ordinary context of daily human life but, by definition, within a life-and-death drama. For a minority living in a continuously hostile Christian environment, being “Jewish” and the possibility of premature death were synonymous. What Hilberg appears to be saying is that Diaspora Jews defined themselves as people incapable of offering resistance to persecution, and based the very essence of their “national existence” around the principles of evasion and accommodation – continuous group-masochism in the service of physical survival.
    At the other extreme, according to Hilberg, are the Jews on Palestinian soil who willingly took up arms against the entire Roman Empire not once but twice in the opening centuries A.D.: in 66?70 A.D. (to which must be added the fall of Masada in 73), and again under Bar-Kosiba (Bar-Kochba) in 132-135 A.D.
    The Diaspora Jews have in common, and transmit to their progeny, the defining trait of being unable to express their hatred of oppression in an overt form.
    Those who took up arms against the Romans, however – opponents of rather different magnitude, let it be noted that they defeated the Arabs in 1948 – would not permit the certainty of defeat to affect their desire to “resist.”
    One of the questions I would like to pose, on the basis of this presentation of Hilberg’s views, is whether those views make any kind of sense. Are there in fact two “Jewish peoples”? If so, how is it that one of them disappeared after 135 A.D. and reappeared only as the middle of the 20th century approached? If not, how can we account for the simultaneous existence, under the rubric of “Jew,” of passive cringers and active supermen?"

Nachman Ben-Yehuda, "The Masada Myth", Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem:

"Masada was part of a much larger Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire between the years 66-73. That revolt ended in disaster and in bitter defeat for the Jews. Masada was only the final defeat in the much larger suppression of that revolt.
    Different ideological groups of Jews existed during the time of the revolt. Of those, four are singled out as important. It appears that the two most relevant groups are the Sicarii, and much more so, the Zealots who apparently carried the main burden of the revolt. Josephus makes a clear distinction between these two groups. Throughout Josephus' books, the connection between the Zealots and the Sicarii is not always entirely clear, but when Josephus discusses Masada his use of the word "Sicarii" to describe the Jewish rebels there is quite consistent. ...
    The Sicarii in Jerusalem were involved in so much terrorist activity against Jews and others that they were forced to leave the city some time before the Roman siege there began. They fled to Masada. There, under the leadership/command of Eleazar Ben-Yair (a "tyrant" in Josephus' terminology) they remained (perhaps with some non-Sicarii who may have joined them) until the bitter end when most of them agreed to kill one another.
    While the Sicarii were in Masada, it is clear that they raided nearby villages. One of the "peaks" of these raids was the attack on Ein-gedi. According to Josephus, the Sicarii on Masada attacked Ein- gedi in the following ferocious manner:
"...they came down by night, without being discovered... and overran a small city called Engaddi: - in which expedition they prevented those citizens that could have stopped them, before they could arm themselves and fight them. They also dispersed them, and cast them out of the city. As for such that could not run away, being women and children, they slew of them above seven hundred" (p. 537).
    Afterward, the Sicarii raiders carried all the food supplies from Ein- gedi to Masada." (p.2)
    "Most researchers seem to accept that the siege and fall of Masada only took a few months—Probably from the winter of 72/73 A.D. until the following spring—A matter of 4-6 (maybe 8) months." (p.3)

    "We must remind ourselves at this point that there are plenty of historical examples of real, remarkable and heroic "fighting to the last." For example: Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans at the pass of Thermopylae; the last stand at the Alamo; the readiness of the American commander of the101st Airborne Division in Bastogne to "fight to end" during the German counter-attack in the Ardennes in 1944; the heroic stand of the U.S. Marines on Wake Island in 1941; the Jewish revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto, against all odds and the death of Biblical Samson together with his enemies. Thus, using a strictly Jewish analogy, when the Sicarii were faced with the choice, they selected suicide rather than the destiny of Samson.
        What Josephus has to say about the suicide is that after the Romans entered Masada and discovered the dead bodies: "Nor could they [the Romans] do other than wonder at the courage of their [the Sicarii] resolution, and at the immovable contempt of death which so great a number of them had shown, when they went through with such an action as that was" (p. 603). The absolute resolution and courage of the Sicarii and their act of collective suicide in Masada raised, apparently, much respect and wonder among the Romans and in Josephus Flavius. Indeed, it should. But, the analytic jump from "respect" to "heroism" is not made by Josephus. It was socially constructed. Indeed, elsewhere Josephus describes the Sicarii killing one another as: "Miserable men indeed they were!" (p. 603).
    The unpleasant impression is that the Sicarii on Masada, so adept at raiding nearby villages, were not really good fighters and, in fact, avoided opportunities to fight. Josephus points out, in particular, that Eleazar Ben-Yair had to make two speeches in order to persuade his people to commit that suicide. He even "quotes" those speeches at length. The implication, obviously, is that the Jewish rebels on Masada were originally quite reluctant to commit themselves to collective suicide.
    Josephus states that there were close to a thousand Sicarii on top of Masada. These people were not all warriors. There were women and children there, and perhaps other non-combatants. How many actual fighters were there is unknown. Although Josephus does not state the specific size of the 10th Roman legion, which carried out the siege on Masada, it seems safe to assume that it was probably composed of a minimum of 6,000 soldiers (the estimate found in the literature). However, the size could have reached 10,000 too.
    It is imperative to emphasize that there were seven survivors from the collective suicide. This is an important point because the details about that last night of the Sicarii on Masada were provided by one of the women survivors.
    Thus, when we carefully examine the main ingredients of Josephus's narrative about both the Great Revolt and Masada, a portrait of heroism in Masada is simply not provided. On the contrary. The narrative conveys the story of a doomed (and questionable) revolt, of a majestic failure and destruction of the Second Temple and of Jerusalem, of large-scale massacres of the Jews, of different factions of Jews fighting and killing each other, of collective suicide (an act not viewed favorably by the Jewish faith) by a group of terrorists and assassins whose "fighting spirit" may have been questionable. Moreover, and specifically for Masada, Josephus’s implication is that it was not only the nature of the rebels there that was problematic, but their lack of a fighting spirit too. Josephus implies that the 10th Roman legion came in and put a siege around Masada. That siege was not too long and was not accompanied by any major fighting. When the Romans managed to enter the fortress they found seven survivors and the remains of the Jewish Sicarii (and perhaps some non-Sicarii, too) who had committed collective suicide. This act itself clearly instilled in both the Roman soldiers and Josephus a respect for those rebels.
    From the Roman military perspective, the Masada campaign must have been an insignificant action following a very major war in Judea—a sort of a mop-up operation. It was something the Roman army had to do, but that did not involve anything too special in terms of military strategy or effort. In fact, Shatzman (1993) notes that the Roman siege of Masada was quite standard. Reading Josephus's narrative raises the immediate question of how could such a horrible and questionable story become such a positive symbol?" (p.4)

   "When And Why Was The Masada Mythical Narrative Created?
    It is not too difficult to establish the fact that the Masada mythical narrative was created by secular Zionism. (Religious Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists were, to a very large extent, not part in the creation of the myth. Many even objected fiercely to the myth). It is clear that the Masada mythical narrative began to be created at the turn of the century. It received a big boost in the 1920s. Before he 1920s Masada, as an heroic tale, was used in a debate between two famous secular Zionist ideological leaders (Achad Ha'am and Berdyczewski). In 1923 the excellent Hebrew translation of Josephus by Dr. Simchoni was published. In 1927 Y. Lamdan published his most popular Masada poem. Moreover, two key and powerful secular Zionists who were promoting Masada as a heroic tale, Shmaria Guttman and Prof. Yoseph Klosner, were operating in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
    Clearly, the crystallizing Zionist movement was desperately looking for heroic Jewish tales. It needed these tales for a few reasons:
    To counteract the poisonous European anti-Semitic image of the Jew as non-heroic
    To create a new secular Jewish consciousness and identity
    To establish a strong and unquestionable bonding of the Jews to Palestine (then) and Israel (later).
    The need for this bond became very acute in the early 1940s when the threat of a Nazi invasion of Palestine was imminent (from Rommel's Korpus Afrika). These years saw the crystallization of the Masada mythical narrative in its most powerful form. The creation of the myth then, no doubt, was justified from a functional point of view as it helped many members of the Yishuv to face some truly formidable historical challenges. Thus, the Masada mythical narrative has become a major and important ingredient in shaping the national and personal identity of the new secular and Zionist Jew—proud, rooted in his/her land and willing, indeed able, to fight for this land to the end if necessary. Clearly, the Masada mythical narrative has a strong generational effect for some generations who were influenced by it the most (including that of the author). This identity connection is exactly the element that explains the negative emotional reaction stirred by connecting the word "Masada" with "Myth" and thus implying something that is untrue.
    The archaeological excavations of the early 1960s headed by Prof. Yigael Yadin helped to solidify the myth. However, following the Six Days War (1967) the opening up of new sites as well as some profound changes in Israeli society, created a process where, starting in the late 1960s, Masada lost its sacred place in the secular Zionists pantheon of heroism. Basically, Masada was transformed from a shrine of heroism and a sacred place for pilgrimage into a tourist attraction. The overwhelming majority of people visiting Masada these days are non-Israelis." (p.9)

    "Exploring space through the astronauts of the human specie is like defiling the galaxy with the smallpox of a Genghis Khan conquest. The mass suicide of self induced empire building is pandemic and engulfs the entire planet. Ilan Ramon was a zealot of the technocrat serpent. Instead of showing contempt, he was one of seven who advanced the toxin of misused technology. Some attribute the same blame to Christopher Columbus, but his exploration was a journey into the unknown. NASA’s mission is to circumnavigate our globe with a protective shield, with an intended purpose to evaporate any Masada sanctuaries, that exist outside the sphere of control of the new Roman Empire.
    Let’s admit reality. The venture into space and the obsession with technology has resulted in a world less free and in greater danger of planetary destruction. Is this the true definition of PROGRESS? Or do earthlings just have an inherent and deranged death wish? The NWO won’t come to the rescue - it is the cause - the benefactor - and the executioner; of this plan. Resisters will be labeled dangerous fanatics and encircled, starved and eliminated. The new tech world makes it possible and the depravity of the oligarchy makes it’s use certain. Just who are the real zealots? This demise aspiration complex must end."