Son of Israel, Caught in the Middle. By Dwight Garner. New York Times, November 19, 2013. Review of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. By Ari Shavit. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013. 445 pp.
The State of Israel. By Leon Wieseltier. New York Times, November 21, 2013. Review of My Promised Land. By Ari Shavit.
The Old Peace Is Dead, but a New Peace Is Possible. By Ari Shavit. New York Times, March 12, 2013.
Garner:
“If you
want everyone to love you,” Saul Bellow wrote, “don’t discuss Israeli
politics.” Yet when Bellow went to Israel for several months in 1975 to
research a nonfiction book, all he did was talk politics — and everything else.
It was what he loved best about Israel, the “gale of conversation.”
Ari
Shavit’s new book, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel,” is a
gale of conversation, of feeling, of foreboding, of ratiocination. It takes a
wide-angle and often personal view of Israel’s past and present, and frequently
reads like a love story and a thriller at once. That it ultimately becomes a
book of lamentation, a moral cri de coeur and a ghost story tightens its hold
on your imagination.
Mr.
Shavit is an eminent Israeli journalist, a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz,
a television commentator, a man of the left, the possessor of a well-stocked
mind. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
“My
Promised Land” combines road trips, interviews, memoir and straightforward
history to relate Israel’s story. The book taps his existential fear for his
country, and his moral outrage about its occupation policy. He dilates
especially on Israel’s essential, combustible duality.
“On the
one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another
people,” he writes. “On the other hand, we are the only nation in the West that
is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli
condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of
our condition.”
His
book takes its time to get going. We are introduced to his great-grandfather, a
British Zionist who visited the Holy Land in 1897 and saw that the place was
his people’s future. We meet Jewish orange growers who moved there in the
1920s, and pioneers of the kibbutz movement.
These
pioneers are a heady success story, their collective work and brawny forearms
an inspiration. Yet, in their labor, Mr. Shavit spies the seeds of the anguish
that is to come, for Palestinians and Israelis both: “All this idealistic
socialism is just subterfuge, future critics will claim. It is the moral
camouflage of an aggressive national movement whose purpose is to obscure its
colonialist, expansionist nature.”
Mr.
Shavit chooses the people he interviews with care, and presents their stories
Studs Terkel-style, as streaming oral histories. These don’t overwhelm the
narrative but add depth and complexity. To comprehend people’s opinions, the
author understands, he must allow them to relate the stories of their childhood.
These childhoods, as they were for most of the world’s European Jews in the
first half of the 20th century, tend to be harrowing to absorb.
“My
Promised Land” shifts into higher gear in its middle sections, with the
claiming of the Masada fortress in the 1940s as a symbol for Zionism, and with
the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. This book’s middle 200 pages are
almost certainly the most powerful pages of nonfiction I’ve read this year.
It’s
not just that Mr. Shavit lays out the story of Israel’s founding with clarity
and precision. This is a story we’ve read before, in a stack of books that,
laid end to end, would wrap 88 times around the outskirts of Tel Aviv. It’s
that he so deliberately scrutinizes the denial he locates at the heart of Israeli
consciousness.
This
book’s central chapter is probably the one about how the Palestinian citizenry
was driven from the Arab city of Lydda in 1948. Many were killed; some were
tortured during interrogations. There was looting. Tens of thousands of Palestinians,
long columns, were driven from their homes into the desert. In expulsions like
this one lie his country’s original sin, the author argues, beyond the
settlements of its later expansion.
“Lydda
is our black box,” he declares. “In it lies the dark secret of Zionism.” Mr.
Shavit is a powerful writer about denial. The miracle that is Israel, he says,
is “based on denial. The nation I am born into has erased Palestine from the
face of the earth.”
It’s
among Mr. Shavit’s gifts as a writer and thinker that he can see this fact
plainly yet condemn “the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who
condemn what” was done in Lydda “but enjoy the fruits of their deed.”
A
heartsick patriot, he adds: “If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know
that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born. If it
wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work
that enables my people, myself, my daughter and my sons to live.”
There
is so much more in “My Promised Land.” There are disquisitions on Israel’s
wars, its nuclear program, its culture, its religious zealots, its
intellectuals, its shifting demographics. The author writes with terrific
feeling about Tel Aviv’s furious club scene in the 2000s, a generation dancing
on the abyss.
With
tragicomic wistfulness, Mr. Shavit captures an essential Israeli longing for
peace. “We’d prefer our Israel to be a sort of California, but the trouble is
that this California of ours is surrounded by ayatollahs.” About the
Palestinians, he declares: “We squeeze, and they squeeze back. We are trapped
by them, and they are trapped by us.”
I
cannot say that “My Promised Land” is an optimistic book. It does not arrive
with ready-made solutions. Its tone will entirely please neither side. Mr.
Shavit’s gift is for seeing plainly, its own variety of sanity. He blames
right-wing politicians for goading the Arab world with Israel’s expansionism.
And he ends by taking a penetrating look at Iran’s nuclear program, one he
fears will wipe his country from the planet.
About
the prospects for peace, he leaves you feeling far worse than when you came in.
The more you know, this book suggests, the closer the shadows creep.
In the
end, he plaintively says: “I wonder how long we can maintain our miraculous
survival story. One more generation? Two? Three? Eventually the hand holding
the sword must loosen its grip. Eventually the sword itself will rust. No
nation can face the world surrounding it for over a hundred years with a
jutting spear.”
Shavit:
KFAR
SHMARYAHU, Israel
HERE is
the bad news: the Old Peace is dead.
It was
first wounded in 1994 when, a year after the Oslo accords, Israel let Yasir
Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, return to the West
Bank, and a result was a deadly bus bombing in central Tel Aviv.
The Old
Peace was injured again in 2000, when, at a Camp David summit meeting, Israel
agreed to establish a free Palestinian state in Gaza and in nearly 90 percent
of the West Bank, and Mr. Arafat refused. The outcome? The second intifada,
with its suicide bombings and the loss of more than 1,000 Israeli lives, left
the people of Israel again traumatized.
The
third blow came in 2005, when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and the
response was not the emergence of a prosperous, self-governing Palestinian
territory, but the establishment of a Hamas-controlled rocket base that has
periodically terrorized southern Israel.
The
death knell for the Old Peace finally sounded in December 2010, with the start
of the Arab awakening, which toppled secular dictators like Zine el-Abidine Ben
Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, while
turning Bashar al-Assad’s Syria into a ghastly slaughterhouse. Corrupt yet
stable tyrannies, which had supported a fragile peace with Israel, have been
replaced by nascent Islamist republics and failed or failing states.
In
these new circumstances, no Arab leader has the legitimacy needed to negotiate
a lasting peace; no Arab government can be trusted to enforce it; and Israelis
justifiably feel there is no reliable Palestinian partner who can guarantee it.
The Old Peace, the dream of numerous direct talks from 1991 through 2010, died
in the caldron of the Arab Spring.
But
here is the good news: a New Peace is now a promising option. Having brought
down tyrants who had paralyzed public life and public debate for decades, the
peoples of the Arab world are focusing on the internal problems of their
societies: poverty, corruption, lack of freedom and opportunity and an overall
failure to establish a decent, functioning Arab modernity.
At the
same time, an Israeli social justice protest movement that began in the summer
of 2011 — filling the streets of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and then
quickly spreading to mass demonstrations across the country — is quietly
changing the political system. It has placed major pressure on the right-wing
government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and helped account for the
January elections, in which the party of the television host-turned-politician
Yair Lapid came in a surprising second.
Israelis
are also focusing on their internal malaise: a dysfunctional government; a
financial oligarchy; rising inequality, cost of living and pressure on the
middle class; poor public education; and the disproportionate power wielded by
ultrareligious parties — adding up to a failure to construct a functioning
Israel that truly represents its citizens and provides for their needs.
Make no
mistake: Arab and Israeli social conditions are not at all identical. Egypt
remains an oppressive, developing society reliant on American aid, while Israel
is a thriving, high-tech democracy. But there is an intriguing link between the
Arab Spring sweeping the Middle East and the protest movement changing the face
of the Jewish state. As both Arabs and Israelis look inward, the Old Peace is
dead, but a New Peace might be born.
The New
Peace will be very different from the Old Peace. There will not be grandiose
peace ceremonies in Camp David or at the White House, no Nobel Prizes to be
handed out. The New Peace does not mean lofty declarations and presumptuous
vows, but a pragmatic, gradual process whereby the New Arabs and the New
Israelis will acknowledge their mutual needs and interests. It will be a quiet,
almost invisible, process that will allow Turks, Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians,
Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Israelis to reach common understandings.
The New Peace will be based on the humble, pragmatic assumption that all the
participants must respect, and not provoke, one another, so that conflict does
not disrupt the constructive social reforms that all seek to promote.
New
Peace might have all sorts of manifestations. A real Israeli settlement freeze
in the West Bank rather than a romantic Israeli-Palestinian final status
agreement which is not feasible at the moment. An Israeli-Egyptian water-supply
development project that would reinforce the fragile peace between the
countries. An Israeli-Turkish gas deal that would bring together two of
America’s most reliable allies and encourage them to work as regional
stabilizers. A Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian program that would channel some of the
riches of the Persian Gulf to keep the peace in Palestine. A secret
Israeli-Hamas deal that would give Gaza more autonomy and prosperity while
halting its rearmament.
Mr.
Obama’s strategy must focus on designing and fostering initiatives like these.
The United States alone can orchestrate this kind of regional cooperation. Its
aim should be to prevent nationalistic crises and religious eruptions from
endangering a new, tentative promise: Israelis and Arabs rebuilding their
nation-states while creating healthy, middle-class societies.
As
Israel forms a new government, it needs a new strategic concept toward the
Palestinians. The Arab world needs new organizing principles for its fledgling
states. And America needs a new Middle East vision — one aimed not at grand and
unattainable all-encompassing solutions but at incremental steps to temper the
flames of extremism, tribalism and hate.
