Ari Shavit's Promised Land

Ari Shavit is a respected journalist, a contributor to Haaretz with an impeccable old Zionist pedigree. His book, My Promised Land (New York 2014) drew fire from critics both on the left and on the right. But although reviewers in the Guardian, the Jewish Journal and The New York Times Review of Books discussed the book in terms of the left and right divide they lost sight of the existential issues at the heart of the book, the survival of the Jewish people in an ever hostile world. 'For as long as I can remember I remember fear' is the opening sentence of the book. 'One day, I dreaded', he continues, '… a mythological tsunami would strike our shores and sweep my Israel away. It would become another Atlantis, lost in the depth of the sea'. The Jews of the Diaspora face an even greater threat. Demography, as Shavit reads it, suggest that Jews face extinction: the Jewish population of Britain, Western Europe and ultimately America will shrink, schools and synagogues will close, the rate of intermarriage will rise, the non-Orthodox Jewish people might gradually disappear. This is a very Zionist view of the Jewish world, after all, the small Wellington Jewish Community in far flung New Zealand survived for 172 years, grew and shrunk over this time, but in its modest small way continues to thrive and if this is true of Wellington it is likely to be even more true of the large Jewish communities of America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Of more concern, however, for Shavit, is the survival of the essence of the Zionist vision that was the driving force of the modern day political miracle that is the State of Israel. A small, underdeveloped, backward province of the Ottoman Empire, was transformed into a country of Jews, its Jewish population increased ten fold over its seventy years of existence, it became a dynamic economic, scientific, cultural and military power. But there was a great cost involved in this. The Palestinian inhabitants of the land who were driven out paid this cost. Yes, they were driven out, not left voluntarily as the lies fed to me by generation of Zionist propagandists told me. The price was also paid by the immigrants from Arab lands, many of whom left behind comfortable lives, respected stations in society, to be considered second rate citizens in a country dominated by an Ashkenazi Zionist elite, and was paid by survivors of the European Holocaust whose cultural values and their sense of loss were not appreciated by the Zionist pioneers who wanted to build a land of new muscular Jews without the baggage of the old world. And the price was paid in the currency of moral ambivalence. Israel became a coloniser, an oppressor, an occupier of other people, a people of torturers, prison guards, thugs, and thieves. The country changed from a land of idealists, of exemplary moral rectitude, to a country of opportunists, hedonists, with no values other than materialism. The country became divided, with huge gulfs between settlers and peacenicks, orthodox obscurantists who live in an enclosed medieval world and enlightened people in the vanguard of modern enlightenment, people who harbour nostalgia for the uncorrupted vision of early Zionists and corrupt politicians and businessmen who are only out for themselves, and between a younger generation who are out to enjoy life while they can and an older generation who live with the memory of sacrifices.

Shavit describes all this through personal accounts of his own grandfather's commitment to leave his comfortable home in England and settle in Palestine, stories of early kibbutz settlers, soldiers, Arabs who lost their homes and soldiers who drove them out, farmers who grew Jaffa oranges that dominated the European orange market, industrialists who grew a small home based dairy operation into a large multinational corporation, the leading pilot who built a vast software enterprise, settlers who occupy land that belong to others and liberal proponents of peace between Jews and Arabs who would remove these settlements. It is a story of people who turned Israel into the dynamic, economically successful melting pot told through riveting accounts of how people remember events that change Israeli society. But the end of the books, when the Shavit meditates on the present and the future is disappointing. There is no room for nostalgic for the values of a past that is no more. The world moved on and is moving on. It would be disappointing if Israel would still be the country of fifty years ago. There is no peace and no prospect of peace until Israel faces the dark shadows of its past, its treatment of the Arabs they drove out, its treatment of its immigrants from various parts of the world. But Arabs will also have to face their historic mistakes. And the likelihood of this happening any time soon is remote. A hundred years ago King Feisal could talk to Chaim Weitzman and discuss the benefits that Jewish immigration would bring to the Arab world, but Arab nationalism destroyed Feisal's level-headed sensible understanding of the realities of the Middle East and the House of Feisal itself. Nationalism was a poison imported from European romanticism to replace colonialism. As to the Jews, a fear of the future that Shavit starts his book with, is a good thing. Fear, the threat of persecution is the glue that holds the Jewish people together. As long as Jewish people accept that killing Jews is not on, it is not acceptable and it has dire consequences the role of Israel is secure.