 "'Hope' in Israel's crisis")
THE GENIUS OF ISRAEL: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World
Authors: Dan Senor & Saul Singer
Publisher: Avid Reader
Pages: 316
Price: $30
More than 1,000 of its citizens, mostly civilians, were slaughtered in a matter of hours by a militant group thought to be ragtag and toothless. The country’s security services were nowhere to be found. The citizens’ faith in their political leader, a prime minister charged with bribery and fraud, was plummeting even before the attack. For the previous nine months, tens of thousands of protesters had held weekly demonstrations asserting that their beloved nation was being dragged by its populist government into authoritarian penury. Eventually, 360,000 reservists rushed into uniforms to fight the militants, only to find substandard equipment that had to be upgraded with private funds raised by volunteers.
This does not sound like a country any sane person would emulate. Yet the political adviser Dan Senor and the former Jerusalem Post editor Saul Singer have written a book under the title The Genius of Israel, and, while their timing couldn’t be worse, the volume does offer important insights into a nation that has punched far above its weight even as it now grapples with existential crises both external and internal.
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Messrs Senor and Singer shot to best-seller fame in 2009 with Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which sought to explain how a tiny young country surrounded by enemies could have, at the time, more companies listed on the Nasdaq than any except the United States. The answer: A mix of risk-taking newcomers and the culture of innovation fostered among young Israelis by their mandatory military service.
Their new book builds on those insights by looking at how Israeli society functions at large. In the past 15 years, Israel’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has risen above that of Britain, France and Japan. The number of multinational companies with operations in the country has grown from fewer than 150 to more than 400.
“Israel has been exposed to constant trauma,” the authors write, and yet the country has some of the lowest rates of alcohol abuse, opioid death and suicide in the world. In other words, the country may be facing a reckoning because of deep societal divisions and its precarious place in the Middle East, but paradoxically, Israel arrived here as one of the world’s most successful societies, with a thrumming energy.
While the authors devote short sections to Israel’s two million Arab citizens and one million ultra-Orthodox Jews, they are focused on the country’s six million or so mainstream Jewish Israelis. They also ignore the circumstances of the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation next door. Some would argue that this amounts to telling the story of the Titanic without mentioning icebergs.
The authors talked to scores of Israelis, from entrepreneurs to politicians to religious leaders and TV writers. The book is an easy read and the narrative conceit — a quest to figure out Israeli exceptionalism — works pretty well. The data are so remarkable that they beg for explanation.
The search for answers brings them back partly to the military, which offers an alternative to academic meritocracy and values determination, teamwork and self-criticism. Focusing on those skills, the authors argue, helps build a superior and more creative workforce.
Indeed, the book argues, the ongoing external threat and the shared goal of building a secure Jewish state that defies not only the Nazi Holocaust but centuries of antisemitism create a sense of purpose. To know that your very existence is at stake focuses the mind. As Micah Goodman, a writer and thinker, tells the authors, there is a feeling in Israel that “history is happening” and that every citizen helps make it happen.
After its security crisis ends, Israel will return to the brewing battle over whether every citizen does in fact make it happen and how competing agendas clash in defining a state as both Jewish and democratic. It seems hard to gain a full picture of the country’s future without a deep look at the large marginalised groups the authors put to the side.
About a fifth of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. About one in eight practices a Judaism so all-consuming that there is little room for secular studies or income-producing work. Some three million Palestinians live under occupation in the West Bank with little prospect of attaining full rights, and another two million are trapped in Gaza under Hamas. Can the country continue to turn away from these challenges and pay no price? As October 7 illustrates, the answer is no.
The authors did most of their work before this year’s fight over the independence of the judiciary. Running to catch up, they rewrote their opening note to reiterate the message of a later chapter on previous crises. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to pursue Palestinian militants who had attacked Israeli civilians, and allowed its Lebanese allies into Palestinian refugee camps, where they massacred at least 800 people. Over the ensuing months, thousands of disgusted Israelis filled the streets; in response, a right-wing activist threw a grenade into a crowd, killing an Israeli military veteran who opposed his government’s actions.
Many such moments in Israel’s history have produced intense internal fighting and, the authors argue, the crisis this year over the nature of its democracy may prove no more dire. The Hamas slaughter followed by Israel’s unforgiving war in Gaza came after the book went to press. The optimism that propels The Genius of Israel seems, just now, like a distant memory.
The reviewer is a senior Middle East editor and Israel bureau chief for Bloomberg News. ©2023 The New York Times News Service