MY PROMISED LAND
The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
Ari Shavit
Spiegel & Grau; 445 pages; $28
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 labour, 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 scrutinises 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."
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."
©2013 The New York Times News Service
