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A review by dmendels
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit
5.0
The best non-fiction work I have read in a while. Part memoir, part history, part editorial, had a personal angle for me because of the parallels in our family history. His grandfather and my great grandfather we both at the first Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland in 1897. My mom was born in the Palestine of secular/liberal/socialist Zionism of a family that had left the pograms of 1890s Lithuania (and arrived via South Africa). From there, our families diverged, but I was brought up on the early myths of liberal Zionism (the worst of which represented by the line "A land without a people for a people without a land") and came to be aware of the horror of the colonialist/nationalist/anti-liberal and even terrorist side of the founding of Israel as a teenager and adult.
Ari Shavat is able to capture the history of Israel and all the contradictions one has to reconcile: the destruction of European Jewry, the idealism and wonder of what (a least the tradition I knew of) Jews escaping the diaspora and the killing fields of Europe created in Israel, but also the Palestinian Nakba and the reality that the founding of Israel was compromised at its core by the destruction and transfer of a people from their homes, as well as the ongoing occupation and discrimination within Israel as well against its non-Jewish population which is destroying any deal of Israel as a normal, free democratic state. His ability to be both proud of Israel and a Zionist and deeply conscious of its flaws and empathetic to its victims is impressive. He destroys the idea that there is a simple good/evil or pro/anti story here.
The one chapter that rubbed me the wrong way was his reporting on the threat of a Nuclear Iran. Unlike other chapters, I think he overweighted his editorial point of view and did not present with fairness the others. But this is a small complaint in a great book.
It didn't have a good way to wind down--he tries to find a angle for hope for Israel, but I don't think he achieves it.
I'd recommend it highly and suggest reading alongside Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh
Ari Shavat is able to capture the history of Israel and all the contradictions one has to reconcile: the destruction of European Jewry, the idealism and wonder of what (a least the tradition I knew of) Jews escaping the diaspora and the killing fields of Europe created in Israel, but also the Palestinian Nakba and the reality that the founding of Israel was compromised at its core by the destruction and transfer of a people from their homes, as well as the ongoing occupation and discrimination within Israel as well against its non-Jewish population which is destroying any deal of Israel as a normal, free democratic state. His ability to be both proud of Israel and a Zionist and deeply conscious of its flaws and empathetic to its victims is impressive. He destroys the idea that there is a simple good/evil or pro/anti story here.
The one chapter that rubbed me the wrong way was his reporting on the threat of a Nuclear Iran. Unlike other chapters, I think he overweighted his editorial point of view and did not present with fairness the others. But this is a small complaint in a great book.
It didn't have a good way to wind down--he tries to find a angle for hope for Israel, but I don't think he achieves it.
I'd recommend it highly and suggest reading alongside Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh