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Book Reviews
their experiences shed light on the wider situation of Moroccan women in Israel seeking
social and economic advancement.
Henriette Dahan Kalev
Ben-Gurion University
Note
1. On stereotypes of Mizrahim that have been repeatedly reinforced by scholars (mainly of
Ashkenazi origin) over the years, see Henriette Dahan Kalev, “Ḥ eker hamizraḥim besotziyo­
logiyah hayisreelit: hamarokaim ke‘mikreh’ shel hamikreh,” Peamim 108 (Summer 2006),
87–126.
Anita Shapira, Israel: A History. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012. xiii + 502 pp.
1
Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. New York: Spiegel
& Grau, 2013. xiv + 445 pp.
The recent publication of two instantly celebrated books on Israel’s history provides
this reviewer with an opportunity to compare and contrast their potential value for the
burgeoning teaching field of Israel studies. Although these books cover much the
same ground, they are not at all of the same genre. Whereas Anita Shapira’s Israel is
an academic historian’s narrative that synthesizes historiographic output to date, Ari
Shavit’s My Promised Land is a journalist’s foray into a narrative that aspires, as he
puts it, to “get the Israel story right” (p. xii). Divergent purposes inspire these two
books. Shapira’s is to offer an authoritatively updated narrative for the primary purpose of academic teaching. Shavit, in contrast, is mainly concerned with submitting
the historical record to acute ideological and moral soul-searching. Shapira’s book
deals with the entirety of the Israeli experience, providing a capacious narrative not
only of the political but also of the social, economic, military, and cultural development of Israel. Shavit, having selected a series of events and issues, simply zooms
headlong into slices of the same history. His offering is a passionate account into
which he has inserted himself as an engaged commentator.
Nevertheless, these two authors do have much in common. Both exhibit an underlying appreciation of Israel as a marvelously vibrant and creative society, a historical
“triumph,” albeit “tragic,” as Shavit’s subtitle declares; “a success story of global
proportions,” in Shapira’s words. Moreover, it is patently clear that both are Zionists,
though Zionists of liberal and humanist persuasion. That is, they subscribe to the
basic Zionist affirmation of the state of Israel’s entitlement to be the expression of the
Jewish people’s national self-determination while simultaneously being a democracy
solicitous of the human and civic rights of all its inhabitants. Yet an interesting difference in vantage points illuminates their take on the Zionist story as a whole. Shapira’s
primary vantage point is East European labor Zionism. The eloquence of her narrative is most apparent when she describes the fortunes and fate of the labor Zionist
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1
heritage, a field she has already enriched in earlier works. Shavit’s vantage point is
Anglo-Jewish political Zionism. His narrative opens with the Herzlian Zionist mission to Ottoman Palestine undertaken by his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, and
at various points he revisits his Bentwich forebears and traces their activities. As for
comprehending the Jewish-Arab conflict, a tragic clash of nationalisms is the primary
paradigm adopted by both authors, subject to a self-critical probing of the historical
record and a fair-minded understanding of the opposing colonialist paradigm that
underpins the Arab case. Shapira reasons that from the outset Jews came out of nationalist motives, and that the self-labor and self-sufficiency ethos of the Zionist labor
pioneers offset and averted a potentially colonial situation.
Shapira’s work derives from substantial primary research—much of it her own—
on the Yishuv period and Israel’s early years. Although dispensing with conventional
academic footnoting, her book draws knowledgeably upon the works of many scholars on military, economic, and social issues. A judiciously selected list of these works
is provided at the end of each chapter as a guide for further reading. Particularly noteworthy is Shapira’s illuminating deployment of cultural sources. She adeptly applies
Hebrew memoirs, literature, poems, and popular songs to serve as a seismograph for
the mood of the public and the spirit of the times. Her engaging literary references
range widely from the plays of Hanoch Levin to the novels of Amos Oz and David
Grossman.
Shapira’s book attains its objectives in admirable fashion. Perhaps its greatest analytic virtue is its splendid elucidation of the transformative process undergone by
Israeli society—from the formative Yishuv ethos of idealistic collectivism, personal
self-sacrifice, and uniform Hebraic cultural reconfiguration to an ethos of individualism, cultivation of prosperity, and resignation to cultural diversity. In other words,
how Israel became an ’am kekhol ha’amim (a nation like all other nations), in the apt
title Shapira chose for the Hebrew version of the book. The narrative is consistently
fluent and engaging, and her treatment of controversial issues is discerning and evenhanded. Most importantly, the story is updated on the basis of major revisions and
additions produced by new generations of historical researchers. Many of the myths
that pervade conventional historical memory are dispelled. The reader will learn, to
give some examples, that the early ’aliyot comprised mainly traditionalist Jewish families, whose motives were personal and material no less than ideological; that it is not
quite true to say that Herzl became a Zionist because of the notorious Dreyfus case;
that the Yishuv’s urban development surpassed the vaunted “redemption of the soil.”
Most significantly, her account of the 1948 “War of Independence” and the origins of
the Palestinian Arab refugee problem endorses major revelations and revisions made
by Benny Morris and others. At the same time, while appreciating the findings of the
so-called “new historians,” she has little regard for what she describes as their one-sided
representation of the historical reality and their tone of rage and moral sanctimoniousness.
On several questions of causation, intention, and motivation that remain controversial, Shapira is careful to allude to alternative views and to refrain from giving definitive answers. One of the intriguing questions that, in her view, remain open for historians
to consider relates to the fatefully convulsive Yom Kippur War of 1973—specifically,
whether it might have been avoided had Golda Meir accepted Anwar Sadat’s proposals
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Book Reviews
1
for interim arrangements. In the case of the first Lebanon war of the 1980s, Shapira
takes a somewhat more assertive position. She characterizes it as a “war of choice”
consciously undertaken by Menachem Begin and hence as a radical departure from
the “defensive ethos” that she has attributed to Zionism in a profound study of her
own. In a third instance, her updated account of the problems and failures of immigrant integration and of the intra-Jewish ethnic tensions and conflicts that have troubled Israeli society, Shapira avers that “the society that took in the immigrants did not
intend to humiliate them by using them as human putty” (p. 239).
On another major issue, it is clear that Shapira has no sympathy for the ideology
of Gush Emunim and the entire settlement enterprise it pioneered and that a series of
Israeli governments fostered. However, compared with the acerbity of current controversy in Israel, her criticism is moderate. She deems the Gush Emunim ideology
to be misguided and irrational, seeking to “impose a concept of faith on reality,” and
she comments that “this frame of mind ran counter to the fundamental Zionist concept that viewed the return to Zion as a project coming to fruition in the real world,
while abiding by the real world’s constraints” (p. 343). At the same time, Shapira
does not lose sight of the responsibility for the endless conflict borne by Yasser Arafat
and the PLO. In this instance, she allows herself to indulge in speculative attribution
of motivation: “Arafat did not see himself as being free to make difficult decisions,
either because he did not think his supporters at home were ready for it, because he
feared the reaction of the Arab states, or because he thought he would be killed the
day after the signing” (p. 444).
Overall, the most important contribution of this volume is its provision of sober
and mature perspective and context for the understanding of the complex developmental problems of Israel, without making light of the extreme dangers, anxieties,
and moral dilemmas that beset its existence.
In comparison, Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land is painted with much bolder brush
strokes. Shavit’s narrative gains much allure from his interweaving of captivating
oral interviews with major personalities. Moreover, he injects himself into the story
by engaging with their views. For the general reader, this certainly makes his narrative more imaginative and fascinating than Shapira’s.
As in Shapira’s book, the transition from a collectivist to an individualist ethos,
and the attendant changes in the mores of Israeli society, form a central theme. In
Shavit’s typically pithy phraseology: “The old discourse of duty and commitment
was replaced by a new discourse of protest and hedonism,” and Israel has become
“a modern western nation in which ‘I’ replaces ‘we’” (p. 191). His treatment of some
developments is no less perceptive than Shapira’s, while at the same time being more
enthralling. One example is his account of the amazing growth of the Sephardi political movement Shas, another is his treatment of the fateful rise of Gush Emunim.
Nothing is more illustrative of the difference in tenor between Shapira’s and Shavit’s
books than their respective accounts of the expulsion of Arabs from Lydda during the
war of 1948. Shapira treats this event with equanimity within the context of war, as
“the only case of organized removal of entire cities on Jewish initiative” (p. 168).
In contrast, Shavit provides an emotively anguished description of massacre and expulsion. It serves as the epitome of his central theme—Zionism’s tragically existential dilemma as an historic project, necessary and justified, yet culpable. He sums it
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1
up with dramatic flair: “Either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism
along with Lydda” (p. 131).
Shavit has a flare for hyperbole. He writes with pathos. “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear. Existential fear,” is the opening line of this book. The major
thrust of his thesis is that the Zionist miracle was blighted by blindness to the presence of the Arabs. The allusion is to what psychologists call cognitive dissonance,
although Shavit does not use this term. On the one hand, the miracle was based on
denial, but on the other, denial was an existential imperative. Hence the “triumph,”
but also the “tragedy” of Israel. Unlike Shapira, Shavit demonstrates nothing like familiarity with the full scope of existing research literature, or else chooses to overlook it. His blindness thesis is not without foundation, but he may lack familiarity
with major historical studies such as Yosef Gorny’s Zionism and the Arabs 1882–1948
(1987). Otherwise he would know that his generalization is far from true for the major
leaders and intellectuals of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv. He seems unaware
that in the Mandate years, the Zionist leadership, ranging from Chaim Weizmann to
Zeev Jabotinsky, was fully aware of the Arab presence. Indeed, they did not deny that
the Arabs of Palestine also had a legitimate claim to the land. Their argument was not
that the Jewish right was absolute and exclusive, but rather that the manifestly greater
existential need of the Jewish people justified its having precedence in attaining national
self-determination in the contested land.
The paramount conundrum laid bare by Shavit is, of course, the occupation and
Jewish settlement of the West Bank (alias Judea and Samaria). “The question is,” he
writes, “whether Israel will end the occupation or whether occupation will end Israel”
(p. 398). Interviewing two leading settler personalities, Pinchas Wallerstein and Yehuda
Etzion, he comments: “The reality created by Wallerstein and Etzion and their friends
has entangled Israel in a predicament that cannot be untangled. The settlements have
placed Israel’s neck in a noose.” With anguish, he ponders “whether Ofra is a benign
continuation of Zionism or a malignant mutation of Zionism” (pp. 220–221). After
hearing Etzion’s views, he makes his most telling personal exclamation: “With horror
I realize that the DNA of his Zionism and the DNA of my Zionism share a few genes”
(p. 209).
Shavit himself says that he has moved from the left-wing to the center of Israel’s
political spectrum. He argues that the fundamental flaw of the Left was that it never
distinguished between the issue of occupation and the issue of peace. It realized that
occupation was a moral, demographic, and political disaster. But it was naïve regarding
the prospect of peace. “If Israel does not retreat from the West Bank, it will be politically and morally doomed,” he opines, “but if it does retreat, it might face an Iranianbacked and Islamic Brotherhood-inspired West Bank regime whose missiles could
endanger Israel’s security” (p. 401).
Shapira, too, is obviously perturbed by the elusiveness of peace and the worsening
reality of continued occupation, but she seems to face it in a spirit of resignation that
leaves some room for hope. By contrast, Shavit responds with paralyzing pessimism
and frustration. As Leon Wieseltier suggests in a New York Times review, Shavit’s is
something of a “doubting discourse;” one that tends to consign Israel to “a historical
provisionality.”1 Indeed, Shavit goes so far as to ask: “Will the Jewish state survive
another century?” (p. 398).
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In the eyes of fair-minded people, Jews and others, Shavit’s book should serve as
a saving grace for Israel’s deteriorating hyper-nationalist image. At the same time, its
message of guilt and remorse is more than likely to be interpreted by inveterate antiZionists as validation of their case. For teaching purposes, My Promised Land might
well serve as a complementary source, preferably alongside contrasting exemplifications of right-wing positions. It is Anita Shapira’s book, however, that merits becoming
indispensable basic reading.
Gideon Shimoni
The Hebrew University
Note
1
1. Leon Wieseltier, “The State of Israel: ‘My Promised Land,’ by Ari Shavit,” New York
Times Book Review (24 November 2013).