resented as a de facto contradiction. The basic dilemma was posed by Moritz Goldstein in his famous
essay “The German-Jewish Parnassus.” The desire
of Kattan’s generation was, in Goldstein’s words, “to
administer the spiritual possessions of a people that
denies us the capability of doing so.” In Isaac Babel’s
“The Story of My Dovecote,” to take another example,
a Jewish student tries to win a spot in Odessa’s best
gymnasium by spouting perfect geysers of Pushkin’s
verse, to which the Russian examiners respond “What
a devil is in these yids.” In Iraq, as in much of Europe,
the passion of Jews for a national culture and language
was taken too often not as evidence of their belonging, but of their alienness.
A
s it happens, Franz Rosenzweig, describing his
vision of German Jewry as a culture to be nourished by twin sources—the enlightenment univer-
salism of Germany and the traditions of Judaism—
characterized this vision as a “Zweistromland”—a
land of two rivers, i.e., Iraq. It is not that the Iraqi
Jewish experience is identical to the German or
Russian or any other European Jewish experience, but that it seems to have been informed by
the same set of political and cultural tensions that
have shaped Jewish history in the modern period.
The Iraqi Jews of Somekh’s generation and milieu
believed that they could help foster and participate
in an Iraqi national identity that would be nurtured
by Arabic culture, while defining this Arabic culture in universal terms that were divorced from its
historical, religious, and political realities.
And so they encountered the same problems
and opportunities as other modern Jews have experienced in other national contexts. Arab identity
was claimed by Iraqi Jews in part because it was not
secure. It was contested, challenged, debated, denied. It was something in the making, and therefore
welcomed makers. But when Jews claimed Arabness they only made themselves more conspicuous
as Jews. And the Jewish component of their identity
was itself always either an insurmountable problem
or on the verge of being erased, or both. And then
the whole cosmopolitan project collapsed.
The experience of Jews in modern Iraq does not
present us with an escape from the conundrums of
Jewish history. Yet it is no less fascinating for that,
and no less deserving of accurate remembrance.
leading figure in the political history of Israel’s first
decades, deals entirely with his earlier military career and does not go beyond an account of his role
in Israel’s War of Independence.
These and Shapira’s other books about the life
her part, makes it clear that this group, the Bilu, was a
small and select one, and that the overwhelming majority of the earliest settlers “were middle-aged Jews
who came with their families out of a combination of
personal and nationalist motives,” religiously obser-
Michael Weingrad is academic director of the Harold
Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland
State University. He is the author of American Hebrew
Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the
United States (Syracuse University Press).
Adventure Story
BY ALLAN ARKUSH
Israel: A History
by Anita Shapira
Brandeis University Press, 528 pp., $35
O
ne-volume histories of Israel aren’t
what they used to be. I have been reading them since the 1960s, and I can remember well enough when they were
just histories of Zionism with postscripts summarizing the state’s fledgling years tacked onto them.
As time has marched on, however, too often to the
beat of war drums, the proportions have been largely reversed. The typical history of Israel now devotes
roughly a third of its pages to the pre-independence
period. This was already the case with Howard Sachar’s revision and expansion in 1996 of a book he
first published in the 1970s, A History of Israel: From
the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. It is likewise true
of a book that Martin Gilbert published in the very
same year, Israel: A History, and also of Anita Shapira’s new book bearing precisely the same title.
It is something of a surprise to see Shapira join
the ranks of these and other chroniclers. Although
she has written numerous important articles and
edited several valuable volumes dealing with post1948 Israel, her own research and writing have focused mostly on developments in British Palestine
in the first half of the 20th century. Her very first
book, based on her doctoral dissertation, was a history of the struggle over what was called “Hebrew
labor,” the employment in the Palestinian Jewish
economy of an exclusively Jewish labor force, between 1929 and 1939. Shapira’s most popular book
was a two-volume biography (abridged to one volume in English) of Berl Katznelson, the Zionist labor leader who died in 1944. Her Land and Power,
an account of “the Zionist resort to force,” ends in
1948. And even her biography of Yigal Allon, a
Shapira has done away with all sorts of errors that
have been passed through the years from one short
history of Israel to another.
and culture of the Yishuv are replete with penetrating insight into the complex processes that culminated in the establishment of the Jewish state. She
has succeeded in portraying many of the strong and
colorful figures of Israel’s founding generations in
full. In her pages, their ideological and tactical debates come alive again—and so do the poets of the
day, whom she strategically cites to capture something of the spirit of the times that might otherwise
elude her own more prosaic efforts.
W
hat she has done so effectively in lengthy
but closely focused tomes (the original version of the Katznelson biography is more than a
thousand pages long) is not the sort of thing that
can be easily replicated in a general history, at least
not in one that a reader of average strength can
conveniently carry. One therefore approaches the
mere 152 pages in Israel: A History that deal with
the years prior to 1948 with the knowledge that
they cannot possibly match the virtues of Shapira’s
other work on this subject. Still, they have many
strengths of their own.
Shapira, for one thing, has done away with all
sorts of errors that have been passed through the
years from one short history of Israel to another.
More times than one could easily count, authors have
described the small group of idealistic young socialist
immigrants who came to Palestine in the early 1880s
as the standard-bearers of the First Aliya. Shapira, for
vant people who “wanted to live a free life in Palestine
‘under their own vine and fig tree.’”
There is perhaps no more enduring myth in
modern Jewish history than the notion than it was
the trial of Alfred Dreyfus for treason that turned
Theodor Herzl into a Zionist. While acknowledging that “Herzl observed the mass indignation that
followed the Dreyfus trial,” Shapira correctly insists
that it was “not this trial that aroused his sensitivity
to the Jewish problem (anti-Semitism), as popular
belief has it,” but other experiences. Observing that
the “Fifth Aliya entered Zionist consciousness”—
not to mention countless history books—“as the
German aliya,” she sees fit to emphasize that “most
of its immigrants—as with its predecessors—came
from Eastern Europe.”
Shapira’s correction of such errors goes hand
in hand with the rapid, suggestive illumination of
themes that she has dealt with much more comprehensively in her other works. She eloquently
elucidates literary evocations of “the new Jew” who
“sought the challenge of a life in which dedication
to the collective was congruent with maintaining
inner truth and a life of simplicity, honesty, and selfrealization.” She deftly describes how the pioneers of
the 1920s remained captivated by the revolution in
the Russia that many of them had left behind. They
were “less influenced by communist ideology,” she
explains, than they were “attracted by the fact that
in that vast country a social experiment was taking
Winter 2013 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
27
place similar in character to the one occurring in
Palestine.” Deeply expert in the history of the Labor
Zionists, Shapira presents a concise and insightful
account of the diverse aspects of their experimentation throughout the history of the Yishuv. At the
same time, she clarifies its limited parameters, noting, “most of the capital invested in the country was
private.” And she admits that even at its high point
the socialists’ “heroic attempt to establish the alternative society and invent for it suitable cultural patterns never overcame the seductive power of bourgeois modernity.”
Stretching from the first articulations of Zionism
in late 19th-century Europe to the establishment of
the State of Israel, the first chapters of Shapira’s Israel
constitute the best brief account of these matters that
has yet been written. Inevitably, however, the restrictions of space have led to certain omissions, especially in the realm of politics. While Shapira touches on
the subject of American Jews’ support for the Central
Powers during the first years of World War I, she does
not really explain how this attitude contributed to the
momentum toward the adoption of the Balfour Declaration. Her outline of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s independent Zionist course concentrates on his demand
for British support for a “colonization regime,” one
“that would actively help build the national home by
creating appropriate economic and political conditions.” She fails to explain, however, that Jabotinsky
took this position because he was frustrated by the
slow pace of the Yishuv’s growth during the 1920s
and felt that only the British government could pay
for the “big Zionism” that could solve the steadily
worsening Jewish problem. And her account of the
emergence of a two-thirds majority vote in the UN
General Assembly in 1947 in favor of partition is
regrettably terse, except with regard to the amazing
turnabout on the part of the Soviet Union.
T
he chapters dealing with the era of statehood
derive far less from Shapira’s own original
scholarship, but they are not for that reason discernibly less thorough or competent. Inevitably,
they focus heavily on Israel’s wars. With the exception of the War of Independence, Shapira devotes
more attention to their causes and their results
than to the fighting itself. She isn’t always certain
that Israel’s actions can be fully vindicated, but she
is very reluctant to come down on the side of those
who find them blameworthy.
Shapira is, of course, familiar with all of the recent
literature tracing hostile Arab actions to Israeli provocations or recalcitrance. She contrasts these claims
even-handedly with opposing views and abstains
from deciding between them. Did Israel’s reprisal
against the Egyptian Army in Gaza in 1955 bring
about “a critical change in the attitude of Egyptian
president Gamal Abdel Nasser toward the conflict,”
inducing him to escalate it and turn to the Soviet
bloc for arms? Some say that it did, Shapiro observes,
while other scholars contend that Nasser’s intensification of Egypt’s engagement on the Israeli front
stemmed mostly from his pan-Arab aspirations. “Either way,” she concludes, “1955 was a year in which
the status quo created by the armistice agreements
became shaky.” Should Israel have agreed, sixteen
years later, to Anwar Sadat’s proposals for “an interim
arrangement” in Sinai that would have amounted to
less than a final settlement? “Would the Israeli government have been justified in relinquishing terri28
JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
tory in exchange for an ambiguous nonbelligerency
agreement without a peace treaty?” Shapira is willing
to say only that “these questions will remain open for
historians to consider.”
Only with respect to the First Lebanon War (her
book ends before the eruption of the second one)
does Shapira voice any criticism of Israel’s basic
policy. In her opinion, the expanded definition of
erations of fighters in the Yishuv and the state. For
that ethos war must always be a war of necessity, in
which the nation stands on the brink.” The strategic concept that motivated this departure from past
practice, Shapira contends, after a review of the overall Lebanese situation, “never had a leg to stand on.”
She is equally outspoken in her criticism of the
people who spearheaded Israel’s post-1967 settlement enterprise. In her account of how “rule over the
new territories became a leading topic in Israeli political discourse” over many decades, she often seems to
stand above the fray. But her descriptions of the leaders of Gush Emunim reflect clearly enough her distaste for them. She notes that already in 1967 members of the core group that founded the organization
“displayed hatred of the Arabs and total indifference
to their plight, and they rejected the humanist faith in
the existence of common ground between Jews and
non-Jews.” They eventually formulated an ideology
that did “not involve rational consideration of what is
possible and desirable,” and sought to
impose a concept of faith on reality and act
in accordance with it. 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.
“Help Him Build Palestine,” by Modest Stein for
Keren Hayesod, 1930.
the term “war of choice” that Begin employed when
he took massive action against the PLO in Lebanon
“contradicted a very basic ethos in Israeli society: the
defensive ethos, which shaped the worldview of gen-
• Winter 2013
It also ran counter to democracy, affirming “a
national-religious mission” that overrode any requirement to accept majority rule.
For all of that, however, Shapira doesn’t blame
Gush Emunim’s legal and illegal settlement activities or Israel in general for the continuation of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It could have been resolved, she believes, at Camp David, in 2000, if Yasser Arafat had been prepared to accept Ehud Barak’s
generous offers. In the end, the summit
failed because only one of the leaders intended
to reach an agreement. Arafat did not see
himself as being free to make a difficult
Members of the Jewish Agency delegation study a map of the proposed partition of
Palestine at United Nations interim headquarters, Flushing Meadows, NY, November
12, 1947. (Courtesy of UN/Photo.)
decision, 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.
Shapira isn’t always certain
that Israel’s actions can be
fully vindicated, but she is
very reluctant to come down
on the side of those who find
them blameworthy.
became Israelis. Already in the 1970s, their “leaders
claimed that discrimination was practiced against
Arabs in the education system and in allocations
for building classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and
sports facilities.” They also claimed that there was
a plan “to keep the Arabs ignorant so as to provide
manual laborers with low status and low wages,” and
accused the Ministry of Education “of discrimination against the Arab heritage in its curricula in
order to obscure Arab national identity.” Shapira is
willing to go so far as to say that “these claims were
not unfounded.” Nor are they ancient history. Even
today “government allocations to the Arab sector
for education, development, and industrial projects” remain “far lower than those for the Jewish
sector.” The most she can say in Israel’s defense is
others. Aryeh Gelblum’s virtually racist articles in
Ha’aretz about North African immigrants, the midnight convoys that dumped people with no previous experience in farming in the remote wilderness
spots that were to be their new homes, the systematic denigration of Mizrachi culture—it’s all here.
What Shapira denies, however, is that any of this reflected any real bias or exploitative intentions. “The
society that took in the immigrants did not intend
to humiliate or harm them by using them as human
putty. On the contrary, it believed that the faster
it could bring these people from their premodern
communities into the wonders of modernity, the
better it would be both for them and for the State of
Israel.” But whatever benefits they received from the
state, and however well they adjusted to it, the Miz-
T
hroughout her text, Shapira dexterously combines a history of the Israeli-Arab conflict with
an account of the political, economic, social, and
cultural evolution of the Jewish state. While her
far-reaching survey is always marked by an effort
to achieve objectivity, she nevertheless appears on
many occasions to be responding defensively, or
one might say patriotically, to the kinds of criticisms that have been voiced in recent decades by
the representatives of two important trends that
she discusses in some detail, “the new historians”
and the “post-Zionists.” The former, says Shapira,
“challenged the Zionist narrative of the War of
Independence and the establishment of the state,
emphasizing the catastrophe that had befallen the
Arabs of Israel—the Nakba.” The post-Zionists,
for their part, denounce “a Zionist ‘narrative’ that
bases the righteousness of Zionism on the spirit of
the old labor movement ethos, while ignoring the
injustice that the fulfillment of Zionism imposed
on the Arabs, the Mizrachim, Holocaust survivors,
women, and so on and so forth.”
Shapira is prepared to grant that the new historians have made some significant discoveries worthy
of being integrated into the Zionist story, even if they
have tended to stress “one segment of the reality and
ignored others.” With regard to the impact of the War
of Independence on the Palestinians, Shapira accepts
the main contours of the case made by the leading
“new historian” Benny Morris, who has exonerated
Israel of the charge of seeking all along to foment a
mass exodus, but also insisted that it did play a part in
forcibly expelling some Arabs. While acknowledging
that the Israeli Army chased the Arabs out of Lydda
and Ramle, she emphasizes that this was “the only
case of organized removal of entire cities on Jewish
initiative.” But she also notes that from the summer of
1948 onward, “the army’s orders were to prevent Arabs from returning to their villages.” Far from regarding this policy on the refugee issue as a sign that Israel
was born in sin, however, she presents justifications
for it. She notes without objection the Israeli leadership’s belief that the “Palestinians had caused the
war and they now bore its consequences.” She also
observes, rather pointedly, that “of all the refugees
created in the second half of the 1940s, the Palestinians were the only ones not absorbed by the countries
where they lived.”
If she is unwilling to express any misgivings
about Israel’s role in the creation of the Palestinian
refugee problem, Shapira is nevertheless prepared
to admit that the implementation of Zionism has in
fact resulted in injustice to the Arabs who ultimately
Members of Gush Emunim establish a new settlement, October 1979. (Photo by Moshe Milner,
courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon speaking during a press conference on “Operation Peace of
Galilee,” Tel Aviv, November 6, 1982. (Photo by Ya’acov Sa’ar, courtesy of the Government Press
Office, Israel.)
that “discrimination is slowly but surely diminishing, and among Jews there is growing recognition
of the need to prevent discrimination in the future.”
In relating how Israel handled the hundreds of
thousands of Jews who fled to it from Muslim lands
during its first decades, Shapira omits none of the
damning evidence assembled by post-Zionists and
rachim passed “their sense of deprivation, discrimination, and affront” from generation to generation.
When the children of these Mizrachi immigrants
reached adulthood, Shapira says, they “undermined
the country’s existing order.” By this she does not
mean, of course, that they toppled the regime but
that they played a major part in deciding the 1977
Winter 2013 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
29
election, the “about-turn” that ended the labor movement’s decades-long hegemony and brought Menachem Begin to power. This development “marked
more than a change of government. It symbolized a
move to center stage of new classes, another culture,
a different historical narrative.”
T
he “about-turn” in 1977 may have symbolized
a great shift, but it didn’t initiate it. Even in the
Among them is the ultra-Orthodox Mizrachi party,
Shas, which Shapira depicts as representative of “the
new identity politics that first appeared in Israeli society in 1977.” She is not sure how seriously to take
its professed ambition “to convert Israeli society in its
entirety to an ultra-Orthodox one in its own image,”
but she does know that it constitutes an angry rejection of “everything connected with the old Israeliness” and a reassertion of Mizrachi culture. On top
Ehud Barak, Madeleine Albright, and Yasser Arafat, at the Camp David Summit,
July 20, 2000. (Courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)
best of times, Shapira repeatedly reminds us, the
old collectivist ethos had strong competition. During the period of the Yishuv, there was plenty of
“tension between individual aspirations to redemption and the demand that each person accept the
collective’s directives.” Most Jewish workers in Palestine “were attracted to the bourgeois lifestyle, the
temptations of the city, and its hedonism.” In the
1950s, Elvis showed up, and so did Gary Cooper.
Rhetorically the collectivist ethos reigned
supreme and was fostered by the press, the
radio, and even literature. [Yet] at the same
time, an individualist ethos appeared. It did
not contravene the patriotism or willingness
to sacrifice of young people seeking a
challenge, but it did conflict with the old
social frameworks that emphasized the peer
group and society at large, as opposed to the
individual.
And this was only the beginning. By the end of
the century, after years of globalization and privatization, “the demise of Zionist-socialist ideology”
left many in “an ideological vacuum.” The “vulgarized and trivialized” popular culture as well as more
sophisticated works of literature testified to “the appearance of a generation with no past and no future,
interested solely in the present.”
On the one hand, the old ethos yielded to something more normal and ordinary (and thereby, somewhat paradoxically, demonstrated “how the Zionist
revolution not only succeeded but became routine”).
On the other hand, there was a resurgence of the very
forces that secular Zionism had sought to overthrow.
30
JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
of this, the massive wave of Russian immigration in
the 1990s consisted of people of a vastly more secular orientation who also “felt no affection for anyone
with ties to a socialist past” and from the moment
they arrived in the country “viewed the Zionist left
with suspicion.”
Shapira herself is far removed from being one of
those writers who, in her own words, speak of the
demise of the old ethos “with something akin to
Schadenfreude.” Nor does she fit—despite her obvious affection for all that has vanished—into the category of those who address its disappearance, as she
puts it, “with painful resignation.” If anything, she
ought to be grouped together with fiction writers like
Ronit Matalon and Dorit Rabinyan who, in Shapiro’s
own words, have “described the new Israeliness that
does not grieve the passing of the old ethos, but anchors itself in the multiculturalism of the new Israel
and gives it both expression and legitimacy.”
This does not mean that Shapira is prepared to
say goodbye to idealism. “The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, she writes, “opened a gaping hole in
this bubble of MTV-style existence.” Many Israeli
youngsters sought to cope with their grief by making peace their life’s mission.
• Winter 2013
Others volunteered for social activist causes. In
the development towns appeared core groups of
religious and non-religious people who had left
the cities and kibbutzim and wanted to live in
these towns and help their residents move ahead.
This was the new volunteerism in turn-of-thecentury Israel. The future will show whether it
heralded a new wave of idealism, or whether it
will remain a marginal event in Israeli life.
Shapira sees other signs of health in the culture.
Toward the very end of her book, she contrasts the
literary works of the 1980s, which expressed “the
depression and confusion resulting from the loss
of values and consensus in Israeli society,” and the
literature of the 1990s “that engaged with nothing,”
with two new books, Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and
Darkness and David Grossman’s To the End of the
Land. These “two great novels,” Shapira says, “reappropriated the public sphere for literature.” They
signify the replacement of “literature that documents nothingness” by “literature committed to the
nation, to society, to all that is human.”
This sounds to me like wishful thinking, something in which Shapira is not usually prone to engage. Neither the new volunteerism to which she
points, nor the general tenor of Israeli literature
seem to me to justify her enthusiasm, guarded as it
is. One ought not quibble, however, with her conclusion, at the very end of the book, that Israel is in
multiple respects “a success story of global proportions.” She describes it as
a vital, vibrant society with a dynamic economy
and an academy that has gained international
recognition for standing at the forefront of
research, a critical democracy with extreme
freedom of speech and insolent and invasive
media that never hesitate to expose all the
government’s weaknesses . . . Israeli culture is
rich, multifaceted, innovative, and constantly
renewing itself, with constant confrontations
within it between high and popular culture,
European and American culture and Mizrachi
culture, secular and religious Jewish culture,
and so forth—all of which reflect its mosaic of
cultural life.
Sadly, however, Shapira’s unequivocal pride in
her country is not matched by a comparable measure of confidence in its future. Keenly aware of the
hostility and dangers that Israel faces, she darkly
wonders whether Theodor Herzl was not “mistaken
in his belief that turning the Jewish people into a
people like any other, with its own state recognized
by the family of nations, would end anti-Semitism.”
But even if he was wrong,
and in the end Israel’s existence as an
independent Jewish state with military might
is fraught with risks and does not ensure
the existence of the Jewish people, the great
Zionist adventure was and is one of the most
astonishing attempts ever made at building a
nation: taking place democratically, without
coercion of its citizens, during an incessant
existential war, and with no loss of the moral
principles that guided it.
These are unsettling words—coming, as they do,
from someone who is far from being an inveterate
pessimist. After reading them, all I can say is that I
hope to live long enough to read a good one-volume
history of Israel that will adduce them as evidence
of worries and concerns that the 21st century finally
put to rest.
Allan Arkush is a professor of Judaic studies at
Binghamton University and the senior contributing
editor of the Jewish Review of Books.