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# In-depth historical narrative Explores complex moral issues Detailed geopolitical context My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

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## Summary

> 📖 Dive deep into Israel’s story — where history, identity, and controversy collide!

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## Key Features

- • **Critical Yet Celebratory:** Balances admiration for Israel’s achievements with a critical eye on its challenges and contradictions.
- • **Secular Zionism Spotlight:** Focuses on the secular Jewish identity and its cultural and political implications.
- • **Nuanced Historical Insight:** Ari Shavit’s candid exploration of Israel’s triumphs and tragedies offers a rare, multi-dimensional perspective.
- • **Unflinching Moral Complexity:** Confronts difficult truths about Zionism, war crimes, and identity with fearless honesty.
- • **Engaging First-Person Accounts:** Includes exclusive interviews and personal reflections that bring history to life.

## Overview

My Promised Land by Ari Shavit is a compelling, well-researched narrative that delves into the complex history of Israel, blending personal memoir, journalistic investigation, and political analysis. It candidly addresses the triumphs and moral ambiguities of Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the evolving identity of secular Jewish society. This used book in good condition offers readers a thought-provoking journey through one of the most contested and consequential stories of the modern era.

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My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel [Shavit, Ari] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Review: Blood & Soil - This is a splendid book for anyone who desires a glimpse into the mind of a secular Zionist, a son of Abraham who loves Israel, is passionate about his Jewishness, but is not religious. And furthermore, one who is willing to look honestly at the atrocities his fellow Zionists have committed against Palestinians over the years and even to acknowledge that Israel exists because it “erased Palestine from the face of the earth.” The Wall Street Journal called “My Promised Land” “nuanced.” K. Thurm on this page called it “all over the map.” I think all over the map is better, since anything you might say about the book – sensitive or callous, insightful or obtuse, humane or brutal – you can find support or refutation for with equal ease. The one constant is the author’s commitment to tribal identity, what Martin Buber called “blood” (“the deepest, most potent stratum of our being”) and what Benjamin Disraeli called “race,” saying, “Race is all.” That’s the emotional world that Shavit inhabits, deploying the Israeli codeword “demography” to make his point. “Demography is vicious,” he says referring to the Jewish world’s supposed shrinkage. When his great-grandfather emigrated from Britain to Palestine in the 1890s, “Jews were 0.8 percent of the British population. Today they are less than 0.5 percent.” Not, of course, because they have been killed or expelled, but because they have ceased to see themselves as a separate people and have become British. Which someone else might not regard as a particular problem, like American descendants of Lithuanians or Greeks ceasing to be Lithuanians or Greeks and instead being Americans, or possibly just human beings. Shavit does see it as a problem, a huge problem. “Over the years our tribe could not survive on these lush green meadows,” he says of the British Isles. “With no Holocaust and no pogroms and no overt anti-Semitism, these islands kill us softly. Enlightened Europe also kills us softly, as does democratic America. Benign Western civilization destroys non-Orthodox Judaism.” The deadliness of good neighborly relations. What matters to him, he reveals, is not physical survival but tribal identity, and a very specific form of it at that, the “non-Orthodox” form, by which he seems to mean secular. (No black coats and sidecurls.) But why it should be a problem that secular Jews join other human beings in a common family he never explains, nor does it seem to enter his head that it requires explanation. It is just a given for him. Indeed, it is the underlying theme of the entire book, from his ode to early kibbutzniks, where he sees “new Jews” bursting with “manly energy,” to his rhapsody on the raucous nightclubs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where what he hears is “the liberating roar of secularism.” What counts is being Jewish, especially secular Jewish. Not adhering to the religion but belonging to the tribe – to the Volk, you might say, to borrow a word from another nationalist movement. It’s not just Great Britain that is a problem for tribal identity. “The demography of American Jews is vicious, too,” he writes, the self-identified Jewish population declining from 3 percent in 1950 to 2 percent today, though again, not because of genocide or expulsion – far from it – but because of “the same comfortable circumstances that made the number of British non-Orthodox Jews diminish.” The same deadliness of having good neighbors. He is dismayed too that “the Jewish birthrate in North America is low and the intermarriage rate is high” – and where else nowadays can one find condemnation of “intermarriage” except maybe on a white supremacist website? And where else can one find a lament for Jews “disappearing into the non-Jewish space” except maybe in a settler screed from the West Bank? Even in Israel itself, “Throughout the country demography is turning against the Jews,” he says worriedly. “Today 46 percent of all the inhabitants of greater Israel are Palestinians.” (By greater Israel he means Israel proper plus the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.) In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Jews are only 63 percent of the population. (Of course, because Israel annexed the Arab half of the city, which he doesn’t mention.) School kids in Jerusalem are 40 percent ultra-Orthodox, which he doesn’t like, and, horror of horrors, “more than 35 percent are Arabs,” while “only an eighth are non-religious Jews,” his sub-tribe, you might call it. But at least they make babies. “Unlike the free societies of Europe, the Israeli free society reproduces,” he says, sounding for all the world like a eugenicist from the 1920s. So that is our author’s outlook on the world. For all his journalistic credentials, for all his intellectual ability, he is an unapologetic tribalist, even when he is finding fault with his tribe and documenting its transgressions, as he does most notably in his recounting of the Zionist conquest of the town of Lydda in 1948 during what Israel calls its War of Independence and what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe. His moral center of gravity is Jewish identity. Lydda was an Arab town near Tel Aviv that the United Nations, in its resolution to partition Palestine, assigned to the Arab portion of the country but that Zionist forces decided they needed to conquer, and not only conquer but clear of its 50,000 inhabitants. What happened has been reported before, mostly notably by the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, but Shavit does the job in more detail, having interviewed several of the leading actors 20 years ago and being able to draw on the tapes of those interviews now. On July 11, 1948, a Zionist military column roared into Lydda, Shavit reports, “firing at all in its way … In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead – women, children, old people.” Thousands more either seek refuge or are herded as prisoners into a couple of mosques and a church. The next day, believing his troops are being shot at, the brigade commander gives an order to fire, and, “The soldiers shoot in every direction. Some throw hand grenades into homes. One fires an antitank PIAT shell into the small mosque … In thirty minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.” What to do next? Comes the order, from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to operations officer Yitzak Rabin down to the brigade commander: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” So soldiers go from house to house ordering people to grab what they can and go, go, go. Along the way Zionist – now Israeli -- soldiers “force those marching to hand over cash and wristwatches and jewelry.” Back in town the soldier, nicknamed Bulldozer, who fired the rocket into the mosque is hospitalized, having injured his hand in the course of the firing. Shavit relates: “His comrades came to visit him and told him he’d done good, he’d killed seventy Arabs. They told him because of the rage they felt at seeing him bleed, they had walked into the small mosque and sprayed the surviving wounded with automatic fire. Then they walked into the nearby houses and gunned down anyone they found. At night, when they were ordered to clean the small mosque and carry out the seventy corpses and bury them, they took eight other Arabs to do the digging of the burial site and afterward shot them, too, and buried them with the seventy.” In telling this horrific story, Shavit endeavors to muster sympathy for the murderers, informing us, for example, that Bulldozer was “exhausted” by the time he arrived in Lydda. “He has seen too much, done too much, killed too much.” He had specialized in “village raids, roadside ambushes,” and in torturing prisoners: “Once he starts beating the prisoners of war he begins to enjoy beating them … He makes them bleed so much that they cannot stand up.” So he was kind of frazzled. Another soldier, identified as Sniper, has also been through a lot as a member of the “training group boys,” killing Arabs left and right even before getting to Lydda. Interviewed years later, he told Shavit of shooting a woman, a priest, a child. “Every time he felled an Arab,” Shavit tells us, “he carved another groove on the wooden butt of his Canadian sniper’s rifle. Fifty grooves in all.” So he must have been kind of frazzled too. As for the brigade commander who gave the direct orders, he assures Shavit, who passes it along to us, “Officers are human beings too … although you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing.” So obviously it was tough on him too, poor bugger. What is Shavit’s own position on all this -- Ari Shavit, admirer of the state of Israel, which he calls at various points “an astounding collective success,” “a man-made miracle,” “a powerhouse of vitality, creativity and sensuality,” and “a truly free society”? It is this: “I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper. But I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know 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.” Which the reader might have to think about to appreciate. Standing by the damned sounds sufficiently noble until you realize that by “the damned” he does not mean the people who were murdered or driven out of their homes but rather the people who ordered the murdering and the driving out. Those are the people he stands by. But at the same time he rejects and condemns those who carried out their orders, those who actually bloodied their hands – Bulldozer and the sniper. Not yet finished, he stands by the “training group boys” even though the sniper, rejected, was one of them. Maybe this is what the New Republic reviewer had in mind when he said the book was “full of moral complexity,” though God knows what Thomas Friedman of The New York Times had in mind when he said Shavit remains “morally anchored.” If that’s anchored I’d like to see adrift. As for supporting the commanders because if not for them “the state of Israel would not have been born,” that brings us back to the tribal perspective. The creation of the state for Shavit’s tribe – “my people,” in his words -- justifies the murder of innocents, apparently. Fine, but how does it enable Shavit and his family to live? He has already told us that his ancestors had it easy in the British Isles. No pogroms, no Holocaust, no overt anti-Semitism. They came to Palestine looking for trouble, it sounds like. He doesn’t put it that way, but that’s what it comes down to. They came so they could aggressively identify themselves as Jews and take the land away from the non-Jews who lived there, and do it by “decisive, rapid action; action to be carried out by a new breed of Jew.” Now he tells us that the slaughter of several hundred Arab civilians and the permanent dispossession of 50,000 was justified because without it he would not have been born and his family would not have been able to live. If there is any sense to this, it escapes me. If his great-grandfather, old Herbert Bentwich, had stayed put in England, where Shavit tells us he was “a gentleman of independent means,” Ari presumably would have been born there and would have grown up free of the “existential threat” that now keeps him in a permanent sweat. Maybe riding to hounds instead of worrying himself over Iran’s nuclear program. And if there is any morality here it can only be of the purely tribal variety enunciated by Benny Morris: “Preserving my people is more important that universal moral concepts.” Though even with that you can’t untangle why he stands by some war criminals but rejects others. “I see that the choice is stark,” he says, “either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” He chooses the latter, as if there were something fine about that, something valorous, but one can imagine a thoughtful Aryan doing the same after contemplating whether to reject Nazism because of Auschwitz or accept it along with Auschwitz. And why not? if preserving one’s people is more important than universal moral concepts. It’s an interesting trajectory our author has followed, from his youthful days in the 1980s as an “anti-occupation peacenik,” as he describes his former self, to his current standing as a chin-scratching contemplator of Israel’s ambiguities. He treats us to a rerun of his experience as a prison-camp guard toward the end of the First Intifada, in 1991, when he was called up as a reservist, basically to help enforce the occupation to which he was opposed. He was “horrified” at the prospect, he tells us, and considered refusing and going to jail instead, but then, he says, “I had a better idea. I would write about the experience,” which in fact he did, getting his account published in The New York Review of Books. “Gaza Beach,” it was called, referring to the site of the camp where young Palestinian men and boys were detained for participating in, or being suspected of participating in, the revolt against Israeli’s military occupation. “Shoot and write,” you might call what he did, as a variation on the Israeli tradition of “shoot and cry,” referring to Jews feeling bad after committing crimes against Palestinians and beating their breasts about it in public before going back to commit more crimes. In the camp he guarded young Palestinians who believed essentially what he believed, that the occupation was wrong. What did he hear in this camp where he served, and what did he write about? “Hair-raising screams coming from the other side of the galvanized tin fence of the interrogation ward.” And why do the captives scream? “They scream because my Jewish state makes them scream … my beloved democratic Israel makes them scream … Thousands upon thousands are being held. Many of them are being tortured.” Then the confession: “This is a systematic brutality no democracy can endure. And I am part of it. I comply.” (He has a weakness for short dramatic sentences.) At this point the reader might think, this is surely evil, and those who do the torturing are evildoers, and maybe the state that requires it is evil too. But no, Shavit philosophizes, it is “evil without evildoers … It is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s.” Which is of course very convenient for him and very convenient for the “truly free society” he loves. What happens in the prison camp is also a tragedy, “a tragedy that never ends.” And tragedies don’t have culpable parties, they unfold as if by fate, which again is convenient for young Shavit, who, in any case, is unburdened of guilt because of his soulful confession. It’s no surprise that our author, committed as he is to Jewishness, and especially secular Jewishness, glorifies the early Zionist pioneers in a manner nearly as effusive as that of his apparent mentor, Leon Uris, author of the 1950s and 1960s best-seller “Exodus.” Uris in his overheated novel had a lot of “high-breasted” women and “tall, lean, and muscular” men draining swamps and fending off Arabs in the kibbutzim of the 1920s, their leader being “a handsome figure on his white Arabian stallion.” Shavit has young Hebrew men “strong, buff, beaming with certainty … their fine torsos are proudly on display … tanned and muscular … they look like models of revolutionary potency … manly energy is now bursting,” while “the girls are surprisingly provocative … tantalizing.” Uris had Arabs living in “filth, unspeakable disease, illiteracy and poverty … There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life … cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.” Shavit spares us most of that, but does tell us, “The downtrodden [Arab] villagers wonder who are these newcomers singing, dancing, shooting in the air. The astonished valley wonders where these [Jewish] nomads came from to pitch tents and dance wildly into the night, to awaken the dormant valley from its thousand-year sleep.” Of “Exodus,” David Ben-Gurion, founding father of Israel, commented, “As a literary work it isn’t much, but as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.” “My Promised Land,” of course, is more “complex” than mere propaganda, with its shoot-and-write confessions and its acknowledgement of Zionist atrocities, but it remains a hymn to the enterprise of European and Russian Jews immigrating to Palestine and taking over the land, even if with many a complication and non sequitur. Non sequitur? While acknowledging that these early European-born pioneers drove the Arabs out of the valleys that the pioneers coveted, he still writes of them, “By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty and undertaking a daring, unprecedented social experiment, they refute any charge that they are about to seize a land that is not theirs.” At times the illogic can make your head spin. He has these European transplants working joyously all day at land reclamation and singing and dancing all night, with “young legs thrust up in the air,” but then tells us, glumly, “only five months after Ein Harod [their kibbutz] is founded, one of its founders cannot take it anymore. He is twenty-four when he takes his life with a shotgun.” Can’t take it anymore? Well, I sympathized. After just a few pages of these carryings-on, it was getting so I couldn’t take it anymore either. Then there is the rhapsodic talk about early Zionists being able “to take the valley and to take the Land,” with a capital L, which is standard Zionist usage, as in his, “Another furrow, another acre, another swamp, until the valley is truly theirs. Until the land is once again the Land of Israel.” If you put that gusto for the Land together with the hosannas to Jewishness, the similarity to the Blood-and-Soil ideology of another national movement is disquieting, and I was sorry Shavit did not make the connection himself. That he concludes that the great “fire in the belly” of the young pioneers “will burn the valley’s Palestinians, but it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark,” strikes me as just a literary affectation, something that allows reviewers to call the book “nuanced” or “full of complexity.” Shavit’s own belly-fire, like that of the work-all-day, dance-all-night pioneers, is for tribal identity and tribal land – Blut und Boden. He even buys into the Masada story, the story first told by a Jewish-Roman historian according to which 960 Jewish extremists, or Zealots, committed suicide rather than be captured or killed by Roman soldiers at their mountaintop fortress in 74 C.E. It’s a story not swallowed whole even by the nationalistic Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, which mentions it in a wall plaque and then says, “So goes the account of Josephus Flavius. While archeologists have never found the hundreds of bodies from this mass suicide, the skeletons of three Zealots were found in the northern palace.” The Jewish Virtual Library, not otherwise shy about celebrating the glories of the tribe, says, “because of Josephus’ proclivity to depend on hearsay and legend, scholars are never sure what to accept as fact.” Shavit gives no indication of doubt on anyone’s part. He repeats the tale without qualification in the course of celebrating the mission of an early Zionist labor leader, Shmaryahu Gutman, who in 1942 led a group of 46 Zionist youth leaders up Masada in order to “change the collective psyche,” because he knows that “when the Second World War ends, the brutal conflict over the fate of Palestine will be renewed.” He wants to fire up the kids, “to unify the Hebrew youth around a powerful concrete symbol.” And this he does with the arduous climb and his recounting to the kids of the tale of suicide in preference to submission. Shavit relates the trek in more of his breathless prose: “Their eyes can hardly see in the pitch-black night. Their throats are parched because of the shortage of water. The straps of their heavy rucksacks cut into their shoulders. The air is salty. The desert is filled with chasms and ravines.” And so forth. “After sixteen hours of walking, the forty-six are not far from breaking,” he tells us. But not to worry: “They are made of stronger stuff than that.” At last on the summit, where their mythological ancestors made their mythological sacrifice, “the youngsters light a campfire and sing and dance.” Gutman, “whose ideology was studying the land, loving the land, and becoming one with the land,” tells them the story again, and says, “Our tent too is pitched on the abyss,” after which, “he steps back into the darkness and” – fortunately not falling off – “watches the dancing begin anew … Eyes afire, feet as light as air. The young boys and girls of Israel have returned to Masada to dance with abandon on the abyss … The dancing boys and girls will fight the cataclysmic war that will save Zionism and save the Jews.” That is, the cataclysmic war against the Arabs to take the land from them once and for all. It’s a scene that puts one in mind of the film “Triumph of the Will,” by Leni Riefenstahl -- all those exuberant kids celebrating the ancestral soil and their bonds of blood, cranked up to do battle with the one people who stand in their way. That in the course of this orgy Shavit declares that Zionism has “no mythology,” is just one more example of the non sequiturs and contradictions that pepper the book and make it “complex” and “nuanced.” Shavit’s devotion to Israel is such that he even rejoices in the nation’s development of nuclear weapons, which he calls a “mythic undertaking” and a “stupefying success,” though in deference to Israel’s policy of never admitting or denying that it has such weapons, he avoids coming right out and saying that it does. “I cleared this chapter with the Israeli censor,” he admits early on, so you can’t expect anything else. The chapter in question is based on an interview with the man who was director general of the Dimona nuclear plant when the first bomb was built, in 1966-67, and it is coy in the extreme. At critical points in their talk about the operation, they just raise an eyebrow or pour themselves another glass of Chivas Regal. “I know, he knows that I know, and I know that he knows that I know, but we do not say a word about it … We will conduct our conversation under a shroud of opacity.” Opacity, even though the newspaper that Shavit works for, Haaretz, is free to report what the Swedish Peace Research Institute says, which is that Israel has an arsenal of 80 nuclear warheads. It just can’t say it on its own account. This policy of speak-no-evil, we learn, was the result of a compromise between hawks and doves in 1962, one side wanting nuclear weapons, the other not. “A synthesis of these approaches emerged,” Shavit tells us, “a doctrine according to which Israel would be a nuclear power but would act as if it were not,” a doctrine that still obtains today, as Israel publicly fumes over the possibility of Iran going nuclear but refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since the nuclear chapter has been censored, of course nothing is said about the highly credible report that Israel’s nuclear program was actually made possible by the theft of bomb-grade uranium from the United States, employing a front company in Pennsylvania named NUMEC, run by one Zalman Shapiro, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, and funded by a veteran of Israel’s 1948 war, one David Lowenthal. (See the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 17, 2014, also the book “Divert!” by Grant F. Smith.) It was a company whose business was uranium enrichment and which mysteriously lost over 700 pounds of uranium at the same time that Israel was embarking on its “mythic undertaking.” Shavit looks the othe way, giving credit to France, guilt-ridden over the Holocaust, for helping Israel down the nuclear road. As for Israel’s reason for going nuclear, surprisingly enough it is not “the knowledge that the world is our enemy,” as Shavit favorably quotes an early labor leader as saying in another context. It’s more specific than that: “The expulsion of 1948 necessitated Dimona. Because of those dead villages it was clear that the Palestinians would always pursue us, that they would always want to flatten our own villages.” Yes, those Palestinians out in the streets, throwing rocks, protesting the confiscation of their lands and water cisterns, confined to ever-shrinking remnants of their country, under siege and under occupation, walled in and fenced off – they are the ones against whom nuclear warheads are needed. To which the reader may append an exclamation mark if he so desires. “Even your neighbors don’t know what they owe you,” Shavit says admiringly to his host, in a Tel Aviv suburb, as he takes his leave. Yea, our author is all over the place. At times he hardly seems to know what he thinks. He acknowledges in one chapter that, “The Arabs who were not driven away in 1948 have been oppressed by Zionism for decades. The Jewish state confiscated much of their land, trampled many of their rights, and did not accord them real equality,” but in another chapter, he seems to forget about that and says the tension between Israel and its neighbors is “inherent,” because Israel is “a Jewish state in an Arab world, and a Western state in an Islamic world, and a democracy in a region of tyranny.” Not because one people stole the land of the other. He vividly lays out some of the details of Zionism’s depredation of Palestine, giving the lie to Israel’s official story about itself, but then he blames the Israeli “elite,” of which he must be a member, for undermining the nation’s esprit with their “constant attacks on nationalism, the military, and the Zionist narrative.” He speaks approvingly of the secularism of the early Zionist settlers while mentioning their “donning their white Shabbat outfits” and saying that their “Jewish identity … sanctified the Bible” -- which suggests the summation of secular Zionism offered by Max Blumenthal: “I don’t believe in God, but God gave us the land.” He loves Israel, that much is clear, both the idea of it as an ethnocentric state and the practice of it -- or at least the secular go-go part of the practice. He loves the success stories of penniless refugees from the Holocaust who came to the barren land and created small businesses that grew into big businesses and became fabulously rich. He loves the licentious nightclubs of Tel Aviv. He loves the tanned torsos of the early kibbutzniks. He waxes rhapsodic about the basic Zionist enterprise: “We probably had to come … We performed wonders … we did the unimaginable,” employing the first-person tribal, as he does when talking about “the genocide done to us” or about how “we wrote the Bible.” He revels in the tribal spirit, the tribal toughness, the tribal energy. But he also tells us, “A movement that got most things right in its early days has gotten almost everything wrong in recent decades,” which is quite a let-down. What happened, besides the grouchiness of a supposed liberal elite? What went wrong after the early victories of clearing the land of swamps and Arabs? Well, after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, “No one had moral authority anymore … Hierarchy broke down. The sense of purpose was gone.” Then in the 1990s the immigration of Russian Jews “added to the chaos … there was no governing ethos and no governing elite.” Then after the second Lebanon war, in 2006, “Old-fashioned Israeli masculinity was castrated as we indulged ourselves in the pursuit of absolute justice and absolute pleasure,” apparently referring to social justice for Jews and the pleasure of nightclubbing, which he nevertheless exults in. He is not specific about these failings, there are no details. Still, regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of his analysis, we are finally able to descry what he admires -- a hierarchical state. A governing elite with a strong “ethos.” National machismo. (“The Jews return to history and regain their masculinity,” he has already told us in gushing over an early kibbutz.) One can’t help comparing his vision with the vision of fascistic movements of the past -- the nationalistic fervor, the mysticism of the soil, the emphasis on blood ties, the nostalgia for moral authority, the yearning for a strong “governing elite”– though no such comparison occurs to him. No surprise that our author has been a cheerleader for Israel’s periodic assaults on Gaza and has also adopted the party line that the thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths they cause are the fault of Hamas, which schemes to produce them – the bombings of hospitals, schools and apartment blocks -- so Israel will look bad. In some ways this is not a good book at all, it is a terrible book, a profoundly confused book, romanticizing what it simultaneously reveals to be vile, deploring on one page what it glorifies on another, stubbornly trying to justify the unjustifiable, and espousing a morality that should make any decent person cringe. But in another way, it is a wonderful book, giving us a vivid look into the morally and intellectually tortured world of liberal, secular Zionism, an ideology that cannot help revealing its primitive fealty to blood and soil even as it endeavors to rise above it. For that I believe it deserves the five stars that I modestly bestow on it.
Review: Informative and well written, albeit with some glaring ommissions - Shavit is a great writer with deep insight. Most of this book is informative and seems non-biased. Mr. Shavit explores the history of Israel in detail and offers his interpretations on a variety of subjects. The vast majority of the time, his assessments are enlightening and appear reasonable. In a situation this complex, readers will not agree with all of his analyses. Is it better to occasionally disagree with the author's opinions or should an author be less opinionated? I'll take the opinions every time if they seem reasonable and are the best attempt at finding the truth. Some readers may disagree, preferring less opinion. The section on Lydda explores several atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers. According to Shavit, war crimes took place in the area around the time of the 1948 war. He investigates the expulsion (or fleeing) of the Arabs from that area and concludes that the actions taken by Israel in Lydda were unjust. It seems quite possible that Shavit's reporting about Lydda is factual. If the details are true, the implication is that even Israel had some immoral characters in its forces. What Shavit doesn't say is whether the evil acts committed by a minority of soldiers or leaders should be considered evidence that the majority of the population supported such atrocities. Did this same sequence of events happen elsewhere? Shavit does not answer. I've read other accounts of the subject of Arabs fleeing the country in 1948 explaining that many feared being caught up in the middle of a war and fled on their own accord for what they expected would be a short time until the neighboring Arab countries overran Israel. Was the Lydda expulsion typical or an anomaly? Shavit does not answer this question. Shavit doesn't elaborate on several additional issues. First, the lack of character shown by the residents of Gaza for electing Hamas in 2006, even though they were card carrying racists. He points at the election relating to the ineptness and corruption of the PA but my feeling is that it is morally wrong for a population to vote for its pocketbooks while failing to consider that their party of choice has "kill Jews" in its charter. A second issue not explored enough: Why do Palestinians languish in refugee camps to this day within the neighboring Arab countries? They speak the same language as the residents of those countries and practice the same religion. It is unclear why they are still stuck in refugee camps. Should the blame be apportioned to Israel or its neighbors? Since Shavit is writing about injustices done to the Palestinians, this is a big issue deserving more detailed exploration. I especially enjoyed the interviews of such diverse representatives of Israel as business magnates, Palestinian activists and politicians, Isreali political leaders (Aryeh Deri stands out), and the new generation of Israeli youth that seems more interested in partying than in politics. Shavit's back and forth dialogue is interesting; his confrontational style with the interviewees forces them to defend their positions. Another interesting issue I discovered that Shavit makes more understandable to me is the effect of religious Jews on Israel. It is a sad fact that such a large percentage of the children entering schools in Israel are on track to learn orthodox Judaism rather than math or science. My conclusion--not Shavit's--is that this time bomb could eventually result in a brain drain and emigration by the best and brightest because they might not enjoy paying gigantic tax bills where much of the money goes to supporting religious folks on the dole. Shavit also explores the motivations of Palestinians. However, compared to the Jewish subjects in interviews, there are fewer Palestinian voices. I wish Shavit would have elaborated on whether the Palestinians are really driven by that 10% of the West Bank that Israel has settled, or, are they interested in taking over the entire country of Israel? What percentage support ISIS or al Qaeda and just hate Jews? [Since I first published this review, I saw one poll showing that 25% of Palestinians support ISIS, the highest such polling numbers in the Middle East]. What is the meaning of numerous polls showing that a majority of Palestinians support suicide bombings? These seemingly essential questions are not covered. Is Israel dealing with a foe that embraces racism on the level of Germans in the 1940s? I'm not suggesting that Hamas have committed the level of atrocities of the Nazis. But would they if they could? Based on the polls above, many Israelis have concluded that the Palestinian population itself has no problem with electing racists who state they would like to annihilate the Jews. Is the Israeli right wing assessment that Arabs in general are not very nice to minorities--Christians are killed regularly in surrounding countries--a valid reason to be hesitant about unenforceable peace treaties? What percentage of the Palestinians living in the West Bank have a positive view of Hamas in spite of its racism and TV programming aimed at teaching its children to hate Jews? Such questions are not answered in Shavit's treatise. They seem important in terms of conclusions. Shavit taught me a lot but left me wondering about a lot more.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #273,949 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #34 in Israel & Palestine History (Books) #419 in Military History (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (5,464) |
| Dimensions  | 6.34 x 1.29 x 9.55 inches |
| Edition  | First Edition |
| ISBN-10  | 0385521707 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0385521703 |
| Item Weight  | 1.75 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 464 pages |
| Publication date  | November 19, 2013 |
| Publisher  | Random House |

## Images

![My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71VF0oy6w0L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Blood & Soil
*by C***K on August 23, 2014*

This is a splendid book for anyone who desires a glimpse into the mind of a secular Zionist, a son of Abraham who loves Israel, is passionate about his Jewishness, but is not religious. And furthermore, one who is willing to look honestly at the atrocities his fellow Zionists have committed against Palestinians over the years and even to acknowledge that Israel exists because it “erased Palestine from the face of the earth.” The Wall Street Journal called “My Promised Land” “nuanced.” K. Thurm on this page called it “all over the map.” I think all over the map is better, since anything you might say about the book – sensitive or callous, insightful or obtuse, humane or brutal – you can find support or refutation for with equal ease. The one constant is the author’s commitment to tribal identity, what Martin Buber called “blood” (“the deepest, most potent stratum of our being”) and what Benjamin Disraeli called “race,” saying, “Race is all.” That’s the emotional world that Shavit inhabits, deploying the Israeli codeword “demography” to make his point. “Demography is vicious,” he says referring to the Jewish world’s supposed shrinkage. When his great-grandfather emigrated from Britain to Palestine in the 1890s, “Jews were 0.8 percent of the British population. Today they are less than 0.5 percent.” Not, of course, because they have been killed or expelled, but because they have ceased to see themselves as a separate people and have become British. Which someone else might not regard as a particular problem, like American descendants of Lithuanians or Greeks ceasing to be Lithuanians or Greeks and instead being Americans, or possibly just human beings. Shavit does see it as a problem, a huge problem. “Over the years our tribe could not survive on these lush green meadows,” he says of the British Isles. “With no Holocaust and no pogroms and no overt anti-Semitism, these islands kill us softly. Enlightened Europe also kills us softly, as does democratic America. Benign Western civilization destroys non-Orthodox Judaism.” The deadliness of good neighborly relations. What matters to him, he reveals, is not physical survival but tribal identity, and a very specific form of it at that, the “non-Orthodox” form, by which he seems to mean secular. (No black coats and sidecurls.) But why it should be a problem that secular Jews join other human beings in a common family he never explains, nor does it seem to enter his head that it requires explanation. It is just a given for him. Indeed, it is the underlying theme of the entire book, from his ode to early kibbutzniks, where he sees “new Jews” bursting with “manly energy,” to his rhapsody on the raucous nightclubs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where what he hears is “the liberating roar of secularism.” What counts is being Jewish, especially secular Jewish. Not adhering to the religion but belonging to the tribe – to the Volk, you might say, to borrow a word from another nationalist movement. It’s not just Great Britain that is a problem for tribal identity. “The demography of American Jews is vicious, too,” he writes, the self-identified Jewish population declining from 3 percent in 1950 to 2 percent today, though again, not because of genocide or expulsion – far from it – but because of “the same comfortable circumstances that made the number of British non-Orthodox Jews diminish.” The same deadliness of having good neighbors. He is dismayed too that “the Jewish birthrate in North America is low and the intermarriage rate is high” – and where else nowadays can one find condemnation of “intermarriage” except maybe on a white supremacist website? And where else can one find a lament for Jews “disappearing into the non-Jewish space” except maybe in a settler screed from the West Bank? Even in Israel itself, “Throughout the country demography is turning against the Jews,” he says worriedly. “Today 46 percent of all the inhabitants of greater Israel are Palestinians.” (By greater Israel he means Israel proper plus the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.) In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Jews are only 63 percent of the population. (Of course, because Israel annexed the Arab half of the city, which he doesn’t mention.) School kids in Jerusalem are 40 percent ultra-Orthodox, which he doesn’t like, and, horror of horrors, “more than 35 percent are Arabs,” while “only an eighth are non-religious Jews,” his sub-tribe, you might call it. But at least they make babies. “Unlike the free societies of Europe, the Israeli free society reproduces,” he says, sounding for all the world like a eugenicist from the 1920s. So that is our author’s outlook on the world. For all his journalistic credentials, for all his intellectual ability, he is an unapologetic tribalist, even when he is finding fault with his tribe and documenting its transgressions, as he does most notably in his recounting of the Zionist conquest of the town of Lydda in 1948 during what Israel calls its War of Independence and what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe. His moral center of gravity is Jewish identity. Lydda was an Arab town near Tel Aviv that the United Nations, in its resolution to partition Palestine, assigned to the Arab portion of the country but that Zionist forces decided they needed to conquer, and not only conquer but clear of its 50,000 inhabitants. What happened has been reported before, mostly notably by the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, but Shavit does the job in more detail, having interviewed several of the leading actors 20 years ago and being able to draw on the tapes of those interviews now. On July 11, 1948, a Zionist military column roared into Lydda, Shavit reports, “firing at all in its way … In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead – women, children, old people.” Thousands more either seek refuge or are herded as prisoners into a couple of mosques and a church. The next day, believing his troops are being shot at, the brigade commander gives an order to fire, and, “The soldiers shoot in every direction. Some throw hand grenades into homes. One fires an antitank PIAT shell into the small mosque … In thirty minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.” What to do next? Comes the order, from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to operations officer Yitzak Rabin down to the brigade commander: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” So soldiers go from house to house ordering people to grab what they can and go, go, go. Along the way Zionist – now Israeli -- soldiers “force those marching to hand over cash and wristwatches and jewelry.” Back in town the soldier, nicknamed Bulldozer, who fired the rocket into the mosque is hospitalized, having injured his hand in the course of the firing. Shavit relates: “His comrades came to visit him and told him he’d done good, he’d killed seventy Arabs. They told him because of the rage they felt at seeing him bleed, they had walked into the small mosque and sprayed the surviving wounded with automatic fire. Then they walked into the nearby houses and gunned down anyone they found. At night, when they were ordered to clean the small mosque and carry out the seventy corpses and bury them, they took eight other Arabs to do the digging of the burial site and afterward shot them, too, and buried them with the seventy.” In telling this horrific story, Shavit endeavors to muster sympathy for the murderers, informing us, for example, that Bulldozer was “exhausted” by the time he arrived in Lydda. “He has seen too much, done too much, killed too much.” He had specialized in “village raids, roadside ambushes,” and in torturing prisoners: “Once he starts beating the prisoners of war he begins to enjoy beating them … He makes them bleed so much that they cannot stand up.” So he was kind of frazzled. Another soldier, identified as Sniper, has also been through a lot as a member of the “training group boys,” killing Arabs left and right even before getting to Lydda. Interviewed years later, he told Shavit of shooting a woman, a priest, a child. “Every time he felled an Arab,” Shavit tells us, “he carved another groove on the wooden butt of his Canadian sniper’s rifle. Fifty grooves in all.” So he must have been kind of frazzled too. As for the brigade commander who gave the direct orders, he assures Shavit, who passes it along to us, “Officers are human beings too … although you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing.” So obviously it was tough on him too, poor bugger. What is Shavit’s own position on all this -- Ari Shavit, admirer of the state of Israel, which he calls at various points “an astounding collective success,” “a man-made miracle,” “a powerhouse of vitality, creativity and sensuality,” and “a truly free society”? It is this: “I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper. But I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know 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.” Which the reader might have to think about to appreciate. Standing by the damned sounds sufficiently noble until you realize that by “the damned” he does not mean the people who were murdered or driven out of their homes but rather the people who ordered the murdering and the driving out. Those are the people he stands by. But at the same time he rejects and condemns those who carried out their orders, those who actually bloodied their hands – Bulldozer and the sniper. Not yet finished, he stands by the “training group boys” even though the sniper, rejected, was one of them. Maybe this is what the New Republic reviewer had in mind when he said the book was “full of moral complexity,” though God knows what Thomas Friedman of The New York Times had in mind when he said Shavit remains “morally anchored.” If that’s anchored I’d like to see adrift. As for supporting the commanders because if not for them “the state of Israel would not have been born,” that brings us back to the tribal perspective. The creation of the state for Shavit’s tribe – “my people,” in his words -- justifies the murder of innocents, apparently. Fine, but how does it enable Shavit and his family to live? He has already told us that his ancestors had it easy in the British Isles. No pogroms, no Holocaust, no overt anti-Semitism. They came to Palestine looking for trouble, it sounds like. He doesn’t put it that way, but that’s what it comes down to. They came so they could aggressively identify themselves as Jews and take the land away from the non-Jews who lived there, and do it by “decisive, rapid action; action to be carried out by a new breed of Jew.” Now he tells us that the slaughter of several hundred Arab civilians and the permanent dispossession of 50,000 was justified because without it he would not have been born and his family would not have been able to live. If there is any sense to this, it escapes me. If his great-grandfather, old Herbert Bentwich, had stayed put in England, where Shavit tells us he was “a gentleman of independent means,” Ari presumably would have been born there and would have grown up free of the “existential threat” that now keeps him in a permanent sweat. Maybe riding to hounds instead of worrying himself over Iran’s nuclear program. And if there is any morality here it can only be of the purely tribal variety enunciated by Benny Morris: “Preserving my people is more important that universal moral concepts.” Though even with that you can’t untangle why he stands by some war criminals but rejects others. “I see that the choice is stark,” he says, “either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” He chooses the latter, as if there were something fine about that, something valorous, but one can imagine a thoughtful Aryan doing the same after contemplating whether to reject Nazism because of Auschwitz or accept it along with Auschwitz. And why not? if preserving one’s people is more important than universal moral concepts. It’s an interesting trajectory our author has followed, from his youthful days in the 1980s as an “anti-occupation peacenik,” as he describes his former self, to his current standing as a chin-scratching contemplator of Israel’s ambiguities. He treats us to a rerun of his experience as a prison-camp guard toward the end of the First Intifada, in 1991, when he was called up as a reservist, basically to help enforce the occupation to which he was opposed. He was “horrified” at the prospect, he tells us, and considered refusing and going to jail instead, but then, he says, “I had a better idea. I would write about the experience,” which in fact he did, getting his account published in The New York Review of Books. “Gaza Beach,” it was called, referring to the site of the camp where young Palestinian men and boys were detained for participating in, or being suspected of participating in, the revolt against Israeli’s military occupation. “Shoot and write,” you might call what he did, as a variation on the Israeli tradition of “shoot and cry,” referring to Jews feeling bad after committing crimes against Palestinians and beating their breasts about it in public before going back to commit more crimes. In the camp he guarded young Palestinians who believed essentially what he believed, that the occupation was wrong. What did he hear in this camp where he served, and what did he write about? “Hair-raising screams coming from the other side of the galvanized tin fence of the interrogation ward.” And why do the captives scream? “They scream because my Jewish state makes them scream … my beloved democratic Israel makes them scream … Thousands upon thousands are being held. Many of them are being tortured.” Then the confession: “This is a systematic brutality no democracy can endure. And I am part of it. I comply.” (He has a weakness for short dramatic sentences.) At this point the reader might think, this is surely evil, and those who do the torturing are evildoers, and maybe the state that requires it is evil too. But no, Shavit philosophizes, it is “evil without evildoers … It is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s.” Which is of course very convenient for him and very convenient for the “truly free society” he loves. What happens in the prison camp is also a tragedy, “a tragedy that never ends.” And tragedies don’t have culpable parties, they unfold as if by fate, which again is convenient for young Shavit, who, in any case, is unburdened of guilt because of his soulful confession. It’s no surprise that our author, committed as he is to Jewishness, and especially secular Jewishness, glorifies the early Zionist pioneers in a manner nearly as effusive as that of his apparent mentor, Leon Uris, author of the 1950s and 1960s best-seller “Exodus.” Uris in his overheated novel had a lot of “high-breasted” women and “tall, lean, and muscular” men draining swamps and fending off Arabs in the kibbutzim of the 1920s, their leader being “a handsome figure on his white Arabian stallion.” Shavit has young Hebrew men “strong, buff, beaming with certainty … their fine torsos are proudly on display … tanned and muscular … they look like models of revolutionary potency … manly energy is now bursting,” while “the girls are surprisingly provocative … tantalizing.” Uris had Arabs living in “filth, unspeakable disease, illiteracy and poverty … There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life … cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.” Shavit spares us most of that, but does tell us, “The downtrodden [Arab] villagers wonder who are these newcomers singing, dancing, shooting in the air. The astonished valley wonders where these [Jewish] nomads came from to pitch tents and dance wildly into the night, to awaken the dormant valley from its thousand-year sleep.” Of “Exodus,” David Ben-Gurion, founding father of Israel, commented, “As a literary work it isn’t much, but as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.” “My Promised Land,” of course, is more “complex” than mere propaganda, with its shoot-and-write confessions and its acknowledgement of Zionist atrocities, but it remains a hymn to the enterprise of European and Russian Jews immigrating to Palestine and taking over the land, even if with many a complication and non sequitur. Non sequitur? While acknowledging that these early European-born pioneers drove the Arabs out of the valleys that the pioneers coveted, he still writes of them, “By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty and undertaking a daring, unprecedented social experiment, they refute any charge that they are about to seize a land that is not theirs.” At times the illogic can make your head spin. He has these European transplants working joyously all day at land reclamation and singing and dancing all night, with “young legs thrust up in the air,” but then tells us, glumly, “only five months after Ein Harod [their kibbutz] is founded, one of its founders cannot take it anymore. He is twenty-four when he takes his life with a shotgun.” Can’t take it anymore? Well, I sympathized. After just a few pages of these carryings-on, it was getting so I couldn’t take it anymore either. Then there is the rhapsodic talk about early Zionists being able “to take the valley and to take the Land,” with a capital L, which is standard Zionist usage, as in his, “Another furrow, another acre, another swamp, until the valley is truly theirs. Until the land is once again the Land of Israel.” If you put that gusto for the Land together with the hosannas to Jewishness, the similarity to the Blood-and-Soil ideology of another national movement is disquieting, and I was sorry Shavit did not make the connection himself. That he concludes that the great “fire in the belly” of the young pioneers “will burn the valley’s Palestinians, but it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark,” strikes me as just a literary affectation, something that allows reviewers to call the book “nuanced” or “full of complexity.” Shavit’s own belly-fire, like that of the work-all-day, dance-all-night pioneers, is for tribal identity and tribal land – Blut und Boden. He even buys into the Masada story, the story first told by a Jewish-Roman historian according to which 960 Jewish extremists, or Zealots, committed suicide rather than be captured or killed by Roman soldiers at their mountaintop fortress in 74 C.E. It’s a story not swallowed whole even by the nationalistic Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, which mentions it in a wall plaque and then says, “So goes the account of Josephus Flavius. While archeologists have never found the hundreds of bodies from this mass suicide, the skeletons of three Zealots were found in the northern palace.” The Jewish Virtual Library, not otherwise shy about celebrating the glories of the tribe, says, “because of Josephus’ proclivity to depend on hearsay and legend, scholars are never sure what to accept as fact.” Shavit gives no indication of doubt on anyone’s part. He repeats the tale without qualification in the course of celebrating the mission of an early Zionist labor leader, Shmaryahu Gutman, who in 1942 led a group of 46 Zionist youth leaders up Masada in order to “change the collective psyche,” because he knows that “when the Second World War ends, the brutal conflict over the fate of Palestine will be renewed.” He wants to fire up the kids, “to unify the Hebrew youth around a powerful concrete symbol.” And this he does with the arduous climb and his recounting to the kids of the tale of suicide in preference to submission. Shavit relates the trek in more of his breathless prose: “Their eyes can hardly see in the pitch-black night. Their throats are parched because of the shortage of water. The straps of their heavy rucksacks cut into their shoulders. The air is salty. The desert is filled with chasms and ravines.” And so forth. “After sixteen hours of walking, the forty-six are not far from breaking,” he tells us. But not to worry: “They are made of stronger stuff than that.” At last on the summit, where their mythological ancestors made their mythological sacrifice, “the youngsters light a campfire and sing and dance.” Gutman, “whose ideology was studying the land, loving the land, and becoming one with the land,” tells them the story again, and says, “Our tent too is pitched on the abyss,” after which, “he steps back into the darkness and” – fortunately not falling off – “watches the dancing begin anew … Eyes afire, feet as light as air. The young boys and girls of Israel have returned to Masada to dance with abandon on the abyss … The dancing boys and girls will fight the cataclysmic war that will save Zionism and save the Jews.” That is, the cataclysmic war against the Arabs to take the land from them once and for all. It’s a scene that puts one in mind of the film “Triumph of the Will,” by Leni Riefenstahl -- all those exuberant kids celebrating the ancestral soil and their bonds of blood, cranked up to do battle with the one people who stand in their way. That in the course of this orgy Shavit declares that Zionism has “no mythology,” is just one more example of the non sequiturs and contradictions that pepper the book and make it “complex” and “nuanced.” Shavit’s devotion to Israel is such that he even rejoices in the nation’s development of nuclear weapons, which he calls a “mythic undertaking” and a “stupefying success,” though in deference to Israel’s policy of never admitting or denying that it has such weapons, he avoids coming right out and saying that it does. “I cleared this chapter with the Israeli censor,” he admits early on, so you can’t expect anything else. The chapter in question is based on an interview with the man who was director general of the Dimona nuclear plant when the first bomb was built, in 1966-67, and it is coy in the extreme. At critical points in their talk about the operation, they just raise an eyebrow or pour themselves another glass of Chivas Regal. “I know, he knows that I know, and I know that he knows that I know, but we do not say a word about it … We will conduct our conversation under a shroud of opacity.” Opacity, even though the newspaper that Shavit works for, Haaretz, is free to report what the Swedish Peace Research Institute says, which is that Israel has an arsenal of 80 nuclear warheads. It just can’t say it on its own account. This policy of speak-no-evil, we learn, was the result of a compromise between hawks and doves in 1962, one side wanting nuclear weapons, the other not. “A synthesis of these approaches emerged,” Shavit tells us, “a doctrine according to which Israel would be a nuclear power but would act as if it were not,” a doctrine that still obtains today, as Israel publicly fumes over the possibility of Iran going nuclear but refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since the nuclear chapter has been censored, of course nothing is said about the highly credible report that Israel’s nuclear program was actually made possible by the theft of bomb-grade uranium from the United States, employing a front company in Pennsylvania named NUMEC, run by one Zalman Shapiro, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, and funded by a veteran of Israel’s 1948 war, one David Lowenthal. (See the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 17, 2014, also the book “Divert!” by Grant F. Smith.) It was a company whose business was uranium enrichment and which mysteriously lost over 700 pounds of uranium at the same time that Israel was embarking on its “mythic undertaking.” Shavit looks the othe way, giving credit to France, guilt-ridden over the Holocaust, for helping Israel down the nuclear road. As for Israel’s reason for going nuclear, surprisingly enough it is not “the knowledge that the world is our enemy,” as Shavit favorably quotes an early labor leader as saying in another context. It’s more specific than that: “The expulsion of 1948 necessitated Dimona. Because of those dead villages it was clear that the Palestinians would always pursue us, that they would always want to flatten our own villages.” Yes, those Palestinians out in the streets, throwing rocks, protesting the confiscation of their lands and water cisterns, confined to ever-shrinking remnants of their country, under siege and under occupation, walled in and fenced off – they are the ones against whom nuclear warheads are needed. To which the reader may append an exclamation mark if he so desires. “Even your neighbors don’t know what they owe you,” Shavit says admiringly to his host, in a Tel Aviv suburb, as he takes his leave. Yea, our author is all over the place. At times he hardly seems to know what he thinks. He acknowledges in one chapter that, “The Arabs who were not driven away in 1948 have been oppressed by Zionism for decades. The Jewish state confiscated much of their land, trampled many of their rights, and did not accord them real equality,” but in another chapter, he seems to forget about that and says the tension between Israel and its neighbors is “inherent,” because Israel is “a Jewish state in an Arab world, and a Western state in an Islamic world, and a democracy in a region of tyranny.” Not because one people stole the land of the other. He vividly lays out some of the details of Zionism’s depredation of Palestine, giving the lie to Israel’s official story about itself, but then he blames the Israeli “elite,” of which he must be a member, for undermining the nation’s esprit with their “constant attacks on nationalism, the military, and the Zionist narrative.” He speaks approvingly of the secularism of the early Zionist settlers while mentioning their “donning their white Shabbat outfits” and saying that their “Jewish identity … sanctified the Bible” -- which suggests the summation of secular Zionism offered by Max Blumenthal: “I don’t believe in God, but God gave us the land.” He loves Israel, that much is clear, both the idea of it as an ethnocentric state and the practice of it -- or at least the secular go-go part of the practice. He loves the success stories of penniless refugees from the Holocaust who came to the barren land and created small businesses that grew into big businesses and became fabulously rich. He loves the licentious nightclubs of Tel Aviv. He loves the tanned torsos of the early kibbutzniks. He waxes rhapsodic about the basic Zionist enterprise: “We probably had to come … We performed wonders … we did the unimaginable,” employing the first-person tribal, as he does when talking about “the genocide done to us” or about how “we wrote the Bible.” He revels in the tribal spirit, the tribal toughness, the tribal energy. But he also tells us, “A movement that got most things right in its early days has gotten almost everything wrong in recent decades,” which is quite a let-down. What happened, besides the grouchiness of a supposed liberal elite? What went wrong after the early victories of clearing the land of swamps and Arabs? Well, after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, “No one had moral authority anymore … Hierarchy broke down. The sense of purpose was gone.” Then in the 1990s the immigration of Russian Jews “added to the chaos … there was no governing ethos and no governing elite.” Then after the second Lebanon war, in 2006, “Old-fashioned Israeli masculinity was castrated as we indulged ourselves in the pursuit of absolute justice and absolute pleasure,” apparently referring to social justice for Jews and the pleasure of nightclubbing, which he nevertheless exults in. He is not specific about these failings, there are no details. Still, regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of his analysis, we are finally able to descry what he admires -- a hierarchical state. A governing elite with a strong “ethos.” National machismo. (“The Jews return to history and regain their masculinity,” he has already told us in gushing over an early kibbutz.) One can’t help comparing his vision with the vision of fascistic movements of the past -- the nationalistic fervor, the mysticism of the soil, the emphasis on blood ties, the nostalgia for moral authority, the yearning for a strong “governing elite”– though no such comparison occurs to him. No surprise that our author has been a cheerleader for Israel’s periodic assaults on Gaza and has also adopted the party line that the thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths they cause are the fault of Hamas, which schemes to produce them – the bombings of hospitals, schools and apartment blocks -- so Israel will look bad. In some ways this is not a good book at all, it is a terrible book, a profoundly confused book, romanticizing what it simultaneously reveals to be vile, deploring on one page what it glorifies on another, stubbornly trying to justify the unjustifiable, and espousing a morality that should make any decent person cringe. But in another way, it is a wonderful book, giving us a vivid look into the morally and intellectually tortured world of liberal, secular Zionism, an ideology that cannot help revealing its primitive fealty to blood and soil even as it endeavors to rise above it. For that I believe it deserves the five stars that I modestly bestow on it.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Informative and well written, albeit with some glaring ommissions
*by S***L on July 26, 2014*

Shavit is a great writer with deep insight. Most of this book is informative and seems non-biased. Mr. Shavit explores the history of Israel in detail and offers his interpretations on a variety of subjects. The vast majority of the time, his assessments are enlightening and appear reasonable. In a situation this complex, readers will not agree with all of his analyses. Is it better to occasionally disagree with the author's opinions or should an author be less opinionated? I'll take the opinions every time if they seem reasonable and are the best attempt at finding the truth. Some readers may disagree, preferring less opinion. The section on Lydda explores several atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers. According to Shavit, war crimes took place in the area around the time of the 1948 war. He investigates the expulsion (or fleeing) of the Arabs from that area and concludes that the actions taken by Israel in Lydda were unjust. It seems quite possible that Shavit's reporting about Lydda is factual. If the details are true, the implication is that even Israel had some immoral characters in its forces. What Shavit doesn't say is whether the evil acts committed by a minority of soldiers or leaders should be considered evidence that the majority of the population supported such atrocities. Did this same sequence of events happen elsewhere? Shavit does not answer. I've read other accounts of the subject of Arabs fleeing the country in 1948 explaining that many feared being caught up in the middle of a war and fled on their own accord for what they expected would be a short time until the neighboring Arab countries overran Israel. Was the Lydda expulsion typical or an anomaly? Shavit does not answer this question. Shavit doesn't elaborate on several additional issues. First, the lack of character shown by the residents of Gaza for electing Hamas in 2006, even though they were card carrying racists. He points at the election relating to the ineptness and corruption of the PA but my feeling is that it is morally wrong for a population to vote for its pocketbooks while failing to consider that their party of choice has "kill Jews" in its charter. A second issue not explored enough: Why do Palestinians languish in refugee camps to this day within the neighboring Arab countries? They speak the same language as the residents of those countries and practice the same religion. It is unclear why they are still stuck in refugee camps. Should the blame be apportioned to Israel or its neighbors? Since Shavit is writing about injustices done to the Palestinians, this is a big issue deserving more detailed exploration. I especially enjoyed the interviews of such diverse representatives of Israel as business magnates, Palestinian activists and politicians, Isreali political leaders (Aryeh Deri stands out), and the new generation of Israeli youth that seems more interested in partying than in politics. Shavit's back and forth dialogue is interesting; his confrontational style with the interviewees forces them to defend their positions. Another interesting issue I discovered that Shavit makes more understandable to me is the effect of religious Jews on Israel. It is a sad fact that such a large percentage of the children entering schools in Israel are on track to learn orthodox Judaism rather than math or science. My conclusion--not Shavit's--is that this time bomb could eventually result in a brain drain and emigration by the best and brightest because they might not enjoy paying gigantic tax bills where much of the money goes to supporting religious folks on the dole. Shavit also explores the motivations of Palestinians. However, compared to the Jewish subjects in interviews, there are fewer Palestinian voices. I wish Shavit would have elaborated on whether the Palestinians are really driven by that 10% of the West Bank that Israel has settled, or, are they interested in taking over the entire country of Israel? What percentage support ISIS or al Qaeda and just hate Jews? [Since I first published this review, I saw one poll showing that 25% of Palestinians support ISIS, the highest such polling numbers in the Middle East]. What is the meaning of numerous polls showing that a majority of Palestinians support suicide bombings? These seemingly essential questions are not covered. Is Israel dealing with a foe that embraces racism on the level of Germans in the 1940s? I'm not suggesting that Hamas have committed the level of atrocities of the Nazis. But would they if they could? Based on the polls above, many Israelis have concluded that the Palestinian population itself has no problem with electing racists who state they would like to annihilate the Jews. Is the Israeli right wing assessment that Arabs in general are not very nice to minorities--Christians are killed regularly in surrounding countries--a valid reason to be hesitant about unenforceable peace treaties? What percentage of the Palestinians living in the West Bank have a positive view of Hamas in spite of its racism and TV programming aimed at teaching its children to hate Jews? Such questions are not answered in Shavit's treatise. They seem important in terms of conclusions. Shavit taught me a lot but left me wondering about a lot more.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Couldn't put it down
*by S***Y on January 19, 2014*

This is a beautifully written book, and very interesting. Shavit explores episodes in Israel's history that even those who are well read in the subject will find new and enlightening. He is a son of Israel's founding families -- Jewish, Ashkenazi and left-oriented. But he bends over backwards to present the mindset also of others: Palestinians, Sephardim, and the right. His patriotism and emotional love for the country is apparent, but he doesn't hesitate to criticize things that Israel has done, and he raises all of the doubts about Israel's prospects for survival that others hesitate to admit. The chronology of the book runs from the late 1890's right up to the elections in 2013, and so it remains relevant as I write in January 2014, but the ending, of course, won't be relevant for long, absent updating. And no book is perfect. I felt like I couldn't put it down until I got 75% finished. Then it seemed to drag on a bit, be less well organized, and contain too much preachy essay. But it picks up again, and I would not have wanted to miss the last sections of the book. For those unfamiliar with Israel and its history, the book will provide a wealth of information, but it makes references at times to people, places and things without a lot of explanation. These readers will miss out a bit if they don't keep a map and Wikipedia close by.

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