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My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Author: Ari Shavit | Language: English | ISBN: B009QJMXI8 | Format: PDF

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Description

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE ECONOMIST

WINNER OF THE NATAN BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER: THE GERRARD AND ELLA BERMAN MEMORIAL AWARD IN HISTORY • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An authoritative and deeply personal narrative history of the State of Israel, by one of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East today

 
Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.
 
We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country.
 
As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.
 
Praise for My Promised Land

“[A] must-read book . . . [My Promised Land] is a real contribution to changing the conversation about Israel and building a healthier relationship with it.Before their next 90-minute phone call, both Barack and Bibi should read it.”—Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
 
“The most extraordinary book that I’ve read on [Israel] since Amos Elon’s book called The Israelis, and that was published in the late sixties.”—David Remnick, on Charlie Rose
 
“Israel is not a proposition, it is a country. Its facticity is one of the great accomplishments of the Jews’ history. . . . It is one of the achievements of Ari Shavit’s important and powerful book to recover [that] feeling.”—Leon Wieseltier, The New York Times Book Review


From the Hardcover edition.
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  • File Size: 4378 KB
  • Print Length: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (November 19, 2013)
  • Sold by: Random House LLC
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B009QJMXI8
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,111 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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This book is a beautifully written and deeply reported attempt to explain Israel to Israelis and to the world.

The author is candid about his own perspective -- a "left-wing journalist," an "anti-occupation peacenik," yet nonetheless one genuinely aspiring to be balanced and fair. His great grandfather Herbert Bentwich arrived in Israel in 1897, and at the beginning and end of the book the author retraces Bentwich's steps.

Pro-Israel American Jews such as myself will find this book troubling. It argues that the crux of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not the 1967 Six-Day War and the occupation that resulted, but rather the events of 1948. It recounts (though without footnotes, and in a chapter that may well be challenged by other historians) an episode in 1948 in which, the author says, David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin ordered the expulsion of 35,000 Palestinian Arabs from the city of Lydda.

For all his directness about what he calls "the tragedy of 1948," Shalit is proud of what he calls the "miracle" of Zionism, He writes about Israel's orange groves, its wineries, its high-tech industry, its absorption of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and from North Africa, Yemen, and Iraq, its music scene. He is critical of the Israeli peace movement for imagining that the threat to Israel's existence can be solved and peace achieved by withdrawing from the West bank and Gaza, and he is clear-eyed in describing the threats Israel faces from a nuclear-armed Iran and from the surrounding Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs.
What are readers to make of Ari Shavit's beautifully rendered and often profound (and often profoundly depressing) new book? It isn't exactly a history, though it considers a number of key moments in the history of Israel. Nor is it memoir, though Shavit folds his and his family's experience seamlessly into the broader narrative. Creative non-fiction? That feels like a copout. Labels might not matter to some, but I settled in the end on a creative analytical meditation on the miraculous rise, strengths, and challenges of modern Israel. One thing is certain: hate it or love it, no reader will likely finish Shavit's discussion without substantial food for thought.

Writing on a topic that often breeds over simplification and over-confident statements made with excessive surety, Shavit stands out for a refreshing willingness to admit to complexity. He begins by honestly stating his own positions as an "anti-occupation peacenik" and a "left wing journalist." At the same time he eschews, indeed castigates, the current fashion of imagining Israel as the source of all the Middle East's (and even all the world's!) ills. Instead he writes with honest admiration about the miracle of Israel's birth, survival, and success. And as he points out, miracle is very much the right word. Against overwhelming odds, a people dispersed for 2000 years did reunite in their ancient homeland and create a vibrant democracy. Yet no state is perfect. Shavit remains cognoscente of Israel's weaknesses and what it took for the state to survive.

For Shavit, Israel's birth in warfare required hard choices, not the least of which was the uprooting of hostile Arab populations. Nation building is never a clean business. Nation building in wartime is still more so.

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