My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GB8VQ3U | Format: PDF
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Description
Winner of the Natan Book Award
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 Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family's story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is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.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 20 hours and 45 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: November 19, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GB8VQ3U
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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