Feeling Good About Feeling Bad
In April 1897, the British lawyer Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of twenty-one Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Bentwich was an acquaintance of Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet “The Jewish State” had been published the year before. Herzl, who had never been to Palestine, hoped Bentwich’s group would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress, which was to be held in Basel later that year.1
Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European, and, like many of the early Zionists, religious. Herzl was chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of secular and emancipated Jews in Western Europe who were becoming assimilated.2 A solution to the problems of both groups, he believed, could be found by resurrecting the Land of Israel in Palestine.
At the end of the eighteenth century, roughly 250,000 people lived in Palestine, including some 6,500 Jews, most of them Sephardic, concentrated in the holy cities of Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias. By 1897, when Bentwich’s delegation made its visit, the Jewish share of the population had more than tripled, with Ashkenazi Zionist immigration pushing it up toward 5 to 8 percent.3
Bentwich seems not to have noticed the large majority of Gentiles, writes his great-grandson, the Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, in the award-winning book My Promised Land. In his white suit and white cork hat, Bentwich failed to observe the Arab stevedores who carried him ashore, the Arab peddlers in the Jaffa market, the Arab guides and servants in his convoy. Looking out from the top of a water tower in central Palestine, Bentwich didn’t register the thousands of Muslims and Christians below, or the more than half a million Arabs living in Palestine’s twenty towns and cities and hundreds of villages. He didn’t see them, Shavit tells us, because most lived in hamlets surrounded by vacant territory; because he saw the Land of Israel as stretching far beyond the settlements of Palestine into the deserts of present-day Jordan; and because there wasn’t yet a concept of Palestinian national identity and therefore there were no Palestinians.4
Bentwich’s blindness was tragic, Shavit laments, but it was necessary to save the Jews. In April 1903, forty-nine Jews were murdered in a pogrom in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova. More than a million Jews fled Eastern Europe over the next decade, the majority of them to America. Most of the 35,000–40,000 who immigrated to Palestine were secular and idealistic.5 They believed Palestine could accommodate Arabs and Jews. Many lived in agrarian communal settlements, which helped to transform the image of the pale, effete Jew of the ghetto into the tanned, masculine pioneer of the socialist kibbutz.
By 1935, Jews made up more than a quarter of the territory’s population, and in dozens of places Palestinian tenant farmers had been evicted to make way for Jewish orange groves and agricultural communities. But the arrival of Jewish capital, technology, and medicine, Shavit writes, didn’t benefit only the Jews. He cites a 1936 article by the leader of Rehovot’s orange growers: “Never did a colonial project bring so much blessing as the blessing brought upon the country and its inhabitants by our project.”6
With Hitler’s rise, many more Jews sought to move to Palestine. The violence of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, a nationalist uprising against the British Mandate and mass Jewish immigration, resulted in the deaths of five thousand Palestinians and several hundred Jews and shocked the local Jewish community. Opposition to Jewish immigration wasn’t new, but before this, riots and violence had been brief and sporadic. Zionism’s utopian phase came to an abrupt end, Shavit writes, to be replaced by the realization that ethnic conflict and population transfer were unavoidable.7
When the United Nations proposed partition in 1947, Jews made up less than 32 percent of the population and owned under 7 percent of the land. The UN proposal, which was rejected by the Palestinian leadership and the Arab League, granted the majority of the land—55 percent—to the Jewish minority. The plan was approved by the UN General Assembly even so, and war broke out the following day, November 30, 1947. By the time Arab armies invaded in May 1948, around two thousand Jews and four thousand Palestinians had been killed and some 250,000–350,000 Palestinians had fled or been driven out.8
In July 1948, the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian village of Lydda, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Soldiers threw hand grenades into houses, fired an antitank shell at a crowded mosque, and sprayed the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”9
These and other episodes of what Shavit calls “cleansing” were not an aberration, he writes, but an integral part of the Zionist mission to create a state with the largest possible Jewish majority. “If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be,” he writes. “If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.” “One thing is clear to me,” Shavit goes on:
the brigade commander and the military governor [of Lydda, both of whom Shavit interviewed] were right to get angry at the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed.… If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the state of Israel would not have been born.10
After the war, progress took precedence over reflection, Shavit writes. Survival was all. Denial took root: the Holocaust was not mentioned; Sephardic and Middle-Eastern Jewish culture were marginalized; Palestinian refugees were forgotten. History was erased. Hebrew patronyms replaced Eastern European ones. The names of biblical locations supplanted those of Arab cities. In the decade after the war, four hundred now empty Palestinian villages were demolished and four hundred new Israeli ones were built.11
Enormous challenges confronted the fledgling state: rationing, poverty, an influx of traumatized Holocaust survivors. In less than four years, the Jewish population more than doubled. Against all odds, it thrived, Shavit writes, and became an egalitarian social-democratic state. Science, industry, and agriculture flourished. In the desert, a nuclear reactor was built.12
Much to Shavit’s regret, however, the enlightened Israel built by Ben-Gurion didn’t last long. After the triumph of 1967, when Israel conquered Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the rest of Mandatory Palestine, there came the devastating surprise attack led by Egypt and Syria in 1973. The Labor Party, which under various names had been the dominant political force since before the founding of the state, never recovered. Seeking to fill the void left by the old Labor Zionist settlement movement, religious Zionists spread out across the hills of Judea and Samaria, land of greater biblical significance than the coastal territory held by Israel before 1967.
A peace movement grew from Labor’s ashes. Shavit considered himself a member, but over time he came to see its faults. Its base was a narrow Ashkenazi elite and its leaders were dilettantes, he writes. It used calls for peace as a cudgel against settlers and the right wing. Its moralizing, misleading focus on the relatively straightforward issue of the 1967 occupation was a way of avoiding a reckoning with what Shavit views as the irresolvable tragedy of 1948. It concentrated on West Bank settlements, he believes, in order to distract attention from the evacuated Palestinian villages in Israel proper where the movement’s leaders now lived. Promising a utopian vision no less messianic than that of the settlers, it conflated an end to occupation with peace, ignoring Arab political culture and Palestinian aspirations for all of Mandatory Palestine. It counted, Shavit believed, on a peace partner that didn’t exist and deluded itself about the nature of the conflict and the brutality of the Middle East. Clashes between Palestinians and Israelis didn’t begin in 1967; an end to the occupation isn’t the Palestinians’ only demand. Even if the occupation ends, Palestinian citizens of Israel will still want to change the Jewish character of the state. The refugees will not give up on returning to Lydda. The essence of the conflict is Lydda, Shavit writes.13 And Lydda has no solution.
* * *
Equal parts memoir, popular history, and polemic, My Promised Land makes a forceful argument about the unlikelihood of a two-state solution, but not from either of the political standpoints typically associated with this position, the far left and the hard right. Instead, it provides a window into the thinking of the largest section of the Israeli electorate, the amorphous, conflicted center, which, after Oslo’s failure, the Second Intifada, and the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, has come to the view that Jewish and Palestinian nationalism can’t be reconciled. The book is a sympathetic portrait of the Holocaust survivors who eked out an existence in the cramped housing estates of a recently founded country; the technology entrepreneurs propping up an economy that includes a dangerously large and growing nonworking population; and the young West Bank settlers in their knitted yarmulkes, who “admired the historical Labor Movement” but “despised what Labor had become.”14
Shavit is critical of his own tribe, the Ashkenazi Labor Zionist elite: he describes its debasement of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries and were indiscriminately sprayed with DDT and forced into camps, some of them surrounded by barbed wire; its fear that Arabic-speaking Jews and ultra-Orthodox yeshiva graduates would overtake “their” country, turning it into another religious Middle Eastern state and destroying its Western foundations from within; its blurring of the line between condemnation of the right’s politics and contempt for the right’s lower-status supporters; and its hollow vision of peace, which “had no Arabs,” as Shavit puts it, and was used as a means of attacking the underclasses who brought Menachem Begin’s Likud to power in 1977.15
Central to Shavit’s critique of this elite is the claim that it has refused to face up to the meaning of Palestinian dispossession in 1948, concentrating on the 1967 occupation instead. But in Shavit’s focus on the events of 1948, he himself does something similar, drawing attention to the war while overlooking the way Palestinians view the decades before and after it. Palestinians do not merely seek an apology for the expulsions and losses that occurred during the heat of battle. They want Israelis to recognize what they see as the injustice of the displacement they’ve suffered since the dawn of Zionism. Shavit is to be commended for not glossing over the misdeeds of Israeli soldiers in 1948—documented over the past few decades by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Simha Flapan, and other revisionists known as the New Historians—even if he congratulates himself rather too many times for having dared “touch the fire.”16 But he doesn’t merely describe what happened in 1948; he attempts to justify it, and his book is in part a moral defense of Zionism’s costs to the local population.
Curiously for a text so concerned with the legitimacy of Zionism, My Promised Land doesn’t make the most powerful and obvious arguments for the right of Jews to self-determination in what is now the state of Israel: first, the fact of its being enshrined in international law, in the form of UN Resolution 181, which was reaffirmed in the declarations of independence of both Israel, in 1948, and Palestine, in 1988. Second, that no matter the actions of their forebears, there are now more than six million Jews in Israel, 75 percent of its population, and the majority of them are second- and third-generation Israelis who want self-determination in their own state. And third, that to deny Jews a country would be to seek redress for past injustices by creating new ones.
Rather than make Israel’s case on these narrow and fairly uncontroversial grounds, Shavit chooses a more ambitious, and fraught, approach: a history of Israel in which the 1948 war emerges as an exception that proves the rule of his country’s morality. Shavit relegates other difficult aspects of Israeli dealings with the Palestinians to the shadows. The resulting mélange of legend and fact is not firm ground on which to stake a moral claim, and he makes many assertions that are easy to dispute: that early Zionists were oblivious to the existence of a native population; that there were few alternatives available to Jews in Eastern Europe; that a historic right of the Jewish people to establish sovereignty in their ancient homeland trumped the rights and wishes of the local population who had lived there for more than a thousand years; that Zionist immigration offered an economic boon to local Arabs; that the Holocaust retroactively justified the Zionist settlement that preceded it by more than half a century; and that the government established after Israel’s founding was democratic and fair.17 Several of these points have some merit, but all are presented with glaring omissions and misrepresentations, even by the standards of mainstream Zionist historiography.
* * *
Shavit is a secularist, who sees the decision to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine as based on broad universal grounds—the need of a persecuted people for asylum—and not on the belief that the Jews own the land by virtue of God’s promise to Abraham. Save for several references to the Holy Land and the Jews’ ancient homeland, religion is almost entirely absent from his description of early Zionism.18 Yet, as Anita Shapira, among the strongest critics of the New Historians, shows in a recent book, Israel: A History, religious ideas, traditions, and texts were at the heart of the enterprise from the start. In the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community, “the Bible was the seminal text,” Shapira writes. “It preserved historical memory … and also concretized the Land of Israel, forming a direct connection between past and present.” The piety of Eastern European Jews was the main reason the secular leaders of the Zionist movement chose to settle in Palestine and not in Argentina, as Herzl had contemplated in “The Jewish State,” or the East African territory offered by the British government and considered by the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903.19
Shavit writes that if Jews hadn’t come to Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century they would have had no future. This was hardly the case, as Shapira points out: millions of Eastern European Jews fled to the West, mostly to America. Even among the small Zionist minority, large numbers chose not to remain in Palestine. Of the thousands of men and women who arrived during the first wave of Zionist immigration, from 1881 to 1904, more than half did not stay; the same was true of the 35,000–40,000 immigrants of the second wave. Ahad Ha’am, one of Zionism’s most influential thinkers, whom Shavit calls “the national moral leader,” believed that most Jews should go to live in the United States and only a select few should establish a spiritual center in Palestine, a model society for the diaspora to emulate.20
Ahad Ha’am and other prominent Zionists of the time also contradict the much-echoed notion of Palestine’s emptiness. They noticed the local Arabs who made up more than 90 percent of Palestine’s inhabitants, and foresaw war with them. Six years before Shavit’s relative, Bentwich, arrived in Palestine, Ahad Ha’am had written:
We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong.… And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite!… They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions … even if [the Arabs] are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.… This society … will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war.21
As Shapira shows, after the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905 a heated debate arose about the suitability of Palestine as a national home, given its large Arab population. A lecture by Yitzhak Epstein, “The Hidden Question,” helped spark the debate, exacerbating tensions between the territorialists, who wanted to establish Jewish self-rule wherever they could, and the Zionists of Zion, who insisted on a national home in Palestine. “Will those who are dispossessed remain silent and accept what is being done to them?” Epstein asked. “In the end, they will wake up and return to us in blows what we have looted from them with our gold!”22
These ethical debates are almost entirely ignored in Shavit’s narrative, a striking omission in a book so concerned with moral defense. He asserts that Zionist settlement was justified by the need of Eastern European Jews to escape persecution, but passes over the attendant normative questions: Did persecution in Europe mean that Jewish refugees had to be accommodated anywhere that could take them, or was there a special obligation on Palestine? Did the persecuted Jews have a right merely to refuge in Palestine, or to their own state there, even if that meant displacing the local population? Was it legitimate for the British to promise the Jews a national home in Palestine? In avoiding these issues, Shavit brings us no closer to understanding the way Palestinians view their history, and he entrenches a narrative of moral righteousness that will hinder any reconciliation.
Although he questions the Zionists’ actions in the 1948 war, Shavit has no doubts about the rectitude of their cause before that point. “In the spring of 1935,” he writes, “Zionism is a just national movement” representing “an absolute, universal justice that cannot be refuted. At this point in time the injustice caused to native Arabs by the Zionist project is still limited.” This blunt assessment, and others like it, might be more convincing if Shavit could explain why Israel’s second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, then going by the name Shertok, said in 1936 that “there is not a single Arab who has not been hurt by the entry of Jews into Palestine.” Or the reason Ben-Gurion said in 1938: “When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves—this is only half the truth.… The fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”23 More than seventy years after the most prominent Zionists uttered these words, Shavit by comparison displays a Manichean obtuseness.
He repeatedly invokes the socialist egalitarianism of the kibbutz as a moral justification for Zionism, as if the harmony of the kibbutz could excuse the Zionists’ behavior toward non-Jews. “Without the communal aspect of kibbutz,” he writes, “socialist Zionism will lack legitimacy and will be perceived as an unjust colonialist movement.… 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.” The egalitarian kibbutz, the orange grove, being close to nature—these are presented by Shavit as the essence of life in Palestine during the British Mandate. Arabs flourished alongside Jews; injustices to the locals were offset by the progress Zionism brought. All of this fits nicely with the story told to children at Zionist summer camps, but crucial parts are missing from Shavit’s picture: the promotion of “Hebrew labor,” “Hebrew land,” and “Hebrew produce,” and the efforts to close the Jewish economy to Arab workers; the repeated Arab petitions against Jewish immigration dating back to 1891; and the bourgeois urban lifestyle chosen by most immigrants in spite of the promotion of a rustic, pioneering ideal. “Despite all the preaching,” Shapira writes, “in 1931 only 19 percent of the Jews in Palestine lived in agricultural settlements, and subsequently this figure dwindled.”24
The Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, Shavit writes, “pushed Zionism from a state of utopian bliss to a state of dystopian conflict,” paving the way for 1948. But this era of innocence is a figment of his imagination. In 1886, an Arab riot against Jewish settlers was described in the Zionist press as a pogrom; subsequent riots took place in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1933.25
When Shavit asserts that the 1948 war was an unavoidable consequence of Zionism, he seems to forget his depiction of happy coexistence in the early years of the Yishuv. “The conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident,” he writes. “They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” But Shavit doesn’t back up his claim that the expulsion of Lydda was inevitable. Lydda was situated on land granted to the Arab state in the 1947 UN partition plan. Unlike the capture of the southern village of Isdud (present-day Ashdod) or the northern town of Nazareth, Lydda’s conquest wasn’t necessary to correct the flawed borders of the partition plan, which divided the Jewish state into discontinuous thirds. At the time of Lydda’s July 1948 defeat, Shapira writes, the Arab combatants were “ill-equipped, partially trained soldiers,” outnumbered by Jewish forces (as they remained for the rest of the war) and with “no co-ordination and no central command.” Shavit writes that taking over Lydda, ejecting its residents, and forbidding their return were necessary, but he doesn’t explain why this wasn’t also true of Bethlehem, Qalqilya, the Old City of Jerusalem, or any number of other Palestinian towns that abutted the new state. As Shapira shows, Israeli leaders decided after some discussion not to conquer other areas and drive out their Palestinian residents, even though they had the capacity to do so. Toward the end of the war, she writes, Ben-Gurion “rejected Yigal Allon’s proposals to conquer the West Bank, which at the time was militarily achievable. He was sensitive to the demographic problem of governing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and did his utmost to avoid that snare.”26
In a broader sense, however, Shavit may be right that the displacement of Palestinians was in the cards from early on, and that the expulsions of 1948 were a natural extension of the goals of the mainstream Zionists, who sought to create a Jewish state for a largely Eastern European minority population despite the objections of the native Arab majority. “The partial dispossession of another people,” Shavit writes, “is at the core of the Zionist enterprise.” Yet Shavit leaves curiously unexamined the decades-old ideology that he says drove this dispossession. He shrugs off questions about it by saying one either accepts Zionism or one doesn’t. He does not try to reply to the universalist questions put to Zionism from its earliest days, such as the argument made by a delegation of Palestinian Muslim and Christian leaders in response to a 1921 report by the British Mandatory authorities: “What confusion would ensue all the world over if this principle on which the Jews base their ‘legitimate’ claim were carried out in other parts of the world! What migrations of nations must follow! The Spaniards in Spain would have to make room for the Arabs and Moors who conquered and ruled their country for over seven hundred years.”27
Shavit also fails to trace the roots of Zionist ideology to the romantic, exclusivist, völkisch nationalism of the Eastern European and German lands from which most early Zionists came. With one exception, he doesn’t ask whether that ideology played a role in driving the expulsions of 1948 and the state policies that followed the war, some of which continue to this day. The exception is West Bank settlement: he asks whether it is “a benign continuation of Zionism or a malignant mutation of Zionism,” and he concludes that, though its modus operandi is similar to that of early Zionist settlement, “the historic and conceptual context is completely different” and so it is “an aberration, a grotesque reincarnation.”28
Throughout the book, Shavit writes misleadingly of a unitary Zionism, ignoring the considerable diversity within the movement. His version of Zionism goes without contestation from its late nineteenth-century birth until today, with the sole setback of 1948. It’s as if he’d taken the crudest anticolonialist and anti-imperialist critiques of Israel—in which every misdeed in the history of Zionism is a predetermined consequence of Zionism tout court—and inverted them. In every case except 1948, the connections between Zionist ideologies and Israeli actions toward Palestinians, particularly those who hold Israeli citizenship, are minimized.
Shavit is right to make the point that Arabs weren’t just passive victims. Many of the Zionist movement’s actions have been driven by a very real sense of threat caused by Arab antagonism: the 1929 Hebron massacre, the support of Nazi Germany by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the anti-Semitism pervasive in Arab propaganda, the numerous military attacks against Israel, the suicide bombings of civilians in Israeli cities during the Second Intifada. But Shavit does his defense a disservice by obfuscating so much. His telling of Israel’s story glosses over or entirely omits some inconvenient facts. In the years after the armistice, as Shapira, Morris, and other historians have recounted, several thousand of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their lands were shot and killed when they tried to sneak back home under cover of darkness; Israel destroyed, expropriated, and tried to erase signs of past life in former Palestinian villages, including those where Israel’s 75,000 internally displaced Palestinian citizens had lived; and between 1949 and 1956 tens of thousands of Palestinians, including residents of present-day Ashkelon and Bedouin in the north and the Negev, were encouraged to leave or forcibly displaced to Sinai, Gaza, Syria, and elsewhere.29
Shavit doesn’t mention that Israel’s prime minister approved plans in the early 1950s to transfer thousands of Christian Arabs to Argentina and Brazil, or that the state imposed military government on its Arab citizens until the end of 1966, denied them access to the judicial system, censored their press, made employment in schools and municipalities contingent on the military administration’s consent, and restricted their movement by requiring them to obtain permits to leave their villages. For Shavit, “the Israel of the 1950s was a just social democracy,” one of “the most egalitarian … in the world.”30
Shavit ignores the post-1948 acceleration of the settlement project, which restricted the growth of Arab villages within Israel, expropriated their lands, and surrounded them with new settlements that were intended, in the words of government officials, to “Judaize” the Arab-inhabited areas and borderlands. And he disregards the fact that after the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan, it was mainly Israel’s Labor Party leaders and leading intellectuals—not religious zealots—who pushed for territorial expansion.31
Most glaringly, Shavit doesn’t explore the continuities between Israeli actions in 1948 and current policies: the restrictions on the sale and lease of land to Arabs; the punishment of organizations that commemorate the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948; and the plans of the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division to “Judaize the Galilee” and expand Jewish territorial contiguity into areas inhabited by Palestinian citizens. The headline of an editorial commenting on these government-supported plans in Haaretz stated, “‘Judaization’ = racism.”32 Each week the newspapers describe the struggle to strengthen the state’s Jewish character at the expense of its Palestinian citizens, yet in Shavit’s account it’s as though the 1948 war was the last time Israel curtailed the rights of the quarter of the country that isn’t Jewish.
* * *
My Promised Land was written for an American audience, in English not Hebrew, and has received more praise from American Jews than any other book on Israel published in the past decade. The director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, the Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, and the New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, offered gushing blurbs for the book, as did the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. It received the Natan Book Award, a prize that funds publicity, marketing, and distribution for the winning titles. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee had its staff distribute copies to youth activists. Thomas Friedman and David Brooks each dedicated a laudatory New York Times column to it. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, whom Shavit describes as his book’s “godfather,” spoke on multiple panels to publicize the work, which he helped edit, extracted in his magazine, and called “the most extraordinary book” on Israel in decades and “an argument for liberal Zionism.” In a panegyric in The New York Times Book Review, Leon Wieseltier, who was then literary editor of The New Republic, described it as “a Zionist book unblinkered by Zionism.”33
Opinion polls suggest that most American Jews identify themselves as liberals and Democrats and feel affection for Israel. Many dislike the suggestion that there is any tension between their commitment to liberalism and their Zionism. Shavit’s fundamentally uplifting tale, his celebration of Israel, tells American liberal Jews that there is not. The findings of the New Historians concerning the darker sides of Zionism can be acknowledged, and the magnanimity of the acknowledgment can be wielded to hold Israel in a still firmer embrace. Shavit’s display of mournful soul-searching about Lydda allows him and his readers to feel good about feeling bad. He can tell Palestinian refugees to get over it, while shedding a tear himself. As he admonished a hypothetical Palestinian interlocutor in a radio interview: “I acknowledge Lydda, but you must not get addicted to Lydda. You have to leave that behind.” Palestinians are commanded to forget their history, and in the same interview Jews are told to remember theirs: “We’ve lost this basic understanding that we are the ultimate victims of the 20th century.”34
Shavit’s emphasis on the tragic inevitability of Israel’s predicament reassures his readers that they can absolve the country of its past wrongdoing—what happened was, after all, unavoidable—and that there is little Israel or its advocates can do today to make up for it. He chastises the left for failing to acknowledge the centrality of the Palestinian refugee issue, but not because he thinks the refugees’ needs must be addressed. Shavit, like Israeli officials, brings up Palestinian refugees only to assert that the conflict can’t be resolved. In short, he justifies inaction, but cloaks it in empathy.
At a discussion with Remnick, Shavit said he wouldn’t “condemn” those who perpetrated massacres in 1948:
SHAVIT: [The soldiers] complained about some Israeli bleeding heart authors that are very well known. They said, “We did the dirty work. They live on the land that we cleared for them, and then they say, ‘These guys committed war crimes.’” And that’s a valid argument. Now I think it’s very important to remember, and I said it to you on some other occasions, I mean, this country [the United States] is based on crimes that are much worse than Lydda, much worse than Lydda. I mean when I hear American liberals, Canadian liberals, Australian liberals, and New Zealand liberals, their liberalism, and their universal values, are based on the fact they basically murdered the other, and therefore they can criticize us—
REMNICK: What is the difference?
SHAVIT: A hundred years.
REMNICK: Exactly.35
Not quite. Of course, Shavit is right that during the centuries prior to 1948, Native Americans suffered a much worse fate than the Palestinians, who were not killed in numbers so great as to deprive them of their current numerical advantage over Israeli Jews. But that doesn’t make the attention now paid to the plight of Palestinians hypocritical, or simply a result of Zionism emerging at a later time. It’s hard to imagine an American commentator getting away with telling Native Americans that he refused to condemn past misdeeds, that Native American anguish was necessary for the greater good of America, and that it was the Native Americans’ “moral and reasonable obligation to overcome that trauma,” as Shavit said to Charlie Rose about the massacres and expulsions of 1948.36
Shavit offers American Jews a seemingly liberal Israeli voice with which many of them can identify—one that’s neither too chauvinist, like portions of the Israeli right, nor too despairing and critical, like sections of the Israeli left. Inside Israel, however, Shavit’s views aren’t considered liberal. In his columns he presents himself as the voice of the reasonable silent majority, and so his positions in recent years, though inconsistent, have followed the steadily rightward-moving center, whose members include the more hawkish parts of Labor as well as Netanyahu and the more moderate elements of the Likud. Shavit is there to reassure the Israeli political consensus of its wisdom.
As far back as 1997, he opposed the Oslo Accords, referring to them as “a collective act of messianic drunkenness” and defending their most prominent opponent, Netanyahu, against charges that he was partly to blame for their failure. During the Second Intifada, he praised Sharon for having “conducted the military campaign patiently, wisely and calmly” and “the diplomatic campaign with impressive talent.” In the final week of the 2014 war in Gaza that took the lives of 71 Israelis and more than 2,250 Palestinians, Shavit wrote that strong objection to Israeli conduct was illegitimate and amounted to anti-Semitic bigotry: “We’re a tiny minority nation under attack, and sweeping criticism of this nation is like sweeping criticism of the black, gay, or Yazidi minority.” Shavit has been among the most prominent advocates of the view that there was and is “no partner” for peace in the Palestinian leadership, claiming that Barak had “offered the whole world to the Palestinians.” He says he supports an end to occupation but in the same breath cautions that this step is “problematic” and “liable to foment tidal waves of violence that will rock Israel and jeopardize its existence.” In 2006, he repeatedly attacked Ehud Olmert’s plan to withdraw from large parts of the West Bank, calling it the “unconditional surrender of Zionism” and “the beginning of the end” of Israel, and argued during a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations that a withdrawal even to the West Bank separation barrier, which would leave the vast majority of settlers on the Israeli side of the wall, would be a mistake. Shavit has often predicted an Iranian nuclear bomb or a military strike against Iran, thus making himself seem like a mouthpiece for Netanyahu. In the West Bank, he advocates slow, cautious, and gradual change while Israeli soldiers and bases remain in place.37 But in the United States all this is somehow packaged as liberalism.
In his review for The New York Times, Wieseltier called My Promised Land “the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read.” But defending the positions of the hawkish center while calling himself a liberal doesn’t make Shavit or his book unbiased. It makes his narrative more like a Trojan horse of liberalism that conceals in its belly a slickly promoted, refined version of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist Party that, after many transformations, now rules Israel. The book’s final chapter contains several approving references to Jabotinky’s influential 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” and to its “prophet.” Jabotinsky wrote:
Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.… if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true; either Zionism is moral and just or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative. We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.38
Shavit’s argument, like Jabotinsky’s, rests on a tautology. Both assume that Zionism was just from its inception, and so conclude that what was required by it was justified. In “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky disparaged the distinctions among various strands of Zionism, writing that there were “no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’” Shavit, who markets militarist ideas in the language of a latter-day vegetarian, serves as living proof of Jabotinsky’s view that the vegetarians are merely more prone to handwringing.
—October 2014