Of course I’m a bit late to this party but hey, I just read the book and I have some points to share.
The first of course is that it was a thoroughly compelling read. In parts even beautifully written, Shavit leads you by the hand on a trip through Israel both geographically and across the time period of her existence. That serves to make reading the book, for the most part, a very pleasant experience.
Over and above the quality of the prose there was enough in this book to jerk the soul around and send me both into a rage and into feeling incredibly proud and emotional that I am living in this amazing country.
There are no answers in My Promised Land, so don’t go into it looking for them.
I read a whole bunch of reviews about this book when it came out and it has been waiting on my kindle for a while. I am used to receiving comments from you guys saying “so what do we do now?” in the wake of many of my screeds. I have the same gripe regarding Shavit here.
He is prepared to criticise the right as overstretching Israel and he is prepared to criticise the left as having nothing to offer. His analysis of the failure of Peace Now and the decline of the political left in Israel feels spot on but his conclusions are incredibly weak. He simply seems to re-iterate the very same arguments that he admits already failed. In short, Israel must withdraw from the territories now and suffer the consequences. Though this is a bitter pill to swallow the consequences will be less bad than watching settlement run rampant and enduring the collapse of the country altogether. The problem with this analysis is that it flies in the face of everything Shavit has said already in terms of the reason no one is voting left anymore. Namely that there is nothing positive on offer. Shavit has claimed that the movement failed because people weren’t interested in something that simply told them over and over again that the end was coming. To make that point and then to go back and simply fall back into the same, failed, argument was disappointing.
The chapter that absolutely made my blood boil was the chapter Shavit spends talking to Mohammed Dahla the Arab Israeli lawyer who founded the “human rights” group Adalah. They’ll defend anyone accused of being a terrorist regardless of the bent of their ideology. So long as it’s against Israel.
In his journey Shavit speaks to Nobel Laureates, politicians and scholars and he questions all of them, but when it comes to his good friend Mohammed there isn’t a peep of a challenge. I suspect and I hope that Shavit is simply being provocative, giving us a good look at the other side of the coin. Nevertheless it’s hard to swallow, mainly because everything that Shavit’s good friend says comes across as such complete nonsense. There’s a delicious irony woven into this chapter. It begins with a monologue from Dahla where he says;
Instead of going to the ultra-orthodox Jews, you should come to me. Instead of trying to scare up half-Jews and quarter-Jews and eighth-Jews from every corner of the world and bringing them here to Israel, you should talk to me. Because I am here, in your backyard. I am here and I am not going anywhere. I am here for good.
Just after this statement the pair visit the former Member of Knesset Azmi Bishara. The disgraced member of Knesset who fled Israel for Qatar shortly after. If this is the kind of staying power he’s talking about I think Israel will manage.
This chapter does nothing for me save anger me. As I said, that’s probably what Shavit wants as he subtly pushes a form of unilateral disengagement from the territories. In this chapter he is really pushing for disengagement from Israeli Arabs. In fact he falls victim to the very same mindset he attacks the left over. After going to such great lengths to tell us the thoughts of Raed Salah, Dalah and co he rather hopefully places in the conclusion the following;
“But the political bomb is ticking. As the Arab minority grows in number and confidence, it endangers the identity of Israel as a Jewish nation-state. If this crucial issue is not resolved soon, turmoil is inevitable.”
That doesn’t really mean very much to me. After spending an entire chapter talking about Israeli Arab intransigence all he really succeeded in doing was pushing me towards Lieberman’s stance of moving the border so as to allow as many of them as possible to be in a Palestine when/if one is ever created. If Shavit’s point is that Israel’s Arabs will never get used to the fact that Israel exists and is here to stay then he makes it well. But that isn’t his point.
His point is that we’re all here so we have to make it work. A point that could have been made better if he perhaps pointed out that many of the beautiful buildings in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in the country only exist because Israeli Arabs and Palestinians built them and are still building them. In fact many settlements only exist because Palestinians built them. When my wife goes to work in a hospital in Kfar Saba she works in a medical unit where one third of the nurses are Israeli Arabs, a situation replicated in hospitals across the country. Arabs are portrayed as putting Israelis in hospital all the time, the truth is that a much larger number of Arabs have dedicated their lives to healing Israelis that killing them. Shavit doesn’t make this point.
For some reason Shavit portrayed a very dark side of Israeli Arabs, fair enough denying that part of the Israeli Arab mindset would be ridiculous but he did it without really making any kind of point at all. In so doing he allowed an opportunity to make some kind of statement about that situation go to waste. Unlike when he met with Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, Amos Oz and various others from the other side of the political spectrum.
And really the conclusion of the book was something that let the rest of the book down. It’s too long and fluffy. It has more of the same lovely, flowery language about Israel but there’s no real message. The conclusion doesn’t really conclude anything except to say;
“The question is whether Israel will end occupation or whether occupation will end Israel”
Now I agree with this except that I have just read a book by Shavit where he argues that it’s not as simple as that. He brought me with him when he made his argument and then he went backwards to the same tired argument that no longer has traction with the Israeli body politic. It was disappointing and it was frustrating. He knows this isn’t enough, he has said so explicitly earlier and yet he reverts backwards.
The conclusion really reads like an old man simply reflecting and wondering whatever happened to the good old days. He looks back on the days of Lydda, in his own words an atrocity, with pride and with nostalgia. It’s a strange mixed message, one that Shavit puts across without really any sense of the contradiction.
What I take away from this book is a greater sense of the challenges facing Israel today. The challenges that Israel has overcome many of us already know about. Today’s Israel requires, if not a revolution then at least a new wave of ideology. The education system, the parallel worlds that have been erected to separate various parts of Israeli society from one another need to come down. The banks and the monopolisation of various parts of the Israeli economy are causing unnecessary hardship rather than the helping. Pointing out these issues is the real strength of Shavit’s achievement. Talking about his book one has to talk about Israel and one has to talk about the issues that affect Israeli society.
His take on the failure of the left and of the right also are compelling despite the fact that his conclusion fails to bring these themes together adequately. These factors along with the superb way in which he writes ensures that My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel is now a seminal work that should be on the reading list of anyone who wishes to gain a more complete understanding of the country and the dream that is Israel.
