Nathan Thrall reviews ‘My Promised Land’ by Ari Shavit · LRB 9 October 2014

/feeling-good-about-feeling-bad

  • Feeling Good about Feeling Bad
    Nathan Thrall
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/nathan-thrall/feeling-good-about-feeling-bad

    Curiously for a book 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: the fact of its being enshrined in international law, in the form of UN Resolution 181, reaffirmed in the declarations of independence of both #Israel, in 1948, and Palestine, in 1988. No matter the actions of their forebears, there are now more than six million Jews in Israel, 75 per cent of its population. And denying Jews their own 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 the exception that proves his country’s morality. Shavit relegates other difficult aspects of Israeli history 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 the 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; the economic boon Arabs enjoyed as a result of Zionist immigration; the socialist egalitarianism of the kibbutz as a moral justification for Zionism; the Holocaust as a retroactive justification of the Zionist settlement that preceded it by more than half a century; and the fairness of the democracy established after Israel’s founding. 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 brief references to the Holy Land and the Jews’ ancient homeland, religion is almost entirely absent from his description of early Zionism. Yet, as Anita Shapira, among the strongest critics of the New Historians, shows in her new 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,’ according to Shapira. ‘ It preserved historical memory … and also concretised the Land of Israel, forming a direct connection between past and present.’ As she makes clear, 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 or the East African territory offered by the UK government.

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    #Palestine #sionisme #Israël #religion