My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

In its first decade of existence, the Jewish state experienced a wave of immigration never experienced by any other state in modern times.

Wow! Quite a zshock! No wonder there were so many aatrocities in the country's first years.

Immediately afterward, Israel signed a vital reparations agreement with Germany and began to sell bonds to the Jewish community in the United States.

Now I see the importance of German reparations.

The first national project to lead the Israeli economic miracle of the 1950s was housing. Committed to eliminating the ma’abarot and to providing every immigrant with a roof over his head, the government initiated the building of two hundred thousand apartments.

Seventy years later we're at a housikng crisis for 15 years. And it's quite a shock! That means the state of Israel took the money of holocaust survivors, Ashkenazi Jews, and used it to get Mizrahi Jews out of the ma'abarot. I need to check up on that.

The number of inhabitants in the ma’abarot declined from 160,000 in 1952 to 88,000 in 1954 to 30,000 in 1956.

Max came to Israel probably after ma'abarot.

Twenty new cities, four hundred new villages, two hundred thousand new apartments, and a quarter million new jobs attest to an unprecedented historical achievement.

In 1957, most Palestinians don’t yet define themselves as a distinct people.

And this year—after the 1956 victory—is the first year that the effigy of Hitler is replaced by an effigy of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

I remember Oved's dad saying that thdh used to place Hitler and Nasser on he top of the bonfire.

Dimona prevented total wars. It brought about peace agreements. But after forty-six years, the question remained: Was it right?

Huh? Dimona prevented wars and brought about peace terms? And if it did, who cares if it were right?

The operation is planned like a military offensive. Etzion’s work squad is to come down the mountain at the end of the workday and arrive at the deserted base below. Wallerstein’s group is to arrive from Jerusalem at the very same time. Simultaneously, Gush Emunim’s leader, Hanan Porat, is to contact the sympathetic defense minister, Shimon Peres, so that when the army discovers that the base has been invaded, he will put pressure on the army to look the other way, to accept this invasion. Between the cracks, Ofra will be founded and become a fact on the ground.

Establishment of the first settlement in Ofra.

As Israel of the plains never really embraced the settlements, they remain distant and detached, living beyond mountains of darkness. Like Algeria and Rhodesia, they will not survive. They are at a dead end.

What?! Some Settlements are 30 minutes from Tel Aviv. Not that distant. And I'd question that plains' Israel doesn't recognise them...

So in Gaza there are no excuses. Gaza is not even needed for our defense like some strategic heights in the West Bank; it is not even a historically charged terrain like some parts of Judea and Samaria. Gaza is clear and simple. It is the epitome of the absurdity of occupation. It is futile occupation. It is brutal occupation. It corrodes our very existence and it erodes the legitimacy of our existence.

Didn't age well now that we have a state run by a terror organisation in Gaza.

It was there in the late 1940s, when Palmach battalions emptied the Arab villages and conquered Arab Lydda, and Smilansky’s nephew Yizhar wrote Khirbet Khizeh, a seminal novella about the savagery of expulsion.

Maybe worth reading...

For seventy years the yearning for peace existed on the fringes of Zionism, trying to restrain the baser instincts of the Jewish national movement. But after the Arab uprising of 1936, mainstream Zionism wanted more and more land, more and more power. It paid lip service to peace, but it was not willing to pay a real price for it. It saw immigration, settlement, and nation building as its main goals, and it did not consider peace to be an absolute value or a supreme cause.

“Therein lies the problem,” I say. “Both you and the peace movement were always against. Against Meir, against Begin, against occupation. But though you were right to be angry, your failing was that you were always about negation. Protests. Demonstrations. Unlike the old Laborites, you never built anything. You never put up a home or planted a tree. And you never accepted the heavy responsibility of dealing with the complexity of Israeli reality. Emotionally, you remained stuck in the adolescent protest stage of the 1960s and 1970s. The naysaying character of the peace culture made it sterile and eventually unattractive. Politically and emotionally it was unproductive and barren, even corrosive. There was not enough love, not enough compassion. And there was too much judgment. That’s why you couldn’t fill the vacuum left by the fading Labor culture. After you performed the grand acts of patricide and matricide, you didn’t succeed in becoming fathers and mothers yourselves. You did not nurture, you did not inspire, you did not lead. You didn’t offer the nation a mature political choice. At the end of the day, your generation achieved only a fraction of what the founders had. It was on your watch, not theirs, that Israel became a rudderless nation, lost at sea with no captain and no compass and no sense of direction.”

Explains right and left in israel to this day.

But sometimes, when I look at my grandchildren, my eyes tear up. I am no longer certain that their fate will not be the fate of the children of Rafalowka.”

Well, that's what happened on 07-10.

He even supported the establishment of some early settlements.

Yossi Beilin supported the earlgy settlements.

Rabin despised Beilin and Beilin disdained Rabin, but the opportunity was irresistible.

I did not know that.

After the failure of the Lebanon War and after the Palestinian uprising of 1987–92, the Right was crushed.

I did not know that either.

At the end of July, as their self-confidence rises, the Palestinians say they will not sign the interim agreement if there is no mutual recognition.

Then, on September 13, Rabin surrenders to a highly significant last-minute maneuver by Arafat, changing the phrase “Palestinian team” in the agreement’s preamble to “PLO.”

“In hindsight, it seems clear that you did not think about the religious, cultural, and existential dimensions of the conflict. You did not remember the Arab rejection of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Arab outrage at the UN partition plan of 1947, and the calamity wrought by the war of 1948. All you saw was the relatively easy problem of 1967, namely, occupation, which you thought you could solve in a relatively easy manner. That a person of your intelligence was tempted to make peace in such a hasty way is unconscionable. Rather than use the unique circumstances of the early 1990s to begin a long process that would eventually lead to a true peace, you opted for the appearance of peace. You thought you were manipulating Peres and Rabin, but in reality it was the Palestinians who manipulated you. Although they were at a strategic disadvantage, they still managed to knock you to the ground.”

But in 1993 Rabin did not want a final comprehensive peace.

But only when I turned thirty and began listening seriously to what Palestinians were actually saying did I realize that the promise of peace was unfounded.

This sentence summarises the Israeli left.

Sternhell says that Oslo was too little too late. But the real problem was that the Left never managed to advance beyond the well-established Ashkenazi elites. It never managed to build a party that resembled the European social-democratic parties. “This is why we didn’t save Israel in time,” Sternhell tells me. “This is why I am now racked by anxiety,” he says. “Israel is my life, but I see Israel fading away. I see a terminal illness consuming the nation I so love.”

But we did not. We failed to say to the world and to our people that occupation must cease even if peace cannot be reached. We failed to tell ourselves the truth about the Palestinian wish to return to their pre-1948 villages and homes. Rather than deal courageously with reality as it is, we fell for the romantic belief in “peace now.” So when the great moment of opportunity arrived in 1993, we missed it. In Oslo we tried to impose a flawed concept of peace on a Middle East reality that soon rejected it. But even after rejection was apparent, we clung to the flawed concept. As buses exploded on the streets of our cities, we kept singing the hymns of our imaginary peace. This is how we lost the trust and respect of our countrymen, who turned away from us because we failed to acknowledge that our wished-for peace was turning into a macabre farce. Our failure was not caused by the forces we encountered, but by our own weakness: by our lack of intellectual integrity and courage, and by our immaturity. We never deigned to inherit the legacy of the founders of Israel that we were supposed to inherit, and we didn’t continue in the footsteps of those we were supposed to follow. The peace clan balked at the historical continuum. It refused to take the reins of true responsibility and remained a 1970s-style protest movement.

Wow! That's a brave confession from a former Peace Now member.

Both the Right and mainstream Labor thought of 1967 as the completion of 1948. What we were not strong enough to do then, we were strong enough to do now. What we didn’t conquer then, we conquered now.

I think that that was also the way Arabs saw it (and still do).

I thought that state of mind was dangerous. I realized that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are the Palestinians’ poor man’s lamb. I knew we must not take it. Not one inch, not one settlement. We must keep the territories only as a surety until peace is reached.

Poor man's lamb based on what?! Geez, if Amos Oz liked to take other people's viewpoint he sure as hell sucked at it.

Oslo was not genuinely implemented because it was a baby unloved by both parents.

Both sides know compromise is essential. They don’t love each other. They cheat on each other. They shout at each other. But whether they like it or not, they see each other. In this sense the emotional breakthrough of 1993 was real. The taboo was broken. The cognitive block fell away. In spite of everything, we now face the Palestinians, nation to nation, to discuss the division of the land. That is no small feat. Peace is an experiment that has not yet failed.”

But during all those wanderings and during all those years, Jamal told me, he never forgot Hulda. So when I drove him in my car over the dirt road to Hulda in the spring of 1993, he smiled a wide child’s smile and murmured: Hulda, Hulda. Nothing in the world like the soil of Hulda. He took me to the site where the threshing floor for the grain harvest had been, to the pile of rubble that was once his aunt’s house, to the pile of rubble that was once his uncle’s house, and to the pile of rubble that was once his own house. He told me he didn’t know how to say what’s in his heart. Only God knows. Only Allah himself. For there is no place in the world but this place. There isn’t and there won’t be any other place. This is Jamal Munheir’s one and only place in the world.

But since my visit here with Jamal Munheir in the spring of 1993, Hulda has changed for me. My homeland has changed for me. Peace has changed, too. I realize now why Israel’s peaceniks live against occupation. I understand now what brilliant use we WASPs make of the conflict’s present in order to protect ourselves from the unbearable implications of the conflict’s past. For we must protect ourselves from our past and our deeds and from Jamal Munheir. We concentrate on the occupation so that we can justify to ourselves the magnificent vineyard that stands in the midst of Hulda like some proof of wrongdoing.

A mile and a half away are the gray ruins of Abu Shusha, where in 1940, Yosef Weitz came to the conclusion that in order to survive, Zionism would have to cleanse the land of its native Arab inhabitants.

Need to read more about who this Yosef Weitz was.

There was harmony between Arabs and Jews in the young North African kingdom.

LOL. There wasn't.

mathematical genius,

I didn't know Deri was gifted in maths.

At twenty-seven, he was director general of the Ministry of the Interior, and at twenty-nine, he became minister of the interior.

Great success at a pretty young age.

In June 1990, Israel’s most powerful daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, published a series of investigative articles claiming that Deri was corrupt.

That means Deri was corrupt ever since he entered politics. Even in his thirties he was corrupt! Or even before that...

The revolt’s second eruption came in late April 1997. Israel’s secular and dovish elites regarded the Netanyahu-Deri government as illegitimate. Deri was fighting for his life in court. Suddenly, on Passover Eve, the state decided to indict Deri on suspicion of persuading Prime Minister Netanyahu to appoint a pliant attorney general in the hope that he could evade further corruption charges. The police had recommended breach-of-trust charges against Netanyahu and other Ashkenazi suspects in the affair, but unlike the Sephardic Deri, none of them was charged.

Why weren't the Ashkenazi charged?

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, Arab world Jewry experienced a relative golden age.

Funny that Jews' and Arabs' golden age was under imperialism...

In the early 1970s,

Factual falsehood. It was in the late 1970s.

For years Argov was not recognized by upstairs Israel.

Maybe 2-3 years. He broke out in 1977. In 1982 he was one ofc the most successful singers in Israel.

But the difference between them and us was that from the very beginning they belonged. They were the ones the State of Israel was meant for and planned for.

This is not true. Jews from Romanika and Poland seemess as the Jews of diaspora. Yehudi galuti. They too had to forget tbisr culture, languge andtradition. Many of them had to change their names. They are still mocked for stereotypes of Jewish diaspora like Shavit in 1977, mostly by Mizrahi Jews.

We have to prove we have totally assimilated. We must prove daily that we are not Arabs anymore.

Such bullshit. Or at least it's not true for decades. Mizrahi music (and culture) is now mainstream. It's thd Ashkenazi Jews who are seen alianated from "Israelhood".

What caused the change? Nini says it is peace. Because of peace Israelis are more relaxed now, more self-assured. He can see it from his window on Yehuda Halevi Street in downtown Tel Aviv. Everything is calmer. People sit in cafés for hours. They’re in the groove. No more old ladies shouting, “Shame on you, what are you doing having a good time and going to clubs and getting laid when soldiers are getting killed?”

What peace wazs in the 90s or 2000? 2000 was the second intifada and busses were exploding on the streets.

In a short time, we will have a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, and it will be all right.

Guess what?! Dint happen!

It will happen.

It didn't happen.

In less than thirty years, Israel has experienced seven different internal revolts: the settlers’ revolt, the peace revolt, the liberal-judicial revolt, the Oriental revolt, the ultra-Orthodox revolt, the hedonist-individualistic revolt, and the Palestinian Israelis’ revolt.

Since then another revolt was added: The anti-Netanyahu revolt.

So while most of the upheavals were just and necessary, their cumulative effect was destructive. They did not advance Israel as a functioning liberal democracy. They did not reconfigure Israel as a strong, pluralistic federation of its different tribes. Instead, they turned the nation into a stimulating, exciting, diversified, colorful, energetic, pathetic, and amusing political circus. Rather than a mature and solid state body that could safely navigate the dangerous waters of the Middle East, it became an extravagant bazaar.

Every scorned and slighted human sentiment wanted to burst out and be free to express itself. But all these different individuals and tribes and sentiments never found a way to coexist. They never worked out a new political framework that would allow Israel to represent them properly while acting as a cohesive whole. The outcome was a fascinating, vibrant society—and a booming economy—but a dysfunctional system of government, an Israeli republic that was not quite there.

The mass Russian immigration of 1989–1991 added to the chaos. The one million immigrants who arrived in Israel within three years invigorated its economy and shared its Jewish majority but added to the lack of cohesion. By the time they arrived in Israel, the old Zionist melting pot was no longer functioning. The well-educated newcomers felt they were superior to the ones absorbing them. Hence, they did not shed their old identity and endorse an Israeli identity as previous immigrants had done. They maintained their Russian values and their Russian way of life and they largely lived in Russian enclaves. While contributing to Israel’s science, technology, arts, and military power, they intensified the process of turning Israeli society into a loose confederation of tribes not quite connecting to one another and not sharing one binding national code.

Finally a word on the Russian Aliyah. Abd yet it's depicted from such a distance. No interview with an immigrant. Shame on Ari Shavit.

Peace has failed.