My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

For as long as I can remember, I remember occupation. Only a week after I asked my father whether the Arab nations were going to conquer Israel, Israel conquered the Arab-populated regions of the West Bank and Gaza. A month later, my parents, my brother, and I embarked on a first family tour of the occupied cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. Wherever we went, there were remains of burned Jordanian jeeps, trucks, and military vehicles. White flags of surrender hung over most houses. Some streets were blocked with the mangled, blackened carcasses of fancy Mercedes automobiles that had been run over by the treads of Israeli tanks. Palestinian children my age and younger had fear in their eyes. Their parents appeared devastated and humiliated. Within a few weeks the mighty Arabs were transformed into victims, while the endangered Israelis became conquerors. The Jewish state was now triumphant and proud and drunk with a heady sense of power.

So I became a peacenik. First as a young activist and then as a journalist, I fought occupation with a passion. In the 1980s I opposed establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories. In the 1990s I supported the establishment of a PLO-led Palestinian state. In the first decade of the twenty-first century I endorsed Israel’s unilateral retreat from the Gaza Strip. But almost all the antioccupation campaigns I was involved with ultimately failed. Almost half a century after my family first toured the occupied West Bank, the West Bank is still occupied. As malignant as it is, occupation has become an integral part of the Jewish state’s being. It has also become an integral part of my life as an Israeli. Although I oppose occupation, I am responsible for occupation. I cannot deny the fact or escape the fact that my nation has become an occupying nation.

On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition.

Although I always stood for peace and supported the two-state solution, I gradually became aware of the flaws and biases of the peace movement. My understanding of both occupation and intimidation made my voice somewhat different from those of others in the media. And as a columnist, I challenge both right-wing and left-wing dogmas. I have learned that there are no simple answers in the Middle East and no quick-fix solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I have realized that the Israeli condition is extremely complex, perhaps even tragic.

One by one he ties the terrified prisoners to a low bench, so that their foreheads touch the ground at one end and their feet at the other. Once he hits the head of a prisoner with a short stick, and then he hits the prisoner’s legs with a long stick. And once he starts beating the prisoners of war he begins to enjoy beating them. He feels he is avenging the dead, that he is doing what his fallen comrades would have wanted him to do. He makes the seven prisoners tell the intelligence officer all that they know. He makes them bleed so much that they cannot stand up.

“Suddenly war broke out. I was awakened in the middle of the night. All the lights were on as my father said goodbye to us, dressed in the uniform of the Polish army. When he returned from defeat a few weeks later, everything collapsed. My father died, my grandfather died. The Russians occupied eastern Poland and took over half of our large house. We no longer had a nanny or maid. My mother had to work. My mother and my sister did the best they could to shield me. In a world that had lost all sense of stability, they were my only remaining anchor. “When I was six, in the summer of 1941, the Barbarossa operation began right under our house, which was built on the banks of the Wisla River. I remember the windows shattering, firebombs, the amazing might of Nazi Germany. And within hours, we saw long convoys of terrified Russian prisoners of war. A few months later we were transported to the ghetto. The transition was abrupt: from our grand house to a nook in the ghetto, with its terrible overcrowding, its stench, the hunger. “Then came the Actions. The ghetto was liquidated in stages, and each time it was a different sort of hunt. I remember when we ourselves were hunted. My mother, Ada, and I hid for three days in an underground hole, some sort of cave. There were a few other people hiding with us, while outside, the ghetto was being decimated. There was a slit through which I watched the hunt. I saw men being shot, children being shot. I was a child of six hiding undergroun...

“In the world of the Holocaust, Jews had no dignity. Jews were human powder, human dust. They were shot as dogs and cats were never shot. They were treated worse than animals. Animals you could pity. Jews you could not pity. The Jew was subhuman. Nothing. Zero. And now, only three years after Auschwitz, the Jew is a human entity. Now, in the Land of Israel, the Jews were fighting back. And they were fighting properly. They fought to win. I saw them in magazine photographs and in cinema newsreels: young and strong and holding guns. Suddenly they were human like all humans. They were capable of fighting for their freedom as the Italians of Edmondo De Amicis’s Heart fought for their freedom. They were not creatures one could enslave and hunt down and kill. For me, in the south of France, it was a wonder. It was a miracle taking place in real, concrete history.

“I was born near Czernowitz in 1932,” Appelfeld tells me. “My father was a well-educated industrialist, a former chess champion of Vienna. My mother stayed at home, and she was absolutely beautiful. I was an only child, and my parents spoiled me with ice cream, cakes, toys, books, and folk tales. They wanted me to be a lawyer in Berlin or Vienna. In general, their eyes were always set on Vienna, with its opera, theater, and grand cafés. Judaism was some anachronistic matter of little importance to them. The future was the future of European enlightenment. Our home was spacious and prosperous. We employed a nanny and a cook. We had a piano and many books and fine paintings, multicolored vases, and a masonry stove that warmed the interiors in winter. And when our small happy family left home, we went to Vienna or Prague or the Carpathian Mountains. Wearing Austrian shorts, socks, and high boots, I loved to step on the soft carpet of autumn leaves in the Vienna parks. When we would return home, my mother would play the piano and put me to sleep with snowy tales that seeped into my dreams. On Sundays, when Father and I would play in my room with the electric train he bought me, Mother would call from the other end of the house: ‘Ervin, where are you?’ ‘I am here, Mother, I am here,’ I would call back to her. “In the summer of 1941, when I was nine, we were vacationing at my grandmother’s country estate in the Carpathian Mountains. I was sick and was asleep in my bed at noon. S...

Aharon Barak, who from 1995 until 2006 served as Israel’s chief justice, sits in his cozy office at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He is a brilliant liberal jurist who reshaped Israeli jurisprudence and is admired worldwide. But I come to him in the same way I approached Sternhell and Appelfeld. I listen to his life story because I want to understand my own. Listening to Barak, I try yet again to comprehend the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century. “When I was born in Lithuania in 1936, my name was Erik Brik,” Barak tells me. “My father was born into a rabbinical family, but he turned his back on all that. He went to the university, studied law, and became the head of the Zionist office in Kovno. My mother was a woman of outstanding intellect. She went to the university and then taught history, German, and Russian. Our home was modest but happy. With my parents I spoke Yiddish; with the Lithuanian nanny I spoke Lithuanian. I was an only child. “I do not remember life before the Holocaust. Perhaps I have repressed it. So my first memory is of the Holocaust. The German Luftwaffe bombarded the city and soon after that we left home. We put a few of our belongings on a horse-drawn cart and we moved to the ghetto. My next memory is of the Germans arriving in the ghetto, rounding up the Jews and assembling them. A German officer divided everyone: right—left. Those to the right were sent home. Those to the left were sent to death. I was five or six years old. My m...

750,000 Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel between 1945 and 1951. Of that number, more than 90 percent arrived in the first three and a half years of the newly founded state. In forty-two months, the number of immigrants absorbed (685,000) surpassed the number of those absorbing them (655,000), a percentage comparable to what would happen if twenty-first-century America took in 350 million immigrants in three and a half years.

The beginning was dismal. Approximately a hundred thousand of the first immigrants to arrive in the free Jewish state were sent to the vacant houses of Arabs who had just fled Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramleh, and Lydda. Tens of thousands were settled in dozens of Palestinian ghost villages whose stone houses were deemed fit for residence. But by early 1950, the deserted properties could no longer solve the acute problem created by the astonishing human flood. More than a hundred thousand immigrants found themselves in depressing camps established in what had been British military installations, most of them surrounded by barbed wire fences. There they lived in tents, sharing toilets and showers. The camps were muddy, chaotic, and prone to disease. This was not what the immigrants had expected the Promised Land to be like.

The newborn state was one of the most egalitarian democracies in the world. The Israel of the 1950s was a just social democracy. But it was also a nation of practicality that combined modernity, nationalism, and development in an aggressive manner. There was no time, and there was no peace of mind, and therefore there was no human sensitivity. As the state became everything, the individual was marginalized. As it marched toward the future, Israel erased the past. There was no place for the previous landscape, no place for previous identities. Everything was done en masse. Everything was imposed from above. There was an artificial quality to everything. Zionism was not an organic process anymore but a futuristic coup. For its outstanding economic, social, and engineering achievements, the new Israel paid a dear moral price. There was no notion of human rights, civil rights, due process, or laissez-faire. There was no equality for the Palestinian minority and no compassion for the Palestinian refugees. There was little respect for the Jewish Diaspora and little empathy for the survivors of the Holocaust. Ben Gurion’s statism and monolithic rule compelled the nation forward.

A First Decade Exhibition is planned, to be held in the summer of 1958 in Jerusalem, to highlight Israel’s success. The message will be that Israel is now the most stable and most advanced nation in the Middle East. It is the most remarkable melting pot of the twentieth century. The Jewish state is a man-made miracle. But the miracle is based on denial. The nation I am born into has erased Palestine from the face of the earth. Bulldozers razed Palestinian villages, warrants confiscated Palestinian land, laws revoked Palestinians’ citizenship and annulled their homeland. By the socialist kibbutz Ein Harod lie the ruins of Qumya. By the orange groves of Rehovot lie the remains of Zarnuga and Qubeibeh. In the middle of Israeli Lydda, the debris of Palestinian Lydda is all too apparent. And yet there seems to be no connection in people’s minds between these sites and the people who occupied them only a decade earlier. Ten-year-old Israel has expunged Palestine from its memory and soul. When I am born, my grandparents, my parents, and their friends go about their lives as if the other people have never existed, as if they were never driven out. As if the other people aren’t languishing now in the refugee camps of Jericho, Balata, Deheisha, and Jabalia.

And all the while, the vast Arab nation doesn’t lift a finger to help its Palestinian brothers and sisters. In 1957, most Palestinians don’t yet define themselves as a distinct people. They do not have a mature and recognized national movement.

Yet the denial of the Palestinian disaster is not the only denial the Israeli miracle of the 1950s is based upon. Young Israel also denies the great Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century. True, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem is being built in Jerusalem. Every April, Israel marks the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. And in wheeling and dealing with the international community, the tragedy of European Jewry is mentioned and used. But within Israel itself, the Holocaust is not given space. The survivors are expected not to tell their stories. A dozen years after the catastrophe, the catastrophe has no place in local media and art. The Holocaust is only the low point from which the Zionist revival rose. The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories. Furthermore, the Israeli continuum does not have room for the individual. That’s also why the Holocaust remains abstract and separate. It’s not really about the people living among us. The message is clear: Quiet now, we are building a nation. Don’t ask unnecessary questions. Don’t indulge in self-pity. Don’t doubt, don’t lament, don’t be soft or sentimental, don’t dredge up dangerous ghosts. It’s not a time to remember, it is a time to forget. We must gather all our strength now and concentrate on the future.

The two denials are actually four: the denial of the Palestinian past, the denial of the Palestinian disaster, the denial of the Jewish past, and the denial of the Jewish catastrophe. Four forces of amnesia are at work. Erased from memory are the land that was and the Diaspora that was, the injustice done to them and the genocide done to us. As they struggle to survive and cast a new identity, the Israelis of the 1950s bury both the fruit orchards of Palestine and the yeshivas of the shtetl, the absence of seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and the nihility of six million murdered Jews. What vanishes under Ben Gurion’s hasty development is the beauty of the land, the depth of the Diaspora, and the great historic cataclysms of the 1940s.

If Israel had acknowledged what had happened it would not have survived. If Israel had been kindly and compassionate, it would have collapsed. Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old nation into which I was born.

Back in Rehovot, he met with Dostrovsky, who took from the safe in his office a big metal lump covered in wax paper. The professor placed it in the hands of the excited young major and asked him if he knew what it was. “Like lead, but much heavier than lead,” the young man answered. “Uranium, it must be uranium.” Both men were silent, but they both understood, without saying it explicitly, what the purpose of Hemed Gimmel was and what its mission was: to create a new bell jar for the Jewish state.

The territories we conquered in 1967 gave us an excellent pretext for this much-needed pretense, as it allowed us to concentrate on an internal conflict of our own making. The Right said, “If we only annex the West Bank, we’ll be safe and sound.” The Left said, “If we only hand over the West Bank, we’ll have peace.” The Right said, “Our dead died because of the Left’s illusions,” while the Left said, “Our dead died because of the Right’s fantasies.” Rather than face a tragic reality imposed on us from without, we chose to create a simplistic narrative of Right against Left. It’s not the Arabs’ fault, it’s the Jews’. It’s not the Middle East, it’s the Israeli government. It’s not the fundamental Israeli condition but some specific mistake made by some specific Israeli politician. In an ingenious way, we turned the tragedy in which we live into a morality play. We created a virtual reality that enables us to blame ourselves rather than face the cruel reality we are trapped in.

I worked out a theory of the Israeli Left: its fundamental flaw was that it had never distinguished between the issue of occupation and the issue of peace. Regarding the occupation, the Left was absolutely right. It realized that occupation was a moral, demographic, and political disaster. But regarding peace, the Left was somewhat naïve. It counted on a peace partner that was not really there. It assumed that because peace was needed, peace was feasible. But the history of the conflict and the geostrategy of the region implied that peace was not feasible. The correct moral position of the Left was compromised by an incorrect empirical assumption.

There was a magic belief that Israel was the supreme power that could end the conflict by ending occupation. The Left adopted the peace illusion because it had a messianic dimension: it promised Israel a new existential condition. It was to replace the badlands under our feet with the open blue skies of an imaginary future.

They saw the inner circle of the conflict in which an Israeli Goliath stands over a Palestinian David, but they didn’t see the outer circle in which an Arab-Islamic Goliath stands over an Israeli David. They saw that for the Palestinians the 1967 occupation was disastrous, but they did not see that for many Palestinians there are other matters that are far more severe and visceral than occupation, like the homes they lost in 1948. They knew that Israel had to deal with the challenge of occupation, but they overlooked and dismissed the other critical challenges facing the state. Because of these three cognitive flaws, their vision was impaired and their scope of reality grew more and more narrow, until finally they were disconnected from reality. The well-meaning leaders of the Israeli Left and the Israeli peace movement became irrelevant.

Conventional wisdom has it that 1967 was the pivotal year in Israel’s history. True and not true. Actually, there were three pivotal years: 1967, 1973, and 1977. Within one decade, Israel experienced an extraordinary victory, a distressing defeat, and a monumental political upheaval—when after nearly thirty years of Labor’s leadership, the right-wing Likud Party won the elections. The three dramatic events shook the nation to its core. They brought about occupation and then institutionalized it. But in hindsight, it seems that the most decisive of the three defining years was 1973. The trauma of the Yom Kippur War terminated the reign of Israel’s ancien régime. It promulgated a deep distrust of the state, its government, and its leadership. It empowered the individual and weakened the collective. It crushed Ben Gurion’s legacy and his concrete state. As a result, the state was in flux. Old grievances resurfaced, old wounds were reopened. There were no longer any real shepherds or masters. No one had moral authority anymore. No one had the capacity to lead or to educate or instruct. Hierarchy broke down. The sense of purpose was gone. The common set of core values disintegrated. In the heat of revolt, the melting pot itself melted away. After being forced to be one, the different tribes of Israel began going their different ways. And it was the same with Israeli individuals. After being overorganized and overmobilized and overdisciplined for half a century, they were not wi...

What has happened to us? First and foremost, we were blinded by political correctness. The politically correct discourse that reigned supreme over the last decade was disconnected from reality. It focused on the issue of occupation but did not address the fact that Israel is caught in an existential conflict fraught with religious and cultural land mines. It paid too much attention to Israel’s wrongdoing, and too little to the historical and geopolitical context within which Israel has to survive. Israeli political correctness also assumed that Israeli might is a given. Therefore, it was dismissive of the need to maintain this might. Because the army was perceived to be an occupying force, it was denounced. Anything military or national or Zionist was regarded with contempt. Collective values gave way to individualistic ones. Power was synonymous with fascism. Old-fashioned Israeli masculinity was castrated as we indulged ourselves in the pursuit of absolute justice and absolute pleasure. The old discourse of duty and commitment was replaced by a new discourse of protest and hedonism. And there was something else: Israelis were besotted with the illusion of normalcy. But on its most basic level, Israel is not a normal nation. It is a Jewish state in an Arab world, and a Western state in an Islamic world, and a democracy in a region of tyranny. It is at odds with its surroundings. There is a constant and inherent tension between Israel and the world it lives in. That means ...

revolution was an identity revolution. Identity revolutions are tempting but dangerous. They are like gender transformations. In our case the operation seemed to succeed; the outcome was extraordinary. But the patient was not really at peace with himself and remained restless. Now it is all falling apart. Our new fierce identity is disintegrating into a multitude of identities, some of which are frail and confused. At times we do not recognize ourselves anymore. We are not sure who we really are.

In 1967 Israel conquered Mount Hermon and built a strategically vital military intelligence base at its summit. On October 6, 1973, Syria conquered the base and captured its men. Two weeks later dozens of Israelis gave their life on these steep slopes so that Israel could regain dominance over this dominating mountain. Now the most advanced technologies are employed in this science-fiction-like mountainous station. The Hermon high-tech fortress enables Israel to keep an eye on Syria and beyond.