My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

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.