My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

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.