My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

If peace is not feasible, how will we withstand a generation-long conflict as our strategic superiority is endangered and our legitimacy is fading and our democratic identity is fractured and our internal fissures tear us apart? While Israel remains innovative, seductive, and energetic, it has become a nation in doubt. Angst hovers above the land like the enormous shadow of an ominous volcano.

This is why I embarked on this journey. Sixty-five years after its founding, Israel has returned to its core questions. One hundred and sixteen years after it was launched, Zionism is confronted with its core contradictions. Now the challenge goes far beyond that of occupation, and much deeper than the issue of peace. What we all face is the threefold Israel question: Why Israel? What is Israel? Will Israel?

This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider narrative of his nation. Through family history, personal history, and in-depth interviews, I will try to tackle the larger Israel story and the deeper Israel question. What has happened in my homeland for over a century that has brought us to where we are now? What was achieved here and what went wrong here, and where are we heading? Is my deep sense of anxiety well founded? Is the Jewish state in real jeopardy? Are we Israelis caught in a hopeless tragedy, or might we yet revive ourselves and save ourselves and salvage the land we so love?

Aharon Appelfeld is a world-renowned author whose Holocaust-related novels—Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders, Iron Tracks—have

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.

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.

BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction)

In American academia of the twenty-first century, I learned, there are three major transgressions: privilege, power, and particularism. Jews are accused of all three. They are perceived as powerful, privileged, and devoted to their particular ethnic clan. Every campaign against Israel on American campuses makes use of these three accusations to recruit anti-Israel supporters in order to isolate, weaken, and defeat not only Zionism, but the Jewish community itself.

South Devon,