My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

And now these very same Jews who had been locked up in the ghetto and were hunted down, rose and established a state.

Suddenly there were Jews who were government ministers and Jews who were military officers. A flag, a passport, a uniform. Now the Jews were no longer dependent on gentiles. Now Jews were like gentiles. They stood up for themselves. Even in retrospect, the most thrilling event of my life was the establishment of the State of Israel. I felt an almost religious exaltation.

“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. J...

Now, in the Land of Israel, the Jews were fighting back. And they were fighting prop...

When his family arrived in Jerusalem, Erik Brik had already gone through five metamorphoses: sheltered childhood in prewar Kovno; persecuted childhood in the wartime ghetto; a childhood of hiding in the wall as the war drew to a close; a refugee’s wandering childhood when the war was over; a respite in the Jewish Agency’s mansion in the years following the war.

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.

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.

Denial has its reasons.

The world feels sorry for them, but the world denies them political rights and does not recognize them as a legitimate national entity. It is therefore not without reason that Israel chooses to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a conflict between states, a conflict between the Israeli David and the Arab Goliath. It is a conflict that marginalizes the Palestinian tragedy, viewing it as some sort of unpleasant peripheral issue.

And yet this denial is astonishing. The fact that seven hundred thousand human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed.

I realize that what makes this camp tick is the division of labor. The division makes it possible for evil to take place apparently without evil people. This is how it works: The people who vote for Israel’s right-wing parties are not evil; they do not round up youngsters in the middle of the night. And the ministers who represent the right-wing voters in government are not evil; they don’t hit boys in the stomach with their own fists. And the army’s chief of staff is not evil; he carries out what a legitimate, elected government obliges him to carry out. And the commander of the internment facility is not evil—he is doing the best he can under impossible circumstances. And the interrogators—well, after all, they are doing their job. And it is, they are told, impossible to govern the occupied territories unless they do all this. As for the jailers, most of them are not evil, either. They only want to leave all this behind and get back home. Yet in some mysterious way, all these nonevil people manage together to produce a result that is evil indeed. And evil is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than all who contribute to it and carry it out.

For it is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s. Evil without evildoers.

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.