This is the third and final part of an extended article by Jonathon Freedland published in The New York Review of Books. His article is a review of three new books on Israel. It went to press on July 11, before the outbreak of fighting in Gaza. Jonathan Freedland’s subsequent post about the crisis in Gaza appears on the NYRblog.
The three books are:
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
by Ari Shavit. Spiegel and Grau, 445 pp., $28.00
Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict
by John B. Judis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30.00
Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land
by Norman G. Finkelstein. OR Books, 97 pp., $10.00 (paper)
Section 4.
While critics on the left have criticized the conclusions Shavit draws from Lydda, the fact that he tells the story of that massacre at all, coupled with the way he tells it, is significant in its own right. The effect of the chapter is to take a stand against the early Zionists and insist on seeing what they did not see. On this Shavit and Judis agree: Zionism’s founding fathers were afflicted by selective blindness, unable or unwilling to register what was in front of their eyes: the presence of another people in the Land of Israel.
Shavit retraces the journey to Palestine made by his great-grandfather, the well-to-do British gentleman and Zionist romantic Herbert Bentwich, in 1897. Arab stevedores attend to him at Jaffa; Arab staff wait on him in his hotel; Arab villagers are all around. But they leave no trace. “My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see,” writes Shavit. “He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back.”
In this, Bentwich was typical. It’s well known that too many of the first Zionists had a blind spot when it came to Palestine’s indigenous population. They were eager to accept the myth of a land without a people, for a people without a land. (The binationalists were the exception, among them, incidentally, Herbert Bentwich’s son Norman, attorney general in Palestine under the British mandate.)
Less well known is that America’s lovers of Zion were similarly sightless. Judis is all but baffled that men of impeccable liberal credentials could fail to see what was obvious. Stephen Wise was a founder of the ACLU and NAACP but, like his fellow Zionist liberals, he was “oblivious to the rights of Palestine’s Arabs.” “They knew next to nothing about Arab Palestine,” writes Judis. They were men of their time, if not of the previous century. In November 1929, Brandeis wrote: “The situation reminds me of that in America, when the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to protect themselves against the Indians.”
In Israel itself, the denial has not passed. On the contrary, Shavit argues that his country is built on layer upon layer of denial. Its most obvious form is physical, Israeli villages built on the remains of places that seventy years ago were Palestinian, their names erased:
This denial is astonishing. The fact that seven hundred thousand human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed. Asdud becomes Ashdod, Aqir becomes Ekron, Bashit becomes Aseret, Danial becomes Daniel, Gimzu becomes Gamzu, Hadita becomes Hadid.
And of course Lydda has become Lod, home of Ben-Gurion Airport. Shavit goes on to argue that it was not just the pre-1948 Palestinians who were the victims of this Israeli tendency to forget. The Holocaust survivors he speaks to were if not silenced then barely heard, their experiences pushed down below the surface where they could not disturb the forward march of Israeli progress. He describes too the fate of the mizrachim, the Jews from Arab lands, who came to Israel only to be denuded of their customs, heritage, and pride—their traditions dismissed as backward and shamefully Middle Eastern. He explains that a country bent on forging and uniting a new nation had no time to look back.
But it is the willed forgetfulness toward the original inhabitants of the land that preoccupies Shavit. His target is not just his long-ago ancestors, but his immediate forebears: the leaders of Israel’s peace movement. He takes them to task for focusing on the legacy of 1967 and the occupied territories, for fostering the delusion that if only Israel righted that wrong and pulled out of those lands then harmonious resolution would follow.
This is not to say that Shavit in any way defends the occupation. On the contrary, he longs for it to end, regarding the West Bank settlements as an Israeli error of catastrophic proportions. He does not offer details or a map, but his support is clear for the international consensus that calls for a withdrawal to an adjusted version of the 1967 lines. The difference he has with his erstwhile comrades in the peace movement is that he no longer believes such a move will bring peace: “We should never have promised ourselves peace or assumed that peace was around the corner. We should have been sober enough to say that occupation must end even if the end of occupation did not end the conflict.”
Implicit in such a view is that Israel need not wait for agreement with the Palestinians to draw a border and, as Shavit puts it, “gradually and cautiously withdraw to that new border.” He is with David Ben-Gurion himself who, in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, suggested that Israel unilaterally return the territories it had just conquered (except for Jerusalem). On this logic, the recent failure of John Kerry’s peace process, or the flare-up in violence following the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June, need not delay a unilateral move. With no illusions about peace, Israel can get started on the more practical business of deoccupation all by itself.
Shavit is explicit about why such a withdrawal to the 1967 lines, more or less, won’t bring peace. It is because the heart of the matter is not 1967 but the birth of Israel itself in 1948.
In a pointed choice, he visits Hulda, the kibbutz that was for decades the home of Peace Now’s spiritual leader, the novelist Amos Oz. But Hulda was also the name of the neighboring Arab village. In April 1948, the village was conquered, its houses demolished, its fields pillaged, and much of its land eventually absorbed into the kibbutz of the same name.
It’s Hulda, stupid. Not Ofra [on the West Bank], but Hulda, I tell myself. Ofra was a mistake, an aberration, insanity. But in principle, Ofra may have a solution. Hulda is the crux of the matter. Hulda is what the conflict is really about.
Of course, Shavit is hardly the first to contemplate the reality of 1948. He quotes the famously frank funeral oration by Moshe Dayan in 1956 that was similarly clear-eyed: “We have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.” Shavit is also following a lead set in the 1980s and 1990s by Israel’s “new historians,” who scoured the archives, exhuming the buried facts of Israeli expulsions of Palestinians.
But Shavit may get a hearing those scholars did not. While some new historians described themselves as anti-Zionists, others as post-Zionists, Shavit is a scion of Zionist aristocracy. His positions on Iran and other issues place him well within the Israeli mainstream. Yet in this book he not only denounces the post-1967 occupation, he engages emotionally with the events Palestinians regard as the nakba, the catastrophe, of 1948.
What’s more, Israel and especially its supporters in the Jewish diaspora might be willing to accept this from Shavit in a way they would refuse it from the likes of Norman Finkelstein. By writing as not only a liberal but a Zionist, Shavit makes clear that his critique is from within rather than without. He supplies the family history of everyone he speaks to, whether he agrees or disagrees, giving a background to their views that cannot help but humanize them. He is not standing on the outside, gloating at Israel’s misfortune, but rather sharing in it. That much is made clear in the chapters devoted to celebrating Israel’s triumphs, its astonishing feats of absorption of waves of immigrants or its burgeoning high-tech sector.
Such praise grates on anti-Zionist ears, but it makes Shavit a much more powerful advocate than they could ever be, at least if shifting Israeli public opinion is the goal—which, for those who want to effect change and end the conflict rather than simply win debating points on Twitter, it should be. Perhaps this is a weakness, but Jews tend to listen to those who argue from inside rather than outside. Witness the Haggadah’s distinction at the seder table between the wise son and the wicked. Technically, all that separates them is the grammatical difference between the first and second person. What does this mean to you, asks the wicked son; what does this mean to us, asks the wise son. But that distinction makes all the difference.
This contrast in tone might be why Judis has drawn fire from the very writers who lavished praise on Shavit, Leon Wieseltier among them. Judis’s book is rigorous, well sourced, and well argued and he has Zionist credentials of his own (he volunteered to fight for Israel in 1967 but was too late). But at times his prose strikes the wrong note, as if he is less concerned to win over Jews than to expose their moral failings. In view of his thesis that American Jews have made, and can make, the difference in the Israel–Palestine conflict, he might have done more to persuade rather than alienate them.
This, perhaps, is the ultimate role of the much-derided liberal Zionist. They are better placed than most to move Zionist, including Israeli, opinion. Finkelstein concludes his philippic against Shavit with a declaration that, despite the “original sin” of its creation, Israel’s fate is not set in stone. It can take a first step toward closure, consigning the past to the past, and perhaps even toward reconciliation, with a “formal acknowledgement of what happened in 1948.” For an Israeli patriot such as Shavit, profoundly committed to his country, to have written this powerful, complex, absorbing book and for it to have received the plaudits it has suggest progress toward that necessary goal.
