This is the second 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 3.

The ultimate question leftist opponents of Zionism like to hurl at liberal Zionists, the one the former believe the latter cannot answer, is, to use Finkelstein’s formulation: “How does one excuse ethnic cleansing?” If one is a liberal, committed to human rights, how can one justify the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 as Israel was born?

Shavit’s answer comes in the form of the two chapters that sit at the heart of the book. First comes “Lydda, 1948,” a meticulously assembled account of the three July days when soldiers of the new Israeli army emptied that city of its Palestinian inhabitants and, according to Shavit, killed more than three hundred civilians in cold blood and without discrimination. Piecing together the testimony of those who did the killing, Shavit writes: “Zionism carrie[d] out a massacre.”

It was this chapter, unflinching and forensically detailed, that so exercised Isi Leibler in his Jerusalem Post review. As we shall see, the mere fact of setting out such brutal facts is itself to take a stand, but Shavit touches on the question of justification too.

First, he implicitly accepts what anti-Zionists have long argued: that the eventual dispossession of Palestinians was logically entailed in the Zionist project from the outset, that it could not be any other way. The problem was, the Jewish homeland was not empty. As the two rabbis dispatched from Theodor Herzl’s first Zionist Congress in Vienna, sent to Palestine like the biblical spies who first entered Canaan, reported back: “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.” Shavit seems to accept as obvious the implication that Palestine could not become the home of the Jews unless Palestinians lost their homes in Palestine: “If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.”

Does that mean that Shavit believes the massacre at Lydda was justified? He avoids a direct answer. The question is “too immense to deal with”; it is “a reality I cannot contain.” But he won’t join

the bleeding heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what [the Israelis] did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed…. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born…. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.

This answer is underpinned, again implicitly, by what follows. The chapter after Lydda is “Housing Estate, 1957,” which describes a single shikun, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Tel Aviv that became the new home of a group of Holocaust survivors. Shavit quotes, uninterrupted and at length, the harrowing childhood experiences of three eminent Israelis: novelist Aharon Appelfeld, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, and Professor Ze’ev Sternhell (whom Shavit calls “a lauded political activist against Israeli fascism”), all of whom endured the whirlwind of the Shoah before they reached Israel.

The juxtaposition of these two chapters makes Shavit’s point for him. It reminds the reader why Jews came to believe with such urgency and fervor that a state, a haven, was a necessity. As it happens, both hawkish Zionists and anti-Zionists tend to dislike this line of reasoning. The former fear it weakens the Jewish claim to Palestine if that claim is deemed to have arisen not out of a millennia-old attachment to the Land of Israel, but simply the need for a postwar sanctuary. The latter see it as a kind of moral trump card, designed to close down all argument.

Yet Shavit is right to raise it, because the experience of the Holocaust did indeed convince Jews in Palestine and beyond that a Jewish state had become a mortal need. Judis, whose perspective differs sharply from Shavit’s, confirms as much when he quotes Truman’s envoy Mark Ethridge telling the president that the Jews believed they had had a “narrow escape…from extinction.” Judis reports that most of the Reform Jews who as late as 1942 had founded the American Council for Judaism—which led the fight against US support for a Jewish state—radically reversed their position once they knew of the Nazi horror. “After reports of the Holocaust surfaced, many of them embraced Zionism as the only alternative for Europe’s displaced Jews.” That experience—of Jews, once ambivalent about Jewish statehood, dropping all doubts in the face of the Shoah—was all but universal in the Jewish world. It seemed clear that Jews needed a country where, even if their safety would be far from guaranteed, they would, at least, be able to defend themselves.

Still, believing that a Jewish national home had become a moral necessity is not the same as believing that the dispossession of the Palestinians was logically inevitable. The two views are separable. Judis’s central argument is that things could indeed have turned out differently, had Truman followed his instinct for evenhandedness between Jews and Arabs and backed the Zionism of Ahad Ha’am and his followers, who called for a binational state in Palestine. That he didn’t, says Judis, is owing to the muscular pressure of American Zionism, as Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Stephen Wise, and others strong-armed the president into favoring the Jewish case over the Palestinian.

The echo in that argument of recent controversies over “the Israel lobby,” including the furor stirred by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book on the subject, has seen Judis similarly accused of reviving age-old tropes of overweening Jewish power. All of which has tended to obscure his attempt to recover from obscurity the binationalist strain within Zionism. The conventional view is that the vision of Ahad Ha’am and the Brit Shalom movement he inspired—which included Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, and Gershom Scholem among others—was impossibly utopian and doomed to fail, that the two peoples were always fated to clash. Judis rejects that, insisting that Truman could have used US might to impose a binational solution on Palestine.

Others, including the political scientist Jerome Slater, argue that a binational state was not the only way that expulsion and dispossession could have been avoided.* Slater describes plans in circulation at the time for voluntary resettlement by Arabs, along with substantial financial compensation, which might have made a Jewish state possible without much of the brutality that ensued.

These should be important questions for liberal Zionists because they challenge, at the very least, the notion that violent dispossession was unavoidable and inherent in the Zionist enterprise. In the cold language of logic, they suggest that massacres such as that at Lydda were contingent rather than necessary. Shavit does not consider these alternative possibilities, but if he had it might have shaken his certainty that had it not been for “the damned” of Lydda, the state of Israel would not have been born.