Ari Shavit

****.5

The book opens with Shavit retroactively imposing his 21st century worldview onto his 19th century great-grandfather, with the benefit and baggage of 120 years of hindsight. The language is poetic and prophetic, idealized and ideological. Anyone looking for an objective overview or history will be disappointed, frustrated, or angered, depending on the degree to which the reader agrees with the author's politics.

Equally frustrating is his refusal or inability to propose any sort of show more tangible solutions to the seven existential crises that he describes. Again aided by hindsight, he excoriates the people he interviews for the mistakes they made decades earlier. While this may be an effective journalistic technique to elicit a spirited response, it's a pretty shitty way to deal with sensitive issues. Especially when many of them are the very people he worked with side-by-side during that period without ever raising the concerns he now accuses them of ignoring.

My biggest problem with the book is that ultimately he doesn't manage to articulate a consistent or coherent vision. Despite bitching for hundreds of pages about how awful things are in Israel and how tainted the history, he remains a staunch Zionist, completely rejecting the validity of American Jewry (or Diasporic Jewry in general) which he views as a dead end. He rails at the West Bank settler movement for being obstacles to peace, but also concedes that the real problem is 1948 and not 1967. He lashes out at the left and the right, the secular and the religious, lamenting the lack of social cohesion while praising the absorption of millions of immigrants from vastly different backgrounds. Basically, anyone who strays one iota from his current opinion is making things worse, never mind the cynicism and contradictions.

However, despite these deep problems (and many others, such as the choppy nature of the book being comprised of essays written over many years and hastily stitched together), I think it's still worth a read for anyone interested in Israel. He does provide a good deal of insight and context for various elements of Israeli society, and provides vital context in understanding why certain things are the way they are. show less

Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist whose ancestors were among the founders of the Zionist enterprise that eventually brought about the creation of the State of Israel. He describes his early childhood, in the 1960's, as prosperous, exuberant, orderly, yet overshadowed by an existential fear that some terrible catastrophe of mythic proportions waited to sweep his beloved homeland away. As he grew older, watched history unfold during the Six Day War and those that followed, and became a show more soldier himself, he came to understand that the source of this fear was the realization that his Israel, founded as a haven for a people long oppressed and cast out, existed only by occupying, dispossessing and oppressing another people.

My Promised Land is Shavit's personalized history of the State of Israel, based on interviews with hundreds of Israelis--Jews and Arabs, men and women, descendants of early immigrants, Holocaust survivors, displaced Palestinians, prosperous business leaders, authors, orange growers, fighter pilots. It is also a rational, frank and honest look at how that country came into being, what it cost and continues to cost both Israelis and Palestinians, and what it means to the larger world in the 21st century. It reads like a generational saga destined to become a sweeping mini-series of the caliber of "John Adams" or "Shogun". Not once is the narrative flow blocked by a chunk of dry facts, and yet this book is loaded with facts. My ARC is dog-eared and page-pointed as though I expected to be comprehensively tested on its contents. The things I learned...they could fill a book. They do fill a book, a very fine book that is important, beautiful and profound. Shavit's love of his native land is not blind, but rather extremely insightful, accepting and forgiving her sins, but never trying to conceal them. He is eloquent in describing the seemingly insoluble problem, the tragedy of a clash between one very powerful, very convincing claim over this land, and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim. "I am haunted by the notion that we hold them by the balls and they hold us by the throat. We squeeze and they squeeze back. We are trapped by them and they are trapped by us. And every few years the conflict takes on a new form, ever more gruesome...The tragedy ends one chapter and begins another, but the tragedy never ends."

All history should be written this well. Highly recommended. show less

This was a disturbing and tiring book, in some ways, yet also encouraging. I finished it some time ago, but never got around to writing a review because it left me feeling so sad, and in a way just a bit hopeless. The levels of apathy, of resignation to what is rather than hope for what could be, and the histories of events I'd read from another point of view about twenty years ago, now seen very differently. All very sad, yet I also see the need to read and attempt to help build on the work show more of authors like Amos Oz, and to read him in the original modern Hebrew, to try harder to understand the full dynamics of what is pulling on the modern State of Israel from both within and without, and to see how that applies to (and to some extent comes from) our Jewish communities, my chosen community, the people of Israel in the diaspora.
I was struck by the near uprising of the Mizrachim and Sfardim, and my experience talking with a Sfardic friend in 1988, and how we have both changed over those years, sadly.
I remain hopeful, because I must.
Toward Peace for All Humanity,
Shira Destinie
7 February 12017 HE (Holocene Calendar)
11 Shevat 5777 (the Jewish Calendar) show less

Continuing on a quest to understand more about the Middle East and how we got to this point in history, Shavit's discourse on the history of Israel is so informative. From the late 1800s when the first Zionist movement began to establish communities in Palestine for Jewish settlers, to the explosion of violence before World War I, and up through the modern day sect-plagued Israeli politics, Shavit carefully explains the seeds of violence and hate playing out in the current news. Though an show more Israeli journalist, and descendant of early Zionists, Shavit is not afraid to divvy up blame where it belongs. If you think you know how Israel came to be, you probably don't have a clue.

highly Recommended!!!!!
5 bones!!!!! show less