My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

“Kibbutz socialism is now essential for several reasons. Without group effort, Zionist colonizers will not be able to endure the hardships involved in the colonizing process. Without the idealism of kibbutz socialism, Zionism will not have the sense of moral superiority that is essential for the colonization process to succeed. Without the communal aspect of kibbutz, socialist Zionism will lack legitimacy and will be perceived as an unjust colonialist movement. Only kibbutz socialism can give Zionism the social cohesion, the mental determination, and the moral imperative needed at this revolutionary stage. And only the Labor Brigade ethos of kibbutz socialism will enable Zionism to take the valley and to take the Land.” 

Israel was founded on socialist ideals that have eroded with time. The first settlers were utopian communists, but their society morphed into Bolshevik-style socialism, state socialism, state capitalism, and then free-market capitalism as dictated by the perceived needs of the country. Shavit argues that Zionism’s most productive eras were socialist.

“The brutal events that took place between April and August 1936 pushed Zionism from a state of utopian bliss to a state of dystopian conflict. As Palestinian nationalism was asserting itself and demanding that Jewish immigration stop immediately, it was now impossible to ignore the Arabs living in the land, impossible to ignore the fact that the Arabs reviled the Zionist enterprise. The Jewish national liberation movement had to acknowledge that it was facing an Arab liberation movement that wished to disgorge the Jews from the shores they had settled on.” 

Zionism began peacefully, but as the Jewish population rose, its accomplishment and power grew with it. The Arab backlash was inevitable. By the late 1930s Arab Palestinians no longer tolerated Zionists. Both groups’ actions during this time defined their relationship for the next century.

“Lehmann believed that Zionism must plant the Jews in their ancient homeland in an organic fashion. It must respect the Orient and become a bridge between East and West. Though he never said so explicitly, Lehmann saw his Lydda Valley youth village as an example of what Zionism should be: a salvation project giving home to the homeless, providing roots to the uprooted, and restoring meaning to life. Lehmann’s Ben Shemen would offer harmony to the children and to the era that had lost all harmony.” 

Many early Zionists believed they could exist within Palestinian society and improve it. These Zionists believed that their contributions to Palestinian society would earn the respect and good will of their Arab neighbors. Early Zionists established medical clinics, introduced new farming techniques, and shared advanced technologies with Arab Palestinians. For decades before conflict became intolerable, the lives of both groups improved.

“But in 1947 the question of Palestine reaches its moment of truth. In February, His Majesty’s government has had enough of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews and decides to leave the Holy Land and let the United Nations determine its fate. In June, an eleven-member UN inquiry commission arrives in Palestine and while touring the country visits Ben Shemen and the Lydda Valley. In August the committee comes to the conclusion that there is no chance that Jews and Arabs can coexist in Palestine, and therefore suggests dividing the land into two nation-states. In November, the UN General Assembly endorses the partition plan and calls for the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state. As the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine reject Resolution 181, violence flares throughout the country. It is clear that Arab nationalism is about to eradicate Zionism and destroy the Jewish community in Palestine by the use of brutal force. It is clear that the Jews must defend themselves, as no one else will come to their rescue. From December 1947 to May 1948, a cruel civil war between Arabs and Jews rages. After the British leave, the State of Israel is founded on May 14, 1948. The next day, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invade and a full-scale war erupts.” 

Partition destroyed any home for Zionist-Arab peace. A foreign body whose authority Arab Palestinians did not recognize granted half of Palestine to a migrant group that had begun arriving less than half a century before. What had previously been a struggle for land and resources became an international struggle for sovereignty against a multinational body of Western hegemonic power. With this new dimension, the conflict grew from a Zionist-Arab Palestinian one to a multinational one between Arabic Middle Eastern and African nations, and Western nations and Israel.

“One thing is clear to me: the brigade commander and the military governor were right to get angry at the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed. I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper. But I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. 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. If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.” 

For Israel to exist, people had to act in a morally questionable and sometimes abhorrent manner. The entire endeavor—entering occupied land, removing its inhabitants, and establishing a sovereign state—necessitated immoral action. Maintaining the state also requires immoral action, given that Israel is surrounded by people who want to destroy it. One cannot accept Israel without also accepting as necessary its immoral and sometimes abhorrent actions.

“Israel of the 1950s was a state on steroids: more and more people, more and more cities, more and more villages, more and more of everything. […] But it was also a nation of practicality that combined modernity, nationalism, and development in an aggressive manner. There was no time, and there was no peace of mind, and therefore there was no human sensitivity. As the state became everything, the individual was marginalized. As it marched toward the future, Israel erased the past. There was no place for the previous landscape, no place for previous identities. Everything was done en masse. Everything was imposed from above. There was an artificial quality to everything. Zionism was not an organic process anymore but a futuristic coup. For its outstanding economic, social, and engineering achievements, the new Israel paid a dear moral price. There was no notion of human rights, civil rights, due process, or laissez-faire. There was no equality for the Palestinian minority and no compassion for the Palestinian refugees. There was little respect for the Jewish Diaspora and little empathy for the survivors of the Holocaust. Ben Gurion’s statism and monolithic rule compelled the nation forward.” 

Israel’s primary strength is its military. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel conducted its entire nation-building effort with the vigor of a military enterprise. It marginalized the individual and promoted the collective. Israel’s ethos was sacrifice, and in turn, Israelis improved the greater good to create an enviable society. A consequence of this was a broken people whose individual struggles were ignored. Shavit argues this resulted in the broken modern Israeli society.

“In order to create and uphold a Jewish state in the Middle East, a protective umbrella had to be unfurled above the fledgling endeavor, a structure that would protect the Jews from the animosity they provoked when they entered the land. A bell jar had to be placed over them to shield them from the predators that lay in wait.” 

Israel is surrounded by hostile forces and requires protection. In the early 20th century Israel depended on diplomatic relations with powerful Western nations to provide protection, but after several decisive military victories and Israel’s construction of the Dimona nuclear reactor, Israel became self-sufficiently secure. Israel’s security has done nothing to reduce tensions with the countries that wish to destroy it but only thwarted their efforts. Israel exists in a perpetual state of danger and requires a perpetual security umbrella.

“[…] in 1962, a synthesis of these two approaches emerged: a doctrine according to which Israel would be a nuclear power but would act as if it were not. This way it would not goad the Arabs or accelerate the nuclearization of the Middle East; it would not adopt a reckless and immoral security strategy.” 

Israel’s nuclear ambitions were balanced delicately. Israel exists in a hostile sea of Arab powers that seek to destroy it. Any perceived nuclear hostility by Israel could result in a nuclear arms race and incite a catastrophe, yet Israel exists in a hostile sea of Arab powers that seek to destroy it, and it must defend itself to survive. In the 1960s, Israel felt it must develop one of the most powerful weapons in existence but that it must do so in a way that did not provoke its neighbors and force them to use those weapons.

“But the historical respite that Dimona gave Israel is nearing an end. Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the Middle East is probably coming to a close. Sooner or later, the Israeli monopoly will be broken. First one hostile state will go nuclear, then a second hostile state, then a third. In the first half of the twenty-first century, the Middle East is bound to be nuclearized. The world’s first multirival nuclear arena might emerge in the world’s most unstable region.” 

Nuclear weapons capability provided Israel over half a century of security. In that time Israel increased its economic output and developed into a thriving nation. Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons will not last forever. India and Pakistan, other Middle Eastern nations, now possess nuclear weapons. Before long, hostile Middle Eastern nations in close proximity will also posses them. Once Iran develops nuclear weapons, a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race will begin that could destroy the entire region.

“And yet, when I listen to Wallerstein and Etzion, I realize that they did not have a well-defined doctrine regarding the Arabs. When they came to settle in Samaria, they were more ignorant than evil. They saw Israel’s 1970s weakness and realized that the Israeli crisis was not only political but spiritual. They felt obligated to deal with the crisis, but the solution they came up with was absurd and completely ignored the demographic reality on the ground. Wallerstein and Etzion did not realize this because they did not think through the consequences of their actions. They were young and rebellious and they were part of a juvenile movement that enjoyed breaking a taboo, crossing a line, and challenging the establishment. But they never knew where they were really headed. They never realized what sort of mess they were about to create. They established Ofra without comprehending its repercussions.” 

Shavit attributes much of Israeli-Palestinian conflict to ignorance rather than evil intent. Shavit blames his great-grandfather and other early Zionists’ unseeing of Arab Palestinians on ignorance; he blames military atrocities on the “chain of command” making individual actors ignorant to the effects of their actions; he blames actions of Israeli prison guards on ignorance rather than hatred for Palestinians; he blames the occupying settlements on ignorance rather than desire for colonialist conquest. Shavit believes individual Israelis do not choose to commit misdeeds. He argues instead that society is structured so that the actions of individual benevolent actors combine to create horrendous outcomes, but that the individual actors are ignorant to the possibility of such outcomes.

“[…] the settlers are a minority in Judea and Samaria. As the international community will never recognize them as legitimate, the settlements are built on precarious ground. As Israel of the plains never really embraced the settlements, they remain distant and detached, living beyond mountains of darkness. Like Algeria and Rhodesia, they will not survive. They are at a dead end.” 

Israel’s occupying settlements in Palestine cannot survive. The international community does not recognize them, Jewish settlers are a minority in the area, and even Israelis reject them. Shavit contends there is no path to acceptance and survival of the settlements. He argues that Israel should abandon them, retreat its borders, and reclaim international respect.

“Like most Israelis, we’d prefer our Israel to be a sort of California, but the trouble is that although we are solid citizens of a consumer-oriented, technological democracy, we find ourselves in deep shit. And when we stand in this weary semicircle—tired, desperate, and miserable, with our tattered belts and with lousy coats that don’t keep us warm enough—we, too, feel like victims.” 

Shavit argues that Israelis are a peaceful, accepting, and progressive people who do not want violence and conflict, and who do not want to imprison and subjugate Palestinians. The Israeli prison guards serving in the Palestinian prison are performing mandatory conscription and do not believe in the cause they serve. He contends the atrocities and violence are a product of Israelis’ precarious situation in the Middle East and the area’s tortured past, and that if Israelis could choose, they would have a peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. This peaceful coexistence, however, would require relinquishing land and power. 

“But only when I turned thirty and began listening seriously to what Palestinians were actually saying did I realize that the promise of peace was unfounded. It played a vital moral role in our lives, but it had no empirical basis. The promise of peace was benign, but it was bogged down by a systematic denial of the brutal reality we live in.” 

Shavit recognizes that Israeli-Palestinian peace is not obtainable. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is a stalemate. The situation is simple: Israelis have the land; Palestinians want the land. Israelis cannot return the land to Palestinians, and Palestinians won’t be happy unless the land is returned. The solution is unsolvable. Someone must win, and someone must lose.

“‘My heart burns when I come here. I go crazy when I come here. We were respected people. Englishmen and Jews and Arabs listened to us. Our words carried weight. But today, who are we, what are we? Beggars. No one listens to us. No one respects us. We, who owned all this land, don’t even have one grain of wheat. Only a UNRWA refugee certificate.” 

Palestinians lived for generations in villages. They were respected in the international community. Then, they were forcibly removed by an occupying force to live as refugees or subjugated people. They are no longer respected; now they are pitied. They are angry and emotional. From their perspective, Israelis took everything from them. Israel comprises many nations’ persecuted Jews. To ensure they would no longer be persecuted, they persecuted another group of people. Jews removed Arab Palestinians from their homeland just as Jews were removed from theirs; Jews committed violence against Arab Palestinians just as violence was committed against Jews; Jews imprisoned Arab Palestinians just as the Jews were imprisoned. To ensure their survival, many Israelis became their enemies.

“A state designed for one population was populated by another. A state based on one culture was overtaken by another. But Zionism did not—and could not—acknowledge the sea change that had taken place. It could not admit that the original blueprint did not fit the new circumstances. So Zionism pressed on, willfully ignoring the harm it was doing. The Israeli melting pot worked with brutal efficiency: it forged a nation, but it also scorched the identities and scalded the souls it was to have saved.” 

Zionism was intended for secular European Jews, but after the Holocaust there weren’t enough secular European Jews to fill the population needs of Israel. To compensate, Israel enticed Northern African and Middle Eastern Jews to migrate, but those Jews were more religious than the Jews who built Israel, and their culture was foreign to the mostly European Israelis. Israeli society was built around secular socialism, technology, industry, and military. Its values did not comport with the values of the ultra-Orthodox Oriental Jews now comprising a large portion of its population. Over time this tension caused a fractured and weakened Israeli society.

“To this day, many Oriental Israelis are not aware of what Israel saved them from: a life of misery and backwardness in an Arab Middle East that turned ugly. To this day Israel is not aware of the pain it inflicted when it crushed the culture and identity of the Oriental Jews it absorbed. Neither Zionist Israel nor its Oriental population had fully recognized the traumas of the 1950s and 1960s. Neither has yet found a way to honor it and contain it-and make peace with it. This is why the wound lingers on.” 

While Israel did not properly accept Oriental Jews, Shavit argues that Oriental Jews fail to recognize what Israel saved them from in their homelands: discrimination, persecution, violence, and potentially death. Even in countries where Jews were previously respected members of society, after the Six-Day War their homelands rejected them. Jewish life has only become more intolerable in those countries, while Israel has flourished.

“No one thinks he can change the world. There is no new idea here, no new message. And yet the government and the parliament and the establishment should pay attention to what is happening here. Because this nation is all about war and death. Even our religion is very sad, with its Yom Kippur and all, always telling you to suffer and sacrifice. But here we have something very powerful that says ‘Fuck it.’ We don’t have to suffer and sacrifice anymore. Because now we are a fifty-year-old nation, and the armies of the surrounding Arab nations won’t invade us. No one will conquer and destroy us. So we can breathe. We must breathe. And not only breathe, we even have to smile, laugh, go wild.” 

Israeli society inevitably rejected its tortured and violent culture in extravagant fashion. Everything that was pent up during Zionism and nation-building—the wars, terrorist violence, self-sacrifice, conscription, the herculean national effort—boiled-over into a self-indulgent bout of passion that was spectacularly unproductive but beautiful all the same. Israelis had enough regiment and for a brief time let loose.

“‘Talk to me,’ the Palestinian-Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla says. ‘Talk to me, give me your hand, make me your partner. Because, like it or not, you are a minority in the Middle East. And though your nation takes part in the Eurovision song contest and plays basketball in the European league, if you open an atlas and look at the map you will see three hundred fifty million Arabs all around you, and a billion and a half Muslims all around you. So do you really think that you can go on hiding in this artificial construct of a Jewish state? Do you really think you can protect yourself with this contradiction of a Jewish democracy? To insist upon the Jewish character of the State of Israel is to live by the sword. And over time, you will no longer be able to do so. The world will change, the balance of power will change, demography will change. In fact, demography is already changing. Your only way to survive in the Arab-Muslim world is to strike an alliance with me. I am your only hope. If you don’t do it now, tomorrow may be too late. When you turn into a minority, you will come looking for me, but I won’t be here. By that time I will not be interested in whatever you’ll want to offer. It will be too late, my friend.”

Israelis face an impossible existence. The state cannot last long in a sea of oppositional forces. Israel’s long-term survival will not depend on military strength, technological might, or its powerful economy; its long-term survival will depend on diplomacy. Israel is currently lacking such diplomacy, ignoring it in favor of colonialist expansionism and demonstrations of military strength. Israel’s military will not protect it forever, though, and the state’s signaling to Western powers that it no longer desires their allegiance may leave it unprotected even by allies. To survive, Israel must mend its relationships with its Arab neighbors and convince them that it can be a valuable ally, worth keeping around.

“In less than thirty years, Israel has experienced seven different internal revolts: the settlers’ revolt, the peace revolt, the liberal-judicial revolt, the Oriental revolt, the ultra-Orthodox revolt, the hedonist-individualistic revolt, and the Palestinian Israelis’ revolt. In a sense, each and every one of these upheavals was justified: they sought justice for an oppressed minority and addressed latent but vital needs. They all brought to center stage forces that were previously willfully ignored or marginalized. But the outcome of these seven revolts was the disintegration of the Israeli republic.” 

Israel is a young state, just over 70 years old. Its history is extremely tumultuous, reshaping its society every few years and restructuring its priorities. This may be necessary in shaping a young state, developing the character it will have in maturity, or it may be a sign of instability, signifying the impermanence of the only Jewish democratic state in the Middle East. Time will tell.

“In the nuclear sphere, Israel has acted in an admirably responsible and restrained manner. Iran is different. Its ayatollahs seek regional hegemony and want to see Israel decimated. If they acquire the bomb they might actually use it or pass it on to others who might do so. A nuclear Iran will force Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to go nuclear and will surround the Jewish state with an unstable multipolar nuclear system that will make its strategic positioning impossible and will turn the life of its citizens to an ongoing nightmare.” 

Because of nuclear weapons’ immensely destructive power, only nations able to exercise restraint must possess them. Shavit believes the current nuclear powers exercise this restraint, including Israel, but that Iran and its allies in the Middle East would not. He fears the declining state of many Middle Eastern and Norther African Arab nations, and the accompanying tumult makes the nuclear threat extremely dangerous if any are to possess a weapon. 

“What I discovered was that the Jewish-American success story is no less impressive than the Jewish-Israeli one. While my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents pursued the Zionist miracle of renewing Jewish sovereignty, four generations of Jewish Yanks pursued the miracle of creating, in America, the perfect diaspora.” 

While Zionists created a powerful Jewish state in Israel, Jews in the United States created a flourishing and powerful diaspora. In certain ways the American diaspora is more successful at preserving Judaism than the Israeli state because it permits shared culture and orthodoxy. Israel, in contract, demands assimilation with a secular Hebrew culture that purges many of the strongest elements from Judaism.

“After all, we are not really masters of the universe. We are a small, persecuted people who contributed so much to humanity, and who were treated so badly by large parts of humanity. For 1,500 years, we were white Christian Europe’s ultimate other. Then we became its ultimate victim. We were not sent by imperialist forces to the other side of the world in order to loot the lands of a faraway continent. We returned to the land of our ancestors because we had no other choice. We had to save ourselves.” 

It is difficult to reconcile Jews as an oppressive colonialist force with the tortured and persecuted history of the Jewish people. Israelites have been persecuted for thousands of years and migrated to Palestine as refugees seeking safe harbor, yet that migration turned them into invaders, occupiers, and persecutors. In much of the world Jews are still persecuted; the state of Israel is persecuted. The BDS movement is one of anti-Semitic intolerance and persecution. Israelis occupy a narrow space in which they are both victim and perpetrator.

“Ehud Barak once defined the country as a villa in the jungle. But the real Israel is not a villa but a shopping mall: cheap, loud, intense and lively. The shopping mall embodies the Israeli condition-a desperate attempt to lead a pseudo-normal life in abnormal circumstances after an abnormal history and on the verge of an abnormal future.” 

The Israeli experience is absurd, dangerous, and illogical, but it could not exist any other way. There is no other place for Jews. Even in the United States, which Shavit claims is the place next most accepting of Jews, the Anti-Defamation League registered 1,879 anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2018, and anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 26% in New York City between 2018 and 2019, to 234 from 186. It is easy to condemn Israeli actions, to feel for Palestinians. It is more difficult to grapple with the impossible choices facing the world’s Jews. The world is dominated by the bold and aggressive. The United States rose to power as a settler nation, on the backs of slaves. Great Britain made its fortune as a colonial empire. Every powerful nation has committed atrocities. The decision for Israelis is to commit atrocities or remain a persecuted, subjugated people.