My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel - Hardcover

Shavit, Ari

 
9780385521703: My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385521707 ISBN 13: 9780385521703
Verlag: Spiegel & Grau, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE ECONOMIST

Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

An authoritative and deeply personal narrative history of the State of Israel, by one of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East today
 
Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.
 
We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country.

As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

Praise for My Promised Land

“This book will sweep you up in its narrative force and not let go of you until it is done. [Shavit’s] accomplishment is so unlikely, so total . . . that it makes you believe anything is possible, even, God help us, peace in the Middle East.”—Simon Schama, Financial Times
 
“[A] must-read book.”—Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
 
“Important and powerful . . . the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read.”—Leon Wieseltier, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Spellbinding . . . Shavit’s prophetic voice carries lessons that all sides need to hear.”—The Economist
 
“One of the most nuanced and challenging books written on Israel in years.”—The Wall Street Journal

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ari Shavit is a leading Israeli journalist, a columnist for Haaretz, and a commentator on Israeli public television.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ONE

At First Sight, 1897

On the night of April 15, 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa. Thirty passengers are on board, twenty-one of them Zionist pilgrims who have come from London via Paris, Marseille, and Alexandria. Leading the pilgrims is the Rt. Honorable Herbert Bentwich, my great-grandfather.

Bentwich is an unusual Zionist. At the end of the nineteenth century, most Zionists are Eastern European; Bentwich is a British subject. Most Zionists are poor; he is a gentleman of independent means. Most Zionists are secular, whereas he is a believer. For most Zionists of this time, Zionism is the only choice, but my great-grandfather chooses Zionism of his own free will. In the early 1890s, Herbert Bentwich makes up his mind that the Jews must settle again in their ancient homeland, Judea.

This pilgrimage is unusual, too. It is the first such journey of upper-middle-class British Jews to the Land of Israel. This is why the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, attributes such importance to these twenty-one travelers. He expects Bentwich and his colleagues to write a comprehensive report about the Land. Herzl is especially interested in the inhabitants of Palestine and the prospects for colonizing it. He expects the report to be presented at the end of the summer to the first Zionist Congress that is to be held in Basel. But my great-grandfather is somewhat less ambitious. His Zionism, which preceded Herzl’s, is essentially romantic. Yet he, too, was carried away by the English translation of Herzl’s prophetic manifesto Der Judenstaat, or The State of the Jews. He personally invited Herzl to appear at his prestigious London club, and he was bowled over by the charisma of the visionary leader. Like Herzl, he believes that Jews must return to Palestine. But as the flat-bottomed steamer Oxus carves the black water of the Mediterranean, Bentwich is still an innocent. My great-grandfather does not wish to take a country and to establish a state; he wishes to face God.

I remain on deck for a moment. I want to understand why the Oxus is making its way across the sea. Who exactly is this ancestor of mine, and why has he come here?

As the twentieth century is about to begin there are more than 11 million Jews in the world, of whom nearly 7 million live in Eastern Europe, 2 million live in Central and Western Europe, and 1.5 million live in North America. Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewry total less than one million.

Only in North America and Western Europe are Jews emancipated. In Russia they are persecuted. In Poland they are discriminated against. In Islamic countries they are a “protected people” living as second-class citizens. Even in the United States, France, and Britain, emancipation is merely a legality. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. In 1897, Christendom is not yet at peace with its ultimate other. Many find it difficult to address Jews as free, proud, and equal.

In the eastern parts of Europe, Jewish distress is acute. A new breed of ethnic-based anti-Semitism is superseding the old religious-based anti-Semitism. Waves of pogroms befall Jewish towns and townships in Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, and Poland. Most shtetl Jews realize that there is no future for the shtetl. Hundreds of thousands sail to Ellis Island. The Jewish Diaspora experiences once again the cataclysmic phenomenon of mass migration.

Worse than the past is what the future holds. In the next half century, a third of all Jews will be murdered. Two-thirds of European Jewry will be wiped out. The worst catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people is about to occur. So as the Oxus approaches the shores of the Holy Land, the need to give Palestine to the Jews feels almost palpable. If the Jews won’t disembark here, they will have no future. This emerging coastline may be their only salvation.

There is another need. In the millennium preceding 1897, Jewish survival was guaranteed by the two great g’s: God and ghetto. What enabled Jews to maintain their identity and their civilization was their closeness to God and their detachment from the surrounding non-Jewish world. Jews had no territory and no kingdom. They had no liberty and no sovereignty. What held them together as a people were religious belief, religious practice, and a powerful religious narrative, as well as the high walls of isolation built around them by gentiles. But in the hundred years prior to 1897, God drifted away and the ghetto walls collapsed. Secularization and emancipation—limited as they were—eroded the old formula of Jewish survival. There was nothing to maintain the Jewish people as a people living among others. Even if Jews were not to be slaughtered by Russian Cossacks or to be persecuted by French anti-Semites, they were faced with collective mortal danger. Their ability to maintain a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization in the Diaspora was now in question.

There was a need for revolution. If it was to survive, the Jewish people had to be transformed from a people of the Diaspora to a people of sovereignty. In this sense the Zionism that emerges in 1897 is a stroke of genius. Its founders, led by Dr. Herzl, are both prophetic and heroic. All in all, the nineteenth century was the golden age of Western Europe’s Jewry. Yet the Herzl Zionists see what is coming. True, they do not know that the twentieth century will conjure up such places as Auschwitz and Treblinka. But in their own way they act in the 1890s in order to preempt the 1940s. They realize they are faced with a radical problem: the coming extinction of the Jews. And they realize that a radical problem calls for a radical solution: the transformation of the Jews, a transformation that can take place only in Palestine, the Jews’ ancient homeland.

Herbert Bentwich does not see things as lucidly as Theodor Herzl does. He doesn’t know that the century about to begin will be the most dramatic in Jewish history. But his intuition tells him that it’s time for radical action. He knows that the distress in Eastern Europe is intolerable and that in the West, assimilation is unavoidable; in the East, Jews are in danger, while in the West, Judaism is in trouble. My great-grandfather understands that the Jewish people desperately need a new place, a new beginning, a new mode of existence. If they are to survive, the Jewish people need the Holy Land.

Bentwich was born in 1856 in the Whitechapel district of London. His father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who made his living as a traveling salesman, peddling jewelry in Birmingham and Cambridge. But the salesman wanted more for his beloved son. He sent Herbert to fine grammar schools where the boy did well. Knowing that all his parents’ hopes were invested in him, the disciplined youngster worked hard to prove himself. In his thirties he was already a successful solicitor living in St. John’s Wood.

Before traveling to Palestine, my great-grandfather was a leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish community. His professional expertise was copyright law. In his social life he was one of the founders of the prominent dining and debating Maccabean Club. In his private life he was married to a beautiful, artistic wife who was raising nine children in their magisterial Avenue Road home. Another two would be born in the coming years.

A self-made man, Herbert Bentwich is rigid and pedantic. His dominant traits are arrogance, determination, self-assurance, self-reliance, and nonconformity. Yet he is very much a romantic, with a soft spot for mysticism. Bentwich is a Victorian. He feels deeply indebted to the British Empire for opening its gates to the immigrant’s son he once was. When Bentwich was two years old, the first Jew was elected to British Parliament. When he...

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Verlag
Spiegel & Grau
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385521707
ISBN 13 
9780385521703
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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