REVIEWED BY SAM WINTER-LEVYThis piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy.In April 1897, just months after Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State and launched the Zionist movement, a steamer containing twenty-one dreamers docks in Jaffa. They are a delegation of upper-class British Jews, and they have traveled to Palestine to investigate the prospects of settling the land with the persecuted Jewish masses of Russia, Poland, and Belarus. A prophetic fear of the extinction of the Jewish people— whether in the pogroms of Eastern Europe or the secularized assimilation of Western Europe—combined with a romantic Victorian yearning for Zion have inspired these pilgrims to leave the comforts of London for the deserts of Palestine. Leading the delegation is the Right Honorable Herbert Bentwich, the great-grandfather of the author Ari Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz and one of Israel’s most influential political commentators. As the steamer moors, Shavit pauses his narrative and asks himself, “Do I want him to disembark?

I don’t yet know.” 1My Promised Land is the most widely acclaimed and commercially successful book on Israel of the last decade, receiving effusively positive reviews upon its publication in the United States. It is an attempt to understand Israel by telling its story from the arrival of Bentwich in Jaffa in 1897 to the writing of the book in 2013.

Shavit thankfully rejects polemic for the most part, instead presenting a “personal odyssey,” an idiosyncratic but always gripping mix of family history, memoir, archival research, and interviews. Structured chronologically, each chapter pro- vides a snapshot of a historical moment set in a geographical location within Israel. Thus from his great-grandfather’s arrival in Jaffa in 1897, Shavit moves on to the 1920s and the pioneers of the Kibbutzim in Ein Harod, where “after eighteen hundred years, the Jews have returned to sow the valley,” 2 and then onto the flourishing orange groves of Rehovot in the 1930s, before the bloodshed of the Arab revolts in 1936 shattered the illusions of the more utopian elements of the Jewish national movement.The State of Israel’s first decade is evoked by the Bizaron housing estate, inhabited by quietly traumatized but obsessively industrious European Holocaust survivors.

Line play gems and cash generator. Other chapters include a fascinating account of Israel’s “ambiguous” nuclear project at Dimona, with which both Shavit’s father and uncle were directly involved, and an overwrought portrayal of the throbbing hedonism of Tel Aviv’s nightlife. Shavit has set out to write an avowedly centrist ac- count, appealing to the broadest possible spectrum of reader—hawks and doves alike. Thus, in the chapter containing his account of his own experience as a guard in a prison on Gaza Beach, Shavit can use words like “Aktion” and “Gestapo” and quote a fellow soldier who says that “the place resembles a concentration camp,” although Shavit himself has “always abhorred the analogy.” 3 In another, however, he can provide an analysis of the existential threat posed by the Iranian centrifuges so hawkish Netanyahu himself could have written it.

Labor historian Honey (Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King’s Last Campaign) emphasizes Martin Luther King Jr.’s attempts to build bridges between civil rights organizations.

This dualism runs throughout the book.Shavit is nostalgic for Israel’s more socialist past, tracing many of the problems he sees today to the victory of the right in the 1977 elections, which ended thirty years of rule by left-wing parties. He is a passionate critic of the occupation, viewing it as unjust and politically corrosive. At the same time, however, despite agreeing with the leftist peace movement on the moral illegitimacy of the occupation, he sees the “peaceniks” as naively deluded in their belief that withdrawing to some version of the 1967 borders would bring peace: “We should have been sober enough to say that occupation must end even if the end of occupation did not end the conflict.” 4On this logic, Israel need not wait for a deal with the Palestinians but should just take unilateral measures to “gradually and cautiously withdraw” from the West Bank. 5 Given the unlikely prospects of any successful negotiated settlement, a unilateral withdrawal of this sort, which Ben-Gurion himself advocated immediately following the 1967 war, increasingly represents one of the few remaining responses for Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state. After Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, however, popular support for any risky disengagement from the West Bank is at an all-time low. At the same time, Shavit is clear-sighted about the dangers of de-occupation—especially the potential for the rise of, in Netanyahu’s words, another missile- lobbing “Hamas-stan” just minutes from Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport. Shavit’s account, then, written in English and clearly targeted at an American audience, has much to interest all readers.

In places, it is genuinely powerful and moving, most notably in its descriptions of Zionism’s almost miraculous nation-building, as malaria-ridden swamps are drained and deserts bloom. Ultimately, however, Shavit’s tale revolves around a core of gnawing, corrosive, confidence-sapping guilt over the foundation of Israel.For all Shavit’s celebration of Israel’s national achievement, this anguished guilt rots away at Shavit’s moral faith in the Zionist project. It hangs over much of the book’s early chapters, with portentous forebodings of an impending catastrophe shrouding his description of Zionism’s every move, no matter how benign, from growing an orange to attending a violin concert. From the very first paragraphs of the book, when Bentwich is described as “still an innocent” 6 when he views the Holy Land from his steamer—not yet damned for the fate of the Palestinians whose villages he “does not see” 7 as he surveys it—guilt hangs over all the triumphs of My Promised Land. This self-flagellating contrition finds its defining apotheosis in one chapter in particular, entitled “Lydda, 1948,” which gained some notoriety when published separately in the The New Yorker.

It de- scribes, graphically, the expulsion of thou- sands of Arabs from the city of Lydda in July 1948, as “Zionism carries out a massacre.” Shavit writes, “Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda.