Ari Shavit’s new book, My Promised Land: The Triumph
and Tragedy of Israel, is a celebration, a lament, and a warning. In the book,
already a bestseller only weeks after publication, Shavit examines, without
denial or obfuscation, what he calls the “inevitable tragedy” at the heart of
Zionism: a movement of orphans that created orphans, a movement of pariahs that
created pariahs, a movement that sought refuge from violence yet wrought
violence on others. (In this sense, Israel is unique—and not.) In a chapter
titled “Lydda, 1948,” which was recently excerpted in The New Yorker, Shavit
writes of the Israeli army’s destruction of Palestinian villages during the
1948 Arab-Israeli war—a war that both sides understood as a zero-sum, us-or-them
battle. In the town of Lydda, destruction included looting and expulsions—and,
most heinously, the massacre of over two hundred civilians in a mosque.
“Forty-five years after it came into the Lydda Valley in the name of the
Kishinev pogrom, Zionism instigated a human catastrophe in the Lydda Valley.”
This is, Shavit writes, the “black box” of Zionism,
in which moral norms and humanist values dissolved. But this does not lead him
to renounce Zionism, or to believe that the suicide of Israel as the state of
the Jewish people would be a good, much less moral, response. “The Jewish state
about to be born would not survive the external battle with the armed forces of
the Arab nations if it did not first rid itself of the Palestinian population
that endangered it from within,” Shavit writes of the Israeli army’s actions
during the war. “If Zionism dies,…Jews will be Jews again”: that is, homeless,
hunted, helpless. For him, Lydda represents the “dirty, filthy work that
enables my people…to live.” Shavit is, I think, essentially arguing that war
crimes can be committed even in the course of a just war. The justness of the
war is not erased by such crimes; conversely, the criminality—the barbarism—of
the acts in question cannot be mitigated by the justness of the cause. (This
is, essentially, the position that members of Nelson Mandela’s African National
Congress put forth in their petitions for amnesty to South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.)
Ari Shavit was born in 1957 in Rehovot, a scientific
community; many of its inhabitants—including, Shavit implies, his chemist
father—worked on developing Israel’s atom bomb. Shavit’s army service as a
paratrooper took him to the occupied Palestinian territories—a traumatic
experience that turned him into a dove. He writes, “What the hell was going on,
I asked myself. Why was I defending my homeland by tyrannizing civilians who
were deprived of their rights and freedom? Why was my Israel occupying and
oppressing another people?” He later studied philosophy at Hebrew University,
and he is a longtime writer for the liberal-left daily newspaper Haaretz.
My Promised Land does not center only on “the
conflict.” Shavit’s range is wide: He explores, among other things, the patient
tenacity of the orange growers; the 1950s housing estates filled with
immigrants; the building of the atom bomb; the effect on Israelis of the Khmer
Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia; the Dionysian spirit of the Tel Aviv dance clubs;
and the early—terrifying—life stories of Israeli intellectuals such as
historian Zeev Sternhell, jurist Aharon Barak, and novelist Aharon Appelfeld,
all of whom survived the Holocaust as children.
Some of Shavit’s harshest criticisms are levelled at
the internal dynamics of the Israeli political system, which has, he charges,
fragmented into a “disoriented and dysfunctional…bizarre political entity.” He
writes, “A movement that got most things right in its early days has gotten
almost everything wrong in recent decades.” In Shavit’s view, the continuing
occupation of the West Bank—which he regards as an utter disaster—is the
result, not the cause, of what he calls “the disintegration of the Israeli
republic” into various warring tribes. Indeed, he argues that while Israeli
society is far richer than it was in its early, austere, egalitarian days, it
is also far weaker—and that this weakness hurts both Israelis and Palestinians.
Only a strong state and a united polity, he writes, can end the occupation—the
opposite of the argument put forth by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
campaign.
In the following interview, Shavit advocates what he
describes as a gradual drawdown of the occupation—an idea that does not appear
in his book, which does not offer policy solutions. His proposal is serious but
problematic, for it seems to ignore the lessons of Oslo, which proved that, in
the toxic context of Israel and Palestine, gradual programs will be subverted
by fanatics (often enthusiastically supported by presumed moderates) on each
side and, thus, create even greater mutual distrust, hopelessness, and hatred.
Oslo—“a baby unloved by both parents,” in the words of Amos Oz—was followed, it
should be recalled, by suicide bombers murdering Israeli children and Holocaust
survivors, two decades of new settlements in the West Bank, a humiliating and
onerous system of checkpoints, and the emergence of settler-terrorists.
At the end of My Promised Land, Shavit describes
contemporary Israel with an intriguing if hardly comforting metaphor: “We are a
ragtag cast in an epic motion picture whose plot we do not understand and
cannot grasp. The script writer went mad. The director ran away. The producer
went bankrupt. But we are still here…The camera is still rolling.” In person
Shavit is energetic, articulate, and far more optimistic than his book may
suggest to some. (Unless, that is, I am mistaking liveliness for optimism.) He
presents a viewpoint—that of a Left-Zionist—that is rarely heard in the U.S.,
where a large number of supporters of Israel deny its crimes and opponents of
Israel deny its right to exist. I spoke to him at a restaurant on the Upper
East Side in mid-November, one day before My Promised Land was released.
Susie Linfield for Guernica
1.
Guernica: You wrote the book in English. Who is
your audience?
2.
Ari Shavit: I wrote it as a Jewish Israeli born
into the Zionist Left. I felt it was time to ask the basic, fundamental
questions. But when the book was emerging, and I began thinking about it also
as a book that would be published in this country, I thought of reaching out
for progressive Israelis, progressive Americans, progressive American Jews—this
was probably my main mission. I’m in an avid dialogue with the Right, but the
Right are not my people. I come from this progressive tribe. And I’ve been in
pain for a long time, seeing what happened to progressive thinking about Israel
in the West. I think ironically that progressive thinking—in Israel and America
and Europe—about Israel became somewhat dogmatic and narrow-minded. It sees
some things very clearly like the futility and outrage of occupation, the
brutality of the settlements. All that, I totally share. But I think we lost
sight of the bigger picture. And I think that ironically this is the reason we
[on the Israeli Left] are politically defeated. I think that good things will happen
in the Middle East, in Israel, and to American progressive Jewry only if we
work together to save a progressive Israel that progressive Americans can have
affinity with again. The terrible things done by the Israeli Right over decades
have rightly alienated progressive Americans, progressive Europeans, and
progressive Israelis. And I think we should not let that be the case. We should
fight the Right, and we should fight the darker Zionist forces while
remembering that there are also things to celebrate: that at its base Israel is
a wonder and that there is justice [to a Jewish state]. And the fact that this
was hijacked, so to speak, by the Right—we should not accept that, and let them
have all the blue and white [colors of the Israeli flag], while we become
anti-blue and white. I think at the end of the day there should be a Jewish
democratic state, and we must fight the mutations, the terrible things that the
Right has done to that country. But we should not give up on that nation.
3.
Guernica: I did an interview in Berlin with the
German-Israeli historian Dan Diner last spring. And he said that he thought the
reason the settlers had become so powerful—although they are a small
minority—is that they represent the unconscious desires of the larger Israeli
public.
4.
Ari Shavit: I think exactly the opposite. I’ve
said to some of my friends: [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is not the sin,
Netanyahu is the punishment—for the left of center and the Left’s complete
political failure in Israel and regarding Israel in the last thirty years. The
majority of Israelis: They’re not doves, they’re not pure liberals, they’re not
idealists, they’re not highly moral. But they’re not that crazy, they’re not
that brutal, they’re not that chauvinist, and they’re not that conservative.
And I think that the success of the Israeli Right in the last generation has
been a result of the political and ideological failure of the Left to reinvent
itself, to adjust itself to a new reality. No one would dare try to sell a
twenty-five-year-old Chevrolet in this country. You cannot go on selling a
twenty-five-year-old peace concept which reality proved, time after time, is
flawed. Is this progressive thinking? We [on the Left] are supposed to be
open-minded. We’re supposed to lean forward. We’re supposed to rejuvenate and
revive ourselves. We are not into dogmas. What you have is the irony of a
dogmatic left-wing peace concept that has become irrelevant in so many ways. I
totally share these [Left] values! I think we need a life-loving Palestine
living by a Jewish democratic Israel. There’s a tragedy inherent to the history
of that country, and the only reasonable solution to that tragedy is the
imperfect two-state solution. Ideologically, I don’t have any problems with
going back to the 1967 lines and dividing Jerusalem, all that. I was against
the settlements from the first moment—since I came of age politically. In 1983,
I warned [that we] will reach forty thousand settlers. That’ll be the end of
Israel. Now we are [at] nearly four hundred thousand. So I’m adamant about
that. But the peace concept that was presented to the Israeli public for years
is an unrealistic one. That [is] the reason the Right is winning—and it’s an
uncalled-for disaster. The Israelis don’t want the settlements. The settlers
use the failure of the Left in order to build settlements.
5.
Guernica: You frequently use the word “tragedy”
in the book. Most Americans are optimists—we have no sense of tragedy. So let’s
talk about that, because your critique of the peace movement is based on your
belief that it denied what you call the existential tragedy that is at the
heart of Israel.
6.
Ari Shavit: Let’s talk about my tribe: the Israeli Zionist Left. Because there is the
extreme [anti-Zionist] Left, which is a different issue. The [Zionist] Left was
absolutely right in seeing the danger of occupation very early. When the
country was drunk with a sort of chauvinist, national messianism, they stood
against the current. They were realistic. And they were courageous. But the
[Israeli peace activists] were blind to the facts that the Right and the
extreme Left were aware of: which is that, for the Palestinians, the main
tragedy and formative trauma is 1948 [United Nations partition of Palestine,
declaration of the State of Israel, and first Arab-Israeli war], not 1967
[Six-Day War and beginning of Israeli occupation]. They ignored the fact that,
although occupation is a problem and settlements are a problem, this is not the
core issue. That does not justify settlements and occupation. But the conflict
is about Hulda [a Palestinian village conquered and destroyed by the Israeli
army after an attack by Palestinians in 1948]. It is not about Ofra [a post-’67
settlement]. I have yet to see a legitimate Palestinian leader who is genuinely
willing to give up the right of return, or the demand for the right of return.
As far as I know, there was one: [Palestinian academic and activist] Sari
Nusseibeh, who stopped saying that. I don’t know of any other. And I think one
of the faults of the Israeli Left, and the international Left, is that they
turn a blind eye to this. They don’t want to see this. I’m not saying this is
because the Palestinians are criminals or extremists. I understand why, for the
Palestinians, it’s so difficult to make this historical reconciliation. But
because occupation is killing us, I think we cannot wait for the Palestinians
to come round to really recognizing the Jewish democratic state within the ’67
borders. I do not see them right now doing that. [So] the right way is to work
on an end-occupation project that will not be part of a peace deal. It is the
crime of the right-wing [Israeli] governments that they don’t even put this [a
real peace plan] on the table. It’s a moral imperative for Israel to put such a
plan there, to be committed to its implementation once the Palestinians come
round. But on the other hand, I would not wait for that [Palestinian agreement]
to materialize. We cannot be hostages to that hope. And [so we have] to work on
some sort of unilateral approach, coordinated with the Palestinians. Don’t
repeat the Gaza mistake, which was a simplistic, brutal unilateralism: We just
go out, we forget about them, we don’t care about them, and we let them rot.
And they become Hamas. That was wrong. But if peace is not possible at the
moment, and if occupation is immoral and dangerous, let’s deal with occupation
although there is not peace. Go for a gradual, cautious, well-calculated
[pullout from the West Bank settlements]. I actually believe that in their
hearts the Palestinians would love that [option], because it would not force
them to make concessions they cannot make. Look, Israel is very confusing
because it seems to be a Goliath, and in some ways it is, when you look at the
tanks versus the Palestinian boy. But deep down, when you look at the big map
and the big picture and the big history, we are really a David.
7.
Guernica: I think that most people on the
American Left—and probably the foreign Left—believe that the end of the
occupation would automatically bring peace.
8.
Ari Shavit: These are two separate issues.
Combining the two is a mistake. Occupation is morally wrong. You cannot
have—even if people would argue this—something that looks in many ways like a
colonialist enterprise at the end of the twentieth century and now in the
twenty-first. It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong because it taints
[Israel] entirely, and even [hurts Israel] in security. It’s wrong in every
way. Yet it’s not clear that the perfect peace that we had hoped for is
possible. There are two main issues here. Because the trauma of 1948—of losing
more than half of their villages and towns—is the formative trauma of the
Palestinians, I do not think they can write a document sealing that [i.e.,
acknowledging a partition of historic Palestine and the Arab defeat in the 1948
and 1967 wars]. And without them signing that, we cannot go back to the ’67
borders. Number two, and this is where I’m more critical of the Palestinians
and a lot in the Arab world, is that I’m afraid—and this is something perhaps
that progressive readers would not like to read, but I urge progressive readers
to think progressively—because I think there is an inherent problem in the Arab
world [in a refusal] to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, anywhere. I
would put it even in a more blunt way: to accept the legitimacy of a non-Arab,
non-Islamic state anywhere between Casablanca and Kandahar. One of the most
interesting interviews I did, thirteen years ago, was with Edward Said. It was
published in Haaretz. It was a fascinating experience. And at the end of the
interview, Edward Said came to say he worries about the Jews living in Israel,
because at the end of the day they are a minority [in the region]—and the
Middle East is very cruel to minorities. I urge progressive readers to think
about that. Look, Israel is very confusing because it seems to be a Goliath,
and in some ways it is, when you look at the tanks versus the Palestinian boy.
But deep down, when you look at the big map and the big picture and the big history,
we are really a David. We are a David with some megalomaniac [ideas] who thinks
he’s huge. But we’re not. At the end of the day, Jews as a people are an
endangered species. One cannot overlook this dimension. The Israeli condition
is based on two pillars: occupation [of the Palestinians] and intimidation [by
the Arab/Muslim world]. The Left tends to focus only on occupation, just to see
the Goliath. The Right sees only victims: “Auschwitz never stopped, they all
want to kill us.” The truth is that you have a situation where it’s both
intimidation and occupation. And it’s the failure of the Left [that] we don’t
address the legitimate fears of so many Israelis who are not right-wingers, but
they are fearful. [The first line of Shavit’s book reads, “For as long as I can
remember, I remember fear.”]
9.
Guernica: You think that this sort of gradual
change would convince the Israeli public to stop the settlements?
10.
Ari Shavit: Again, it’s very difficult. First of
all, because of the [Israeli] leadership problem and because the Israeli
government became escapist. Because we had good years, with no violence, in a
sense we were victims of our success. So Israelis have to wake up. But the way
to wake them up is to prove to them that the international community, and mainly
America, know what they’re talking about, that they know what the world is
about. And if the concept seems credible, seems not detached from reality, then
they will listen to it, and—hopefully, nothing promised—they will come round to
do something about it. Right now, when what they are presented with is
something that seems naive and irrelevant, they just reject it and then we end
up with the settlers controlling the country. So the answer is a non-messianic
answer. Anyone who has a simplistic idea about the Middle East, or about the
conflict, doesn’t get it—because there are no simple answers. And anyone who is
messianic, in a right-wing way or a left-wing way, is wrong too. The way
forward is a kind of cautious, commonsense approach—a cautious, humble hope. No
fantasies.
11.
Guernica: The world is full of tens of millions
of people who have been refugees, who have been displaced. Why is it that the
Palestinian trauma is still so active, more than sixty years later? There are
ways that trauma and displacement can be, have been, dealt with politically.
Why has that not happened in this case?
12.
Ari Shavit: There is no easy answer. Look,
obviously the most difficult chapter in my book is the Lydda chapter. Going to
the edge of my identity and really looking, seeing the most difficult things my
people have done, and really understanding what was done to our Other with
total empathy.
13.
Guernica: And not denying it.
14.
Ari Shavit: Exactly. And yet that does not make me an
anti-Zionist. One must remember that there were many Lyddas in the twentieth
century, there were many things that were much worse than Lydda! And let’s not
[even] talk about [the] evil powers. What what was done to the German
population in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia was far worse than Lydda. And they
do not linger over this. It would be considered illegitimate! Only right-wing
groups, neo-Nazis, would have “right of return” demands. So yes, Palestinians
definitely deserve national rights, individual rights, everything. But I think
it’s legitimate to demand of them to grow up. There is a tendency in their
political culture to be addicted to victimhood. And at the end of the day, with
all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.
And the Jews who came to Israel are amazing proof of how people do not get
addicted to their victimhood. They build a future. The Jewish-Zionist revenge
was to live. Not to kill, not to commit suicide, and not to keep telling the
story [of persecution and loss] over and over again. I wish that the
Palestinians would learn from that side of Zionism. Because in this sense,
Zionism was remarkable. Here you had the ultimate victims of the twentieth
century who were saying, “Let’s move on.” People who came out of the
[concentration] camps, and within a year or two got married and made children
and sent their kids to schools, and from nothing did something. That’s what the
Palestinians should do now. It is my moral commitment and obligation to
recognize Lydda, but it’s their commitment to overcome it. In a sense, I did my
share, they must do theirs.
15.
Guernica: Actually, you write in your book about
the ways in which the Shoah was repressed—denied—in the early years of the
state.
16.
Ari Shavit: Which was, again, cruel and unjust
for the people at the time. But there was some wisdom in the repression.
Because it [the Holocaust] was too much to deal with. Had you sent these people
to analysis, to shrinks, they would’ve collapsed. What they experienced was so
horrible that the remedy was in action, in moving forward. Only after you build
yourself again can you begin to reflect.
17.
Guernica: And yet in contemporary Israel, there
seems to be more of an obsession with Auschwitz than there was fifty or sixty
years ago. How do you explain that?
18.
Ari Shavit: Part of it is [due to] elements that
I do not like: to regain the rights of the victim when you’re not the victim
anymore. But I think there is some justification. It [genocide] is something
that is impossible to deal with. The kind of trauma we experienced, which is
the ultimate trauma: it’s absolutely legitimate for us to still have it within
us, especially when it repeats itself. Again, I’m not saying there are Nazis
around—but there are people who want to see us gone. It’s not just a memory. We
are still a people in danger. And yet I urge us not to get addicted to it. We
should remember, it is part of our history, but we should not use it in daily
life.
19.
Guernica: And how do you understand the
resurgence of religion in Israel? Zionism was originally a rebellion against
religion. The term “religious Zionist” would have been seen as an oxymoron
fifty years ago.
20.
Ari Shavit: I’m not an anti-religious guy. I
live at peace with religious people, although I’m totally secular. But I’ll
tell you where the deep misfortune is. Orthodox, and definitely ultra-Orthodox,
Jews do not need Zionism and do not need Israel. They can survive very well in
Brooklyn, or even Manhattan! They are not endangered. The Zionist project
basically is a project designed to save non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. To
save the Jews physically, first of all—from pogroms, from Holocaust—but not
less than that, to save non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. Now the irony is that
because large parts of it [Israel] were taken [in recent years] by the
Orthodox, it’s less of a haven for non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. So
ironically, the people who do not need Israel are gradually taking over Israel,
and they’re actually pushing out people who so need it.
21.
Guernica: One of the original ideas of Zionism
was to create a “normal” country. Yet you criticize the Israeli peace movement
for having become “besotted with the illusion of normalcy.” Is it the fate of
the Jewish people to never be normal? And if so, what does that mean?
22.
Ari Shavit: [laughs] I’m not deterministic. But
basically, yeah, Jews cannot be normal. I’m not saying it’s in our genes. I am
saying this is our biography. I have all the respect in the world for Holland
and Bulgaria, but this [Israel] is not Holland or Bulgaria. This is an old-new
country, an old-new nation, it’s an invention, an artificial project on the one
hand, and yet with very deep biblical roots. That doesn’t make it righteous. It
has so many flaws, and there are sins built into it, like in a great
Shakespeare drama. I don’t expect very happy endings, but I really want to
prevent the bad ending. But beyond that, I think that Zionism and the
international community drew opposite conclusions from Auschwitz. Zionism said,
“Never again”—because we [Jews] were moral and righteous but powerless for a
millennia, and look what happened. But much of the international community
said, “We do not want to see any use of power, anywhere; our new religion is
human rights and we do not recognize historical events that are messy and bloody.”
So we moved, in order to save ourselves, [into] a kind of history that the West
altogether rejects. Europe, because it’s running away from its colonial past,
rejects any friction with the Third World. And America, with human rights built
into it… So there is an inherent tension between where the West went, and where
we [Israelis] went. And yet Zionism is all about inner contradictions and how
to turn them into a fertile force. Don’t be afraid of them, recognize them,
turn them into creation, not into negation.
23.
Guernica: In the book you say Israel is caught
in a kind of Catch-22: The occupation will destroy Israel, but to withdraw from
the occupation might lead to a Hamas West Bank—which would aim to destroy
Israel.
24.
Avi Sharit: Absolutely. And yet I think we
should take the risk. At the end of the day I would say it [the pullout from
Gaza] was the right thing. Because we can deal with the rockets. We cannot deal
with the demography [i.e., Israel becoming a majority-Arab state if the
occupation continues] and the immorality [of occupation]. But this is where we
should have a real partnership with the international community. We’ll be
taking risks, but they cannot be existential ones.
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