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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
well written. lots of story. interesting characters interviewed. some explanation of where Israel came from and the evolution of the country and the people. unhappily, not a way for Israel to move forward without embroiling itself in crisis. not a happy ending for the reader.
This one was really hard for me to place. I was unfamiliar with Mr. Shavit and not sure about some parts of this book. What really stands out for me here are the stories. The stories are amazing! This man can really retell a story and can use the stories of his subjects to provide amazing illumination of history and politics. If the book had been all contextualized stories I'd have given it a 5. The long parts of soul-searching, slightly navel-gazing commentary were harder for me. I didn't always agree and sometimes just had a hard time with these sections. Now I must say I am a safe Midwestern American who has never lived in a particularly dangerous place. But these sections did seem endless, and at the end, a little incoherent to me. Mr. Shavit seems to me to not quite always have worked out what he means. At one point he covers the party, sex and drugs young-people scene in Tel Aviv, seemingly quite approvingly, talking about their freedom. Then he talks about high tech companies and their creativity. Then he seems later in the commentary to want to get rid of both--he derides that the young are not kibbutzniks and wants to tamp down capitalism. He seems to think the way Israel treats Palestinians is a bad thing at times, and then at the end seems to think they must be got rid of anyway. And he seems to think that religious Israelis are not real Israelis; he despairingly lists statistics like what percentage of school students are Muslim and what percentage are Orthodox and laments that they aren't Israeli enough. ??? To him apparently "Israeli" means only liberal secular Jews and no one else. But all in all, I learned a tremendous amount from this book. In all, the author seems to deal with the difficulties of the state of Israel in an intelligent, compassionate and pretty balanced way, all things considered. This was a valuable read for helping to understand what is going on in the Middle East today.
I had lots of very complicated feelings while reading this — as did the author in writing it: one of his explicit purposes was to explore the contradictions and tensions in Israel’s history and present. The book is not structured as a history per se, but as a series of episodes or facets from the story of the Jews in Palestine, starting with the visit made by the author’s great grandfather, a successful British lawyer, in 1897 and ranging all the way through 2013. He uses his own experiences and observations to great effect, particularly in a chapter recounting his experiences as a reservist in the early 90s, performing guard duty in a camp for Palestinian inmates.
The author recognizes the inherent injustice of the ethnic cleansing that was part of the establishment of Israel in 1948, but ultimately seems to feel that this is an “original sin” that must be forgiven. He is much harder on the actions after the 1967 and 1973 wars that lead to settlement and occupation of the West Bank, but he also holds some fairly conservative views about Israel’s right to hold its place — never openly acknowledged — as the Middle East’s one nuclear power.
Shavit explains the world view that shaped the evolution of Zionism both before and after the birth of Israel: it is hard to argue with the need for desperate action in response to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, but I have less sympathy for the idea that assimilation (in Western Europe and North America) constitutes an existential threat. If assimilation in free societies takes place over the course of generations, through individual choices rather than by coercion, is it a threat?
Okay. Well. Hmmmm.
1. I am so glad I read and listened to this book.
2. U.S. citizens, like me, who want a deeper understanding of Israel and more language with which to talk about Israel: I highly recommend this book. And…
3. It’s a circular, spiraling journey. How could it not be, really. I mean, Israel. But also somewhere around Chapter 14 I found myself exhausted and disinterested in continuing to feel dizzy. I kept going anyway, and I’m glad I did. I am also weary. When I left Israel in 2000 after just months there, I thought I’d be back soon. I wanted to be back soon. Maybe I’m just not the sort to choose the dizziness that israel inevitably is when we are being honest with ourselves.
4. I deeply love Israel.
5. I am deeply disappointed in Israel.
6. Israel makes be proud like no other institution or country or organization I know of.
7. Israel makes me angrier, more embarrassed than any other institution or country or organization I know of.
Ari Shavit made me dizzy.
Seems fitting.
1. I am so glad I read and listened to this book.
2. U.S. citizens, like me, who want a deeper understanding of Israel and more language with which to talk about Israel: I highly recommend this book. And…
3. It’s a circular, spiraling journey. How could it not be, really. I mean, Israel. But also somewhere around Chapter 14 I found myself exhausted and disinterested in continuing to feel dizzy. I kept going anyway, and I’m glad I did. I am also weary. When I left Israel in 2000 after just months there, I thought I’d be back soon. I wanted to be back soon. Maybe I’m just not the sort to choose the dizziness that israel inevitably is when we are being honest with ourselves.
4. I deeply love Israel.
5. I am deeply disappointed in Israel.
6. Israel makes be proud like no other institution or country or organization I know of.
7. Israel makes me angrier, more embarrassed than any other institution or country or organization I know of.
Ari Shavit made me dizzy.
Seems fitting.
Probably one of the most important, heartfelt, and heartbreaking books about Israel, ever. A must read, and come and join us at Beth El in Charlotte to discuss it on Sunday, January 26, 2014, at 11:30 AM.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I really, really liked this book. Its a balanced, unorthodox, and really honest critical look at the modern State of Israel by a liberal Haaretz journalist.
The book was an honest and insightful look into the issues surrounding the Israeli state today. Shavit is at his best when discussing the history of Israel, from the orange groves of Jaffa, to the expulsion of Arabs from Rehovot during the '48 war, to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He is even handed, self-critical, and transparent about the reasons for each action and their consequences. Where he loses some ground is in the more contemporary chapters, especially the discussion of Iran's nuclear program and the perceived threats to Israel today. Here, he is clearly injecting emotion into his work, which weakens his position.
Still, the book is a great work, if only for the questions it poses, rather than the answers it provides. The fundamental question, which he discusses in the beginning, is why is Jewish identity so important? His great grandfather and other Zionists came to Palestine a century ago because they felt their identity would be lost, either directly, by means of the repressive states of Eastern Europe, or indirectly, through the liberal culture of Western Europe and America. They didn't want to face the risk of their grandchildren losing their Jewish identity, so they sought to form their own state based on Judaism. I have no doubt that this is an accurate assessment of the opinions of Herzl and Bentwich, but I'm still left to wonder: Why is that identity so important that it is worth dying over? Identities change periodically throughout history. 2000 years ago, there were Roman citizens. 1000 years ago, they became Britons. 200 years ago, Americans. Polytheists became Christians, Catholics became Protestants, Protestants secularized. If we're being technical, 250,000 years ago, we were all Africans. Who knows what identities we will have in the future? Why is Jewish identity so important that it must withstand the drivers of change at all costs? I think this is the fundamental issue which makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict difficult for Americans to understand. In a country where the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners live together (albeit sometimes contentiously, but never existentially threatening one another), why can two groups with similar cultures and religions not coexist within the same region?
Still, the book is a great work, if only for the questions it poses, rather than the answers it provides. The fundamental question, which he discusses in the beginning, is why is Jewish identity so important? His great grandfather and other Zionists came to Palestine a century ago because they felt their identity would be lost, either directly, by means of the repressive states of Eastern Europe, or indirectly, through the liberal culture of Western Europe and America. They didn't want to face the risk of their grandchildren losing their Jewish identity, so they sought to form their own state based on Judaism. I have no doubt that this is an accurate assessment of the opinions of Herzl and Bentwich, but I'm still left to wonder: Why is that identity so important that it is worth dying over? Identities change periodically throughout history. 2000 years ago, there were Roman citizens. 1000 years ago, they became Britons. 200 years ago, Americans. Polytheists became Christians, Catholics became Protestants, Protestants secularized. If we're being technical, 250,000 years ago, we were all Africans. Who knows what identities we will have in the future? Why is Jewish identity so important that it must withstand the drivers of change at all costs? I think this is the fundamental issue which makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict difficult for Americans to understand. In a country where the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners live together (albeit sometimes contentiously, but never existentially threatening one another), why can two groups with similar cultures and religions not coexist within the same region?
There is quite possibly no more perplexing conundrum in our world than Israel. Oh, I suppose if you are a zealot on either side of the question this is not true—you would no doubt have complete certainty in your soul about this troubled country. But for the rest of us it is nearly impossible to know where to stand.
Enter this superb book by Ari Shavit, who delineates and shares with us the genesis and ongoing struggles of Israel from an insider's point of view. Heralded in reviews as an objective observer, Shavit is anything but that. To his credit, I don't think he would describe himself that way. He is clearly an urban Ashkenazi Jew, born of the children of Western Europe, an observant but largely secular man, a cautious Zionist with an assimilationist streak, a dove is much of his thinking, but a decided hawk when it comes to defending his homeland. He is unapologetic in his biases. The framework of this book is extremely personal, in fact, following his family's long and often conflicted relationship to it.
As all of these descriptors of the author demonstrate, there is nothing simple in Israel. Its history is interwoven with that of the entire world and goes back millennia. There is no way to divide out the persecution of the Jews throughout history from the story of the creation of the nation of Israel and therefore no simple way to view the rights and wrongs of what has gone on there. In the West we tend to think either that Israel should be left as it is, allowed to continue expansion into disputed territories, or that they should withdraw entirely from the West Bank and Gaza. The thinking in many circles is that this latter move would immediately bring about peace through the creation of a Palestinian homeland. Would that it were that simple.
Modern Israel was born primarily in antisemitism. Jews have been persecuted throughout Europe and Asia for centuries. They were only one of many peoples who claimed Palestine as their homeland over these centuries, all of whom were dominated over by successive totalitarian regimes (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Macedonian, and Roman, among others). Beginning in the year 634, Palestine became part of the great Muslim empire. The restoration of this area to Christianity was the purported genesis of the Crusades. Throughout most of these eras, Jews were unwelcome, persecuted, and slaughtered.
Thus the Diaspora, the wide dispersion of the Jews throughout (primarily) the countries of Europe and Asia. In these countries they were sometimes welcomed but often—especially in times of economic upheaval—reviled. Even in countries where they had equal (or nearly equal) rights, antisemitism would arise anew and they would be hounded out of these adopted countries, sometimes after assimilating as full citizens of them for generations. Had they been allowed to become fully incorporated into those countries without persecution, it is doubtful that the pressure to form the nation of Israel would have overcome the incredible odds against it.
In the early 20th century, a wave of persecution in Europe drove many to take up the cause of Zionism, the idea that the Jews needed a homeland of their own, that the Diaspora itself was an illegitimate construct and made the Jew a pariah no matter where he went. As Palestine was the only place where in their long history they had lived in anything like a homeland, it seemed the only logical choice. (For a whimsical alternative, by the way, Michael Chabon's [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union|16703|The Yiddish Policemen's Union|Michael Chabon|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg|95855] is worth a read). The Zionist movement started in the late 19th century, but had only limited support before the persecution of the early 20th century led to mass migration.
The beginnings of Israel were colonial. Controlled by Great Britain after a bruising war with the Ottoman Empire, England ceded a certain portion of Palestine to emigrating Jews. In addition to the small portion of Palestine granted to them, many Jews purchased territory in which to build their early colonies. In the early part of the 20th century, the movement was manifestly secular and socialistic. Though there were some inevitable conflicts with their Arab neighbors, these were muted both by the small number of settlers and the hegemony of Great Britain.
Soon both of these circumstances changed. More and more Jews poured into the area and Great Britain, exhausted with battles on many fronts and facing the rise of Nazism in Germany, gradually left Israel to its own devices, entirely giving over control of the area in 1947. At that time, the United Nations determined that there should be two countries, that of Israel and an Arab state in Palestine. This resolution was rejected by the Arabs of the region and war erupted. Israel's victory in this brutal civil war was in many ways the founding of modern Israel, no longer an outpost of scattered kibbutzim, but a mighty, militarized, pseudo-European state in the Middle East.
Of course, the history of Israel is far more complex than this, but even this brief overview demonstrates the competing forces that forged the nation, as well as the crushing forces it faces from without. This also demonstrates the fallacy of any easy solution to the ongoing crisis Israel has become.
The rhetoric of war is always difficult to parse, and this is especially true in Israel. What is justifiable and what is not? What is wise and what is not? What is an act of terrorism and what a justifiable act of war? When is a prison camp a concentration camp? Is it wise to become a nuclear nation? Does this act as a deterrent or a goad? As the United States discovered after 9/11, it becomes easy to justify immoral acts such as abrogation of human rights and torture when faced with a pressing existential crisis. Thus in Israel, where following the Palestinian intifadas, the Israelis justified both, as well as the wholesale extermination of entire villages. Early on in the founding of the state, when conflicts arose over ownership of land and the obstruction of roads leading to and from the kibbutzim, the greater military might of Israel was used to dispossess the native population. In a chapter of this book on the conquest of Lydda, for example, the Israelis engage in what are clearly war crimes, including the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
And this military might and the growth of the nation was born out of persecution and its consequences. The reparation payments from Germany after World War Two were used to strengthen the hold of Israel on the land. Much of the military capability of Israel can be traced to the guilt felt by many countries, primary among them the United States and France, following the Holocaust. After World War Two, there was a mass influx of Jews to Israel as they came together to mourn the loss of a full third of their numbers to aggressive tactics of extermination. (In 1942 alone, German forces exterminated over a million Jews). And just because the war ended did not mean the end of persecution, as postwar pogroms were carried out in many Eastern European nations. Why would they not feel the need of a secure, defended fully-Jewish homeland? As one of these immigrants says in the book, "...these very same Jews who had been locked up in the ghetto and were hunted down, rose and established a state".
Where this book excels is in delineating the forces that threaten to tear modern Israel apart. Israel has many shifting faces and is not an easily defined entity. It is a largely European state in an Arab land, a Jewish state among 1.5 billion Muslims, a homeland established on the bones of another people's homeland (which was itself built on the graves of those who came before, back into antiquity). Internally, Israel is rocked by the forces of conflict between the Orthodox and the secular, the New Zionist (those who continue to establish settlements in the West Bank) and the old, urban and rural, those who advocate for sharing the land with Palestinians and those who will settle only for a distinct homeland for Jews alone, the Western European population versus the second wave of Eastern Europeans, and the conflict of both with the more recent influx of Oriental Jews from Arab countries. The immediate and most pressing divide, both internal and external, is what to do about the West Bank, where Israel is widely regarded as a colonial power illegitimately occupying the land of another soverign nation. Yet even this cannot be seen in black and white; as the recent return of lands in Gaza and Lebanon demonstrate, the relinquishment of these lands almost immediately led to Arab extremists establishing missile bases in them, using them to attack Israeli cities. Why would this not happen in the West Bank? Does Israel not have the right to a buffer zone, geographic or otherwise?
As one might expect, there are no easy answers. Shavit himself is a proponent of a peaceful solution, but he is clearly a Zionist of the old school in his thinking. His biases are clear in some of his language. For instance, the word "terrorist" is almost exclusively used to describe non-Israelis, despite the fact that he describes acts of terror carried out by his countrymen. I suspect he doesn't realize this, but when large numbers of Jews are killed by Arabs, he frequently chooses the word "murder", but only once uses this term to describe the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis. Similarly with the phrase "viciously attacked"; this phrase is only used when Jews are the victims. He tends to use the word "innocent" when what he means is "noncombatant"; to me this is a very meaningful distinction. Is the front line soldier any less innocent than the person he kills, even if that person is a child? How does one distinguish between the innocent and the non-innocent? Where exactly does one draw that line? The use of this loaded term is a manipulative device to shift the affinity of the reader to the side of the "innocent" and should be abandoned by all those seeking to find the truth in war.
Perhaps most shocking to me, in a man who to that point made an attempt to be fair-minded, is his contempt in the latter parts of the book for the ultra-Orthodox Jews of his country. While I understand that his animus is inspired by the economic and security threat he sees in them—unemployment among this group tends to be very high, they rely disproportionately on welfare, they refuse to serve in the military—these actions (or, more accurately, inactions) are based in deeply-held religious beliefs. Shavit does very little to outline the legitimacy of these beliefs while excoriating those who hold them for their consequences. This seems to me an appalling lack of perspective and fairness.
On a purely literary front, Shavit has a couple of tics which bear mentioning. First of all, he has a fondness for the term "at the very same time". I know this seems picky, but he uses this phrase over and over again and does so quite imprecisely. To me, "at the very same time" would imply an amazing coincidence, the occurrence of one event in exactly the same instant as another. "At the same time" is sufficient and more precise. Second, in the early part of the book, he uses the term "avant-garde" when the more precise term would be "vanguard". Though the literal translation of avant-garde from the French means "front guard" and would therefore seem to be synonymous with "vanguard", the modern definition of avant-garde has come to be the forefront of an artistic movement. The use of the term in the way he does is no longer legitimate or easily understood.
But please don't allow my observations on any of these peccadilloes to deter you from reading this wonderful book. If you have any interest at all in Israel (and these days, can any of us afford not to?), I urge you to pick this up and give it a serious, concentrated read. In my experience there does not currently exist a more thorough, evenhanded account of this troubled, exciting puzzle of a land. Israel, as the subtitle suggests, is a land of both triumph and tragedy. This book brings both to the forefront and we all have a vested interest in what happens here. You could not hope for a better guide through the triumph and tragedy of Israel than Ari Shavit.
Enter this superb book by Ari Shavit, who delineates and shares with us the genesis and ongoing struggles of Israel from an insider's point of view. Heralded in reviews as an objective observer, Shavit is anything but that. To his credit, I don't think he would describe himself that way. He is clearly an urban Ashkenazi Jew, born of the children of Western Europe, an observant but largely secular man, a cautious Zionist with an assimilationist streak, a dove is much of his thinking, but a decided hawk when it comes to defending his homeland. He is unapologetic in his biases. The framework of this book is extremely personal, in fact, following his family's long and often conflicted relationship to it.
As all of these descriptors of the author demonstrate, there is nothing simple in Israel. Its history is interwoven with that of the entire world and goes back millennia. There is no way to divide out the persecution of the Jews throughout history from the story of the creation of the nation of Israel and therefore no simple way to view the rights and wrongs of what has gone on there. In the West we tend to think either that Israel should be left as it is, allowed to continue expansion into disputed territories, or that they should withdraw entirely from the West Bank and Gaza. The thinking in many circles is that this latter move would immediately bring about peace through the creation of a Palestinian homeland. Would that it were that simple.
Modern Israel was born primarily in antisemitism. Jews have been persecuted throughout Europe and Asia for centuries. They were only one of many peoples who claimed Palestine as their homeland over these centuries, all of whom were dominated over by successive totalitarian regimes (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Macedonian, and Roman, among others). Beginning in the year 634, Palestine became part of the great Muslim empire. The restoration of this area to Christianity was the purported genesis of the Crusades. Throughout most of these eras, Jews were unwelcome, persecuted, and slaughtered.
Thus the Diaspora, the wide dispersion of the Jews throughout (primarily) the countries of Europe and Asia. In these countries they were sometimes welcomed but often—especially in times of economic upheaval—reviled. Even in countries where they had equal (or nearly equal) rights, antisemitism would arise anew and they would be hounded out of these adopted countries, sometimes after assimilating as full citizens of them for generations. Had they been allowed to become fully incorporated into those countries without persecution, it is doubtful that the pressure to form the nation of Israel would have overcome the incredible odds against it.
In the early 20th century, a wave of persecution in Europe drove many to take up the cause of Zionism, the idea that the Jews needed a homeland of their own, that the Diaspora itself was an illegitimate construct and made the Jew a pariah no matter where he went. As Palestine was the only place where in their long history they had lived in anything like a homeland, it seemed the only logical choice. (For a whimsical alternative, by the way, Michael Chabon's [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union|16703|The Yiddish Policemen's Union|Michael Chabon|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg|95855] is worth a read). The Zionist movement started in the late 19th century, but had only limited support before the persecution of the early 20th century led to mass migration.
The beginnings of Israel were colonial. Controlled by Great Britain after a bruising war with the Ottoman Empire, England ceded a certain portion of Palestine to emigrating Jews. In addition to the small portion of Palestine granted to them, many Jews purchased territory in which to build their early colonies. In the early part of the 20th century, the movement was manifestly secular and socialistic. Though there were some inevitable conflicts with their Arab neighbors, these were muted both by the small number of settlers and the hegemony of Great Britain.
Soon both of these circumstances changed. More and more Jews poured into the area and Great Britain, exhausted with battles on many fronts and facing the rise of Nazism in Germany, gradually left Israel to its own devices, entirely giving over control of the area in 1947. At that time, the United Nations determined that there should be two countries, that of Israel and an Arab state in Palestine. This resolution was rejected by the Arabs of the region and war erupted. Israel's victory in this brutal civil war was in many ways the founding of modern Israel, no longer an outpost of scattered kibbutzim, but a mighty, militarized, pseudo-European state in the Middle East.
Of course, the history of Israel is far more complex than this, but even this brief overview demonstrates the competing forces that forged the nation, as well as the crushing forces it faces from without. This also demonstrates the fallacy of any easy solution to the ongoing crisis Israel has become.
The rhetoric of war is always difficult to parse, and this is especially true in Israel. What is justifiable and what is not? What is wise and what is not? What is an act of terrorism and what a justifiable act of war? When is a prison camp a concentration camp? Is it wise to become a nuclear nation? Does this act as a deterrent or a goad? As the United States discovered after 9/11, it becomes easy to justify immoral acts such as abrogation of human rights and torture when faced with a pressing existential crisis. Thus in Israel, where following the Palestinian intifadas, the Israelis justified both, as well as the wholesale extermination of entire villages. Early on in the founding of the state, when conflicts arose over ownership of land and the obstruction of roads leading to and from the kibbutzim, the greater military might of Israel was used to dispossess the native population. In a chapter of this book on the conquest of Lydda, for example, the Israelis engage in what are clearly war crimes, including the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
And this military might and the growth of the nation was born out of persecution and its consequences. The reparation payments from Germany after World War Two were used to strengthen the hold of Israel on the land. Much of the military capability of Israel can be traced to the guilt felt by many countries, primary among them the United States and France, following the Holocaust. After World War Two, there was a mass influx of Jews to Israel as they came together to mourn the loss of a full third of their numbers to aggressive tactics of extermination. (In 1942 alone, German forces exterminated over a million Jews). And just because the war ended did not mean the end of persecution, as postwar pogroms were carried out in many Eastern European nations. Why would they not feel the need of a secure, defended fully-Jewish homeland? As one of these immigrants says in the book, "...these very same Jews who had been locked up in the ghetto and were hunted down, rose and established a state".
Where this book excels is in delineating the forces that threaten to tear modern Israel apart. Israel has many shifting faces and is not an easily defined entity. It is a largely European state in an Arab land, a Jewish state among 1.5 billion Muslims, a homeland established on the bones of another people's homeland (which was itself built on the graves of those who came before, back into antiquity). Internally, Israel is rocked by the forces of conflict between the Orthodox and the secular, the New Zionist (those who continue to establish settlements in the West Bank) and the old, urban and rural, those who advocate for sharing the land with Palestinians and those who will settle only for a distinct homeland for Jews alone, the Western European population versus the second wave of Eastern Europeans, and the conflict of both with the more recent influx of Oriental Jews from Arab countries. The immediate and most pressing divide, both internal and external, is what to do about the West Bank, where Israel is widely regarded as a colonial power illegitimately occupying the land of another soverign nation. Yet even this cannot be seen in black and white; as the recent return of lands in Gaza and Lebanon demonstrate, the relinquishment of these lands almost immediately led to Arab extremists establishing missile bases in them, using them to attack Israeli cities. Why would this not happen in the West Bank? Does Israel not have the right to a buffer zone, geographic or otherwise?
As one might expect, there are no easy answers. Shavit himself is a proponent of a peaceful solution, but he is clearly a Zionist of the old school in his thinking. His biases are clear in some of his language. For instance, the word "terrorist" is almost exclusively used to describe non-Israelis, despite the fact that he describes acts of terror carried out by his countrymen. I suspect he doesn't realize this, but when large numbers of Jews are killed by Arabs, he frequently chooses the word "murder", but only once uses this term to describe the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis. Similarly with the phrase "viciously attacked"; this phrase is only used when Jews are the victims. He tends to use the word "innocent" when what he means is "noncombatant"; to me this is a very meaningful distinction. Is the front line soldier any less innocent than the person he kills, even if that person is a child? How does one distinguish between the innocent and the non-innocent? Where exactly does one draw that line? The use of this loaded term is a manipulative device to shift the affinity of the reader to the side of the "innocent" and should be abandoned by all those seeking to find the truth in war.
Perhaps most shocking to me, in a man who to that point made an attempt to be fair-minded, is his contempt in the latter parts of the book for the ultra-Orthodox Jews of his country. While I understand that his animus is inspired by the economic and security threat he sees in them—unemployment among this group tends to be very high, they rely disproportionately on welfare, they refuse to serve in the military—these actions (or, more accurately, inactions) are based in deeply-held religious beliefs. Shavit does very little to outline the legitimacy of these beliefs while excoriating those who hold them for their consequences. This seems to me an appalling lack of perspective and fairness.
On a purely literary front, Shavit has a couple of tics which bear mentioning. First of all, he has a fondness for the term "at the very same time". I know this seems picky, but he uses this phrase over and over again and does so quite imprecisely. To me, "at the very same time" would imply an amazing coincidence, the occurrence of one event in exactly the same instant as another. "At the same time" is sufficient and more precise. Second, in the early part of the book, he uses the term "avant-garde" when the more precise term would be "vanguard". Though the literal translation of avant-garde from the French means "front guard" and would therefore seem to be synonymous with "vanguard", the modern definition of avant-garde has come to be the forefront of an artistic movement. The use of the term in the way he does is no longer legitimate or easily understood.
But please don't allow my observations on any of these peccadilloes to deter you from reading this wonderful book. If you have any interest at all in Israel (and these days, can any of us afford not to?), I urge you to pick this up and give it a serious, concentrated read. In my experience there does not currently exist a more thorough, evenhanded account of this troubled, exciting puzzle of a land. Israel, as the subtitle suggests, is a land of both triumph and tragedy. This book brings both to the forefront and we all have a vested interest in what happens here. You could not hope for a better guide through the triumph and tragedy of Israel than Ari Shavit.
Excellent insight into Israel (as far as I'm aware!). He's a journalist so a lot of it is compelling interviews, and some history mixed in. His view is that Israel is in a way inevitable but also intractable. He describes himself as centrist - not being as biased as left or right (in his view). Would recommend.