Book review: My Promised Land, by Ari Shavit
Ari Shavit is an eminent Israeli journalist, a man of the left, the possessor of a well-stocked mind.
by Ari Shavit
Spiegel & Grau
4 stars
Dwight Garner
Ari Shavit is an eminent Israeli journalist, a man of the left, the possessor of a well-stocked mind.
My Promised Land combines road trips, interviews, memoir and straightforward history to relate Israel's story. The book taps his existential fear for his country, and his moral outrage about its occupation policy. He dilates especially on Israel's essential, combustible duality.
"On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people," he writes. "On the other hand, we are the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique."
His book takes its time to get going. We are introduced to his great-grandfather, a British Zionist who visited the Holy Land in 1897 and saw that the place was his people's future. We meet Jewish orange growers who moved there in the 1920s, and pioneers of the kibbutz movement.
Shavit chooses the people he interviews with care: to comprehend people's opinions, he must allow them to relate the stories of their childhood. These childhoods, as they were for most of the world's European Jews in the first half of the 20th century, tend to be harrowing.