My Amazon Review of Daniel Gordis' "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years after....... "

 Israel@75

Daniel Gordis, the American born Israeli Distinguished Fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem College, has offered up an examination of where Israel has succeeded and failed through the lens of its 1948 Declaration of Independence. It is important to note here that although there is much history in his book, it is not a history of Israel. He simply asked whether or not Israel would today be viewed as a success or a failure in the eyes of its founders.

Today’s Israel would give immense pleasure to its Zionist founders. Instead of the cowering Jews of the shtetl, the average Israeli stands upright and, although not quite “the light unto the nations” and not necessarily loved, it is respected in the international community. Indeed, Israel has become a regional superpower with a vibrant culture and a buoyant technology driven economy. It is a country that stops work on Yom Kippur and even among secular Jews it has the highest birthrate in the industrialized world.

The country has grown from the 1947 partition lines of 660,000 Jews and 600,000 Arabs to country of seven million Jews and two million Israeli Palestinians. People today forget how close run its survival was in 1948 and that the vote to declare independence passed by a thin 6-4 majority. Gordis also reminds us that the founders created an ethnic democracy, not a liberal democracy. Afterall, Israel is the Jewish state. And in 1948 its goal was survival, not prosperity. It certainly has survived and thrived.

 

Nevertheless, the founders would be surprised to see that Mizrachi Jews now account for a majority of the state’s Jewish population, a group that was then and still today that is looked down upon by the Ashkenazi elite. The founders hoped that American Jews would move to Israel in substantial numbers. This, as we know, did not happen. To American Jews, America is the new Jerusalem.

 

The 1948 vision of Israel society was that of a state-centered socialism. That lasted for Israel’s first 25 years, but as that the bureaucracy ossified, in fits and starts Israel became a market economy with a very unequal distribution of income. Nonetheless, the social safety net is propped up by a strong universal health insurance system.

 

The founders would be surprised to see that the tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians continue unabated. After 75 years there is still no end in sight. Gordis supports a two-state solution, but that remains far off in the distance. The founders couldn’t imagine that Israeli troops would be deployed outside of the 1948 lines for so long acting as occupying troops. Perhaps even more shocking to the founders would be the power of the orthodox Haredim in today’s government and how far right leaning it is. Remember that in 1948 the Israeli right was just as secular as the Israeli left.

 

Although not present at the signing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and hardly in the leadership, it was Menachem Begin, heir Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionism, who was most clear-eyed about Israel’s future. To the Revisionists the antagonism coming from the Arabs would be long lasting and that ultimately Israel’s economy would have be organized along capitalistic lines if it were to succeed.

 

As an aside after reading this book and Walter Russell Mead’s “The Arc of a Covenant,” I can’t help but thinking had the U.S. Congress not passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, there might not be an Israel today; many of the Jews of Europe would have ended up in America, not Israel. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Walter Russell Mead's "The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People")

 

Reading Daniel Gordis’ book has reinforced my belief as to what a miracle Israel is. Against all odds and with all of its fallibilities, Israel remains a hope for the Jewish people and, in a way, for the people of the world.

For the full Amazon URL see: Israel@75 (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Micah Goodman's "Catch 67: The Left, the Right and the Legacy of the Six-Day War"

 

Shrinking the Conflict

 

Shalom Hartman scholar Micah Goodman has offered up an important history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the points of view of the Israeli Right and Left and the Palestinians going back to Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky. He argues the positions of the Israeli Right and Left better than they do themselves. He knows all of the arguments and how they evolved over time. For example, the Left has moved from peace to the evils of occupation and lead a security crisis caused by a rising relative Palestinian population and the Right has moved from biblical maximalism to the physical security needed to protect Israel proper. The Jordan Valley the hills of Judea and Samaria are of great strategic importance. Thus, both sides argue from a security posture.

 

He also realizes that Israel will never compromise on security and that the Palestinians will never compromise on the right of return. The crux of the problem is that at its core the Palestinians real quarrel is not with 1967, but rather with 1948 that brought with it the Israeli state. Thus, the issue for them is far more than the occupation brought about by the 6-Day War in 1967. Importantly Goodman notes that the Palestinians are an occupied people, rather than the Palestinians living on occupied territory. That territory was never theirs to begin with because Israel conquered it from Jordan after Jordan attacked in 1967. To Goodman the territories should rightly be characterized as “disputed.”

 

Meanwhile history has passed this 2017 book by with the growing diplomatic recognition of Israel by several Arab states. Simply put the Sunni-Shia rivalry, not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become the critical variable in today’s middle east.  

 

This makes Goodman’s idea of shrinking the conflict far more practical. His idea is to increase the autonomy of the Palestinians by connecting all of their communities with roads thereby avoiding roadblocks and increasing their ability to control development within their boundaries. Of course, the Israeli Defense Forces would continue to be responsible for security. If, and that is a big if, acceptable to the Palestinians his ideas would certainly remove some of the rough edges around the conflict. This would also enable greater foreign investment in the Palestinian zones.

 

Goodman leaves out two important issues. One, the Palestinian government is a kleptocracy and two, there is no discussion about Gaza which is ruled by the iron and corrupt hand of Hamas, certainly not a good example.

 

Nevertheless, Goodman takes us away from the Right’s status quo argument of “managing the conflict” and the Left’s “solving the conflict.” His solution is sensibly to shrink the conflict over time.

For the full Amazon URL see: Shrinking the Conflict (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Norman Lebrecht's "Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947"

Changing the World

Music critic and novelist Norman Lebrecht tells the story of how the marginalized Jewish community in 1847 moved to the center of Western culture within one hundred years, yet continued to live under the shadow of antisemitism. His history starts with the death of composer Felix Mendelssohn and ends with U.N. resolution establishing the State of Israel.

The book is written is a stream of consciousness style that chronologically highlight different ways in which Jews entered the cultural mainstream. Simply put, in order to be accepted Jews had to be better and more innovative than their contemporaries. Early on we see the actress and daughter of a prostitute Sarah Bernhardt establish herself as a pop star. He tells of how Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” was influenced by his Jewish wife Genevieve. After Bizet’s death Genevieve would establish a Paris salon which introduces Marcel Proust to the world. Lebrecht highlights the importance George Eliot’s (not Jewish) novel “Daniel Deronda” in influencing jump-starting the Zionist movement and how the Dreyfus Affair shattered the complacency of the rising Jewish middle class.

Because Lebrecht is a music critic he has many vignettes on Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weil and Arnold Schoenberg, among others. Although he really doesn’t get into the Jewish role in Hollywood he leaves space for director Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca.” Thus this book covers much more ground than covering the obvious personalities of Marx, Freud, Disraeli, Trotsky and Einstein. He especially notes the tragic figure of chemist Fritz Haber who invents the chemical fertilizer industry but also plays a role in the development of poison gases first for World War I and then later for the death camps.

There are three vignettes that especially struck me. The first is how Eliza Davis, a friend of Charles Dickens, get him to edit out Jewish references to Fagin in his “Oliver Twist.” Second he sheds new light on the murder of Jewish diplomat Victor Arlozorov on a Tel Aviv beach in 1934. Jabotinsky’s revisionists were initially tried and later acquitted. Here Lebrecht fingers German intelligence agents under the direction of Goering. Lastly he tells the very improbable, but true story, of how Admiral Wilhelm Canaris chief of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) gets the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yitzchak Schneersohn out of German occupied Poland thereby enabling the sect to thrive in the United States.

I have a few minor quibbles with the book. First Lebrecht leaves out the Talmudic injunction that Jews teach their male children to read, making literacy an important attribute that gets embedded into the DNA. Along with literacy, numeracy become important to maintain the far flung trading relationships of Diaspora Jewry. And second, it was the Gaon of Vilna who in the late 1700s opened up the yeshivas to secular subjects that enabled Jews to catch the wave of the Enlightenment when emancipation finally came in the 1800s.

Quibbles aside, there is much more to Lebrecht’s marvelous book than described here. In this time of rising antisemitism is important to remember how it was overcome.

For the full amazon URL see:https://www.amazon.com/review/R1DXIIJN2321J1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Daniel Gordis' "Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul"

The history of Israel has largely been written from a secular Labor-Zionist or a Palestinian perspective. In those histories Menachem Begin has either been air-brushed out or vilified as a terrorist by Jew and Arab alike. Daniel Gordis a rabbi from a family of rabbis and vice president of Shalem College in Israel makes a huge contribution in correcting the historical record. Simply put, although Menachem Begin was not the George Washington of Israel, he certainly was a founding father and was it not for him the State of Israel might not have been brought into being.

Begin was born in 1913 in the town of Brisk (now Brest in Belarus) under grey Polish skies compared to the sunny Mediterranean skies most of the early Zionist leadership who were either born in then Palestine or arrived there when very young. As a result Begin stood out as Polish formal compared to Israeli casual. Begin did not arrive in Palestine until he was 30. As an aside his birth was midwifed by Ariel Sharon's grandmother. Begin learned his Zionism from his father and the everyday Polish anti-Semitism he witnessed while growing up. He also, unlike the Zionists in Palestine, grows up religious and very knowledgeable in the biblical texts.  In time he would become, according to Gordis, the most Jewish of Israeli prime ministers. As a teenager he became a convert to the Revisionist Zionism of the charismatic Vladimir Jabotinsky and quickly became a leader of its Betar youth group. Revisionist Zionism differed from Labor Zionism in that it was more clear-eyed about the fate of the Jews, in Europe, market oriented versus socialist, and was pessimistic about the prospect of peaceful coexistence with the Arab population living in Palestine.

Imprisoned by the Russians in 1940 he is released after the German invasion and finds his way to Palestine in 1943 where almost immediately assumes the leadership of the Irgun. It here where Menachem Begin enters history. He adopts "an eye for an eye" policy with respect to the British. For every Irgun member executed by the British, a British soldier would be kidnapped and executed. He plots along with the more establishment Haganah the 1946 bombing of the King David hotel, the headquarters of the British Army. It was Begin’s terror campaign that forced the British out. In too many histories it is the Irgun alone who were responsible for the bombing. Prior to the imposition a temporary cease fire in Israel's War for Independence the Atalena, an Irgun arms carrying ship was fired upon by Haganah troops just outside of Tel Aviv. The government under Ben Gurion wanted to show that Israel would support the U.N. cease fire ordered the attack. The columnist Tom Friedman has cited this as an important step in establishing the credibility of the new government. However, the historical record is murkier, because the government was told by Begin that the ship was coming after the cease fire was put in place. Begin made attempts at compromise, but Ben Gurion fearing Begin as a rival, opened fire. Twenty years later Ben Gurion reconsidered.

By most histories Begin is blamed for the 1948 massacre of Deir Yassin, an Arab village near Jeruslaem. Yes, there was a massacre, but the nascent state was struggling to keep the road to Jerusalem open. Moreover the entire operation was being run by the Haganah. Thus there is plenty of blame to go around, but to most histories the blame falls fully on Begin. 

With the labor Zionists fully in control Begin spends the next 30 years in all but political exile. To be sure he is a member of the Knesset, but he doesn't enter the government until the 1967 war. He leaves it soon thereafter. However a political revolution is brewing under the surface. The population is becoming more Sephardic and become restive under the more elitist labor Zionist Ashkenazim, corruption was growing, and the early failures of the Israeli Army during the 1973 War highlighted military unpreparedness. Thus in 1977 a political revolution took place brought Menachem Begin to the prime ministership with his Likud coalition. One of his acts is to admit and make full citizens of 66 Vietnamese boat people who were picked up by an Israeli freighter in the South China Sea. No Asian country wanted to take them in; Israel did.

Begin is most well known for making peace with Egypt's Anwar Sadat. He won the Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat in 1979 for the Camp David Accords which established peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai to Egyptian control. In the Sinai he showed no hesitation in removing the Jewish settlements there. This would not be the case for the West Bank. Recall the Sinai was never part of biblical Israel.

Begin made the big call in June 1981 when he ordered the Israeli Air Force to take out the Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction at Osirak. His action was condemned by most of the world, but in the light of history it represented one of the most clear eyed acts statesmanship of the 20th Century.

Perhaps the biggest stain on Begin was his delegating too much authority to Ariel Sharon during the 1982 Lebanon War. There is a straight line from that delegation to the massacre by Christian phalangists of the Arab towns of Sabra and Shatila. Begin resigned over this. Not only was the Lebanon War a political disaster, it was also a moral one.

Begin died in 1992. He lived his life under the precept of hadar (Dignity). Gordis brings this to life.

The full Amazon URL is:

http://www.amazon.com/Menachem-Begin-Battle-Israels-Soul-ebook/product-reviews/B00F1W0RZA/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_five?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&showViewpoints=0