The Internalized Wandering Jew

The Tragic Divisions of Ari Shavit’s 'My Promised Land'

By Jared Feuer

I’ve often wondered what caused the Romans to act with such vengeance upon putting down the Jewish rebellion. Surely they conquered more troublesome people from Germania to the British Isles, and yet it was Judea where they basically salted the earth. The Romans destroyed The Second Temple, exiled almost every Jew, prohibited the rest from entering Jerusalem (which was almost razed to the ground), and even wiped the name Judea from the map (replaced with Syria Palaestina). It is true that some Jews had already immigrated to other corners of the Roman empire and the world, but the Roman reaction was so vicious and complete that the Jews were turned into the world’s most diasporic people in a generation. A singular and central Temple was replaced with local synagogues necessitating changes in ritual and religious life, economic and physical security and opportunity were now at the disposal of a slew of host civilizations, and the Jews drifted into different sub-cultures including the Mizrahi (Middle East and North African), Sephardic (European Mediterranean), and Ashkenazi (Eastern European). For almost 2,000 years these changes took root until, incredibly, the script was reversed in less than a century. And yet that reversal, so fast and under such strain, might prove too tall an order to sustain. The cost of the divisions that emerged in the Jewish people upon diaspora to present-day Israel are at the heart of My Promised Land by Israeli journalist Ari Shavit.

The book is a collection of interlocking and roughly linear essays about Zionism. Each essay discusses part of Israel’s story, such as the kibbutzim, wars, and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. Shavit notes the suffering experienced and caused by the Arabs-cum-Palestinians, but they are mostly off camera. The essays are not unfeeling toward the Palestinian experience, but the book is unapologetically chauvinistic. Shavit is concerned with the Jewish perspective and specifically whether Israel will survive. The essays are almost entirely haunting, culminating in the last paragraph, as Shavit zooms out to the heavens and looks down, as God would, on a people that might be pushed into the sea by others, or possibly themselves. He writes:

“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 all still here, on this biblical set. The camera is still rolling. And as the camera pans out and pulls up, it sees us converging on this shore and clinging to this shore and living on this shore. Come what may.”

Shavit is not the first, obviously, to note Israel’s fault lines, but he identifies a plethora and does so in relation to the existential risk they present to Israel. Shavit notes, for example, that Jews from the Middle East and North Africa were forced to immigrate to Israel after its founding due to the resentment by host nations and consequently see themselves as outsiders in a country set up for others (the Ashkenazi Jews). Their resentment and alienation leads to the formation of the oppositional Shas party that directs resources to the ultra-Orthodox who distance themselves from society. He discusses how the founders of the settlements in the occupied territories took advantage of a distracted country, driven by the religiously fervent who wish to reorient Israel toward faith and by the nationalistic who believe Israel must be Arab-free. He spends time in Tel Aviv clubs where secular Jews use sex and drugs to disconnect from the weight of being Israeli. He describes how the one million Russian immigrants to Israel over the past thirty years have led to support for the Likud party that further divide the country. Shavit dissects how Israel as ‘Start Up Nation’ is actually a movement away from the country’s communal (socialist) past and toward hyper individualism (capitalism). He discusses Israel’s nuclear capacity as a triumph of engineers and Ashkenazi elites who refused to see how it would eventually lead to dangerous copycats in the Middle East while enabling Israel to turn inward and thus on itself. He is unsparing toward the peace movement that is unwilling to acknowledge how ending the occupation will not remove the injustice experienced by, or the grievances of, an excluded people any more than the nationalists who believe that the Palestinians can almost literally be paved over. 

More and more examples of tragic fault lines are given throughout the book. Shavit travels to the Kibbutzim and finds how their idyllic labor origins obscure the exclusion of the Arabs. He writes about his mandatory service at a Gaza prison where he hears the cries of the interrogated who give up the names of their compatriots who give up new names the next night. Shavit drives to the Galilee with an Arab lawyer, friend, and activist who notes with thinly-veiled hostility that Israel is sitting on a time bomb of resentment and demographics. He notes how the growth of Arabs within Israel and the occupied territories is only outpaced by the ultra-orthodox. Shavit even travels to colleges across the United States to observe how Israel’s occupation is dovetailing with a left that divides the world between oppressor and oppressed, leading to many Jewish students being excluded from other students and from their pride and identity in being Jewish. And over all this is the tragic-king of Bibi Netanyahu who correctly understands that Iran is singularly focused on destroying Israel, but has so many character-flaws that he can marshal little support from the Americans to stop Iran as he risks leading Israel toward pariah status. These are some of the tragic fault lines put forward by Shavit.

Despite all Israel’s divisions, Shavit remains committed to it as a Jewish state, with the United States serving as a cautionary tale. He notes that the intermarriage rate of American Jews means that eventually the only Americans with a Jewish identity will be the Orthodox. Yet he does not explain why this concerns him. Judaism has survived as a faith and a people in diaspora by being isolated or isolating from the host community, and so he is correct that only by being a majority population can ‘secular’ Jews maintain their Jewish identity. But why does that matter? He doesn’t ask and he doesn’t answer.

There are three potential answers. First is the relay race of history. A Jewish person saying the ancient prayer ‘the Shema’ is saying words recited by countless generations in the face of countless attempts to cut off that transference. Like an heirloom, Jewish identity gained value through the care of its protectors. The second answer is that despite its different strains and peoples, there is such a thing as ‘secular’ Jewish culture even across the three main cultural strains. It is - arguably - argumentative, intellectual, political, and entrepreneurial. It has chants, prayers, dances, and touchstones. Judaism aside from being lived as Orthodox maintains a culture, history and people that is beautiful in its own right. In the United States, these two answers are cause to preserve Jewish identity (even if assimilation proves that impossible), but that is due in part to the lower stakes than in Israel.

But when it comes to Israel, the question of why to support the continuation of non-Orthodox Jewish people demands an answer as its people and region are pushed to the brink. The question that Shavit does not ask is why should there be the inherent disparate treatment that come with a religious state, even if these violations are practiced in much greater measure by scores of other countries that are overlooked by Israel’s critics. I believe the third answer of why a secular Jewish population is worth preserving can be seen when Shavit narrates how Nazi Germany was threatening to push through Egypt into British-controlled Palestine early in World War II. Jews who had just escaped the Holocaust found themselves forced to plan for a hopeless battle against the Nazis. And then just a few years later, in 1948, Israel faced multiple armies seeking to push the newly-created nation into the sea (reflecting actual words of Arab leaders). In only five years, Jews faced three genocidal threats. And this is a small sample of a history on repeat. Jews in diaspora served and can serve as a perfect pressure release - a perpetual scapegoat of a minority that is bewilderingly successful nonetheless. Israel seemingly ended that cycle by moving Jews from hosted to host. But if Israel was to become a single state with the occupied territories, Jews would eventually become a minority. The apparent answer to the question Shavit does not ask is that a secular Jewish people, in Israel and perhaps only with the support of a secular Jewish people in America, offers the only means to keep the millions of Jews who are already in Israel safe. It’s a roundabout answer - because there is a large number of secular Jews concentrated in one place they must remain in place or there will be another genocide. The ultra-orthodox do not serve in the army and will not not develop the technology and economic means to defend Israel, inviting attack. And if Israel becomes a single state, there is little chance for widespread assimilation (the numbers are too big and the intermarriage rate too slow) that will keep the Jewish people safe from the risk of sectarian violence and pogroms. Asking Israel to end itself as a Jewish state is asking the Jewish people to ignore every lesson that history has taught. Is that ethically right? Most likely. Is it fair to ask…?

It didn’t need to be this way. 

The subtitle of My Promised Land is “The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.” Shavit correctly points out that the tragedy is not necessarily the one everyone thinks of: the occupation. The occupation is a symptom and not a cause. It is the result of a nation wracked by division. He imagines that its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, would have made the tough decisions to end the occupation and pulled it off through military, domestic, intelligence, and other steps only possible if the country worked collaboratively. Likewise, he believes an Israel in its first twenty years would have collectively addressed the divisions caused by its immigration waves. Maybe yes, maybe no. But symbolically, Ben-Gurion died right after a Yom Kippur War that revealed a country so suspended in its internal tensions that it was unable to prevent a telegraphed mass invasion. Just six years earlier the nation was able to act proactively, but the success of the Six Day War along with an unstated nuclear capacity created a sense of permanence in Israel. And under that perception, 2,000 years of divergence took root and undermined the ability of Israeli Jews to act as a people. 

Over the past half century, Israel has seemingly fallen further into divisions that are remarkable for such a tiny people with a shared faith and history. But time apart has done its work. As the embodiment of the Jewish people, Israel holds multitudes and it is struggling to keep from coming undone. All is not lost, but it is difficult to see a new path of solidarity. Can it integrate the ultra orthodox into broader society? Can it address the resentment of the Mizrahi and Sephardim against the Ashkenazi? Can it address cynicism toward democracy among those who grew up in Russia? Can it be secular and religious? Can it protect human rights of a minority when Jews are the majority? Can it curtail the messianism of its extremists? Its nationalist settlers? And can it connect with the young generation of American secular Jews who are frequently assimilating and distancing from Israel? Moreover, can it do all this while under threat from Iran’s proxies and potential nuclear missiles? Shavit fears the answer. I do too.

This is the Shakesperian tragedy of Israel according to My Promised Land. That once cast into diaspora, Jews became a people distant not only from their homeland but from each other. These divisions perhaps became destiny and when the means to become a people at home and together was seemingly within grasp, it was already lost.