Reviewed by Joanna Graham
Thursday July 17, 2014 - 12:39:00 PM
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit, Spiegel & Grau; 1st Edition (November 19, 2013), 464 pages
Reviewer’s Note: I wrote the following very long review of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land in mid-May, at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at such a low ebb that, as Israeli polls repeatedly showed, most Israelis, if not Palestinians, had pretty much forgotten about it. Not to mention all the rest of us. I wrote the review because I had to, then filed it because it wasn’t of much use or interest to anyone else. I hope it will be helpful now. Amongst the cacophony of voices this year shouting mostly horrible news, I would not be surprised if many people missed the brief exhalation of breath that signaled the end of the twenty-year Oslo period in Israeli/Palestinian history. (Explaining the failure of the peace talks, John Kerry said, “Poof. And that was that.”)
Although initially resisted by at least some in Israel (Rabin, who signed them, was assassinated), the Oslo Accords ultimately proved to be useful beyond imagining in myriad ways, not least of which was their success in keeping the American Jewish community tethered by the tantalizing promise of a Palestinian state. For twenty years, the on-again-off-again peace talks nearly completely suppressed all those nasty issues of occupation, apartheid, etc., the sort of thing with which Jewish Americans are so annoyingly concerned. If only we could give the Palestinians their own little (demilitarized) state, people thought, Israel could be both Jewish AND democratic, problem solved! It was only the Palestinians (obviously) and the left of the left among Jews who noticed—in the immortal words of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat—that while they were discussing the future of the pizza, Israel was eating it.
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