/ 15 May 1998

Unhappy birthday

David Cesarani ISRAEL: A HISTORY by Martin Gilbert (Doubleday, R219,95)

Israel’s 50th birthday celebrations are in disarray, a muddle produced by fiscal

stringency and ideological confusion. Plans for costly, symbolic events have been

scrapped amidst popular apathy. According to the Jerusalem Report, “There’s little

sense of unity, and not really much agreement on what it means to be Israeli or Zionist.”

This uncertainty is faintly registered in Martin Gilbert’s epic account of Israel’s origins, birth and first five decades. Gilbert epitomises the view from without: the admiring gaze of the Jewish Diaspora, rather than the interrogative mood notorious to Israel. As usual he presents events in strict sequence. He effaces the narrator’s voice, making documents, testimony and memoirs tell the story. The narrative rattles along, and addicts of his unique approach will feel instantly at home.

He begins with the forerunners and founders of the Zionist movement and follows its progress, settlement by painful settlement. Gilbert excels at diplomatic history, charting Theodor Herzl’s peregrinations around the chanceries of Europe, the origins of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the dynamic between British and Zionist policy while Palestine was ruled from Whitehall. Parallel sections on the gradual flowering of the yishuv, the modern Jewish community of Palestine, suffer badly from the episodic structure.

The savage tripartite war between Jews, Arabs and, decreasingly, the British from 1945 to 1949, is recounted unsparingly. Gilbert incorporates the explosive “new history” researched by young Jewish historians that challenges many of Israel’s founding myths.

Yosef Weitz, director of the lands department of the Jewish National Fund, is quoted relishing the chance which the fighting gave to remove Arabs from areas allotted to the Israeli state by the United Nations partition plan in 1947. When Yigal Allon, an army commander charged with enforcing “Plan D”, which sanctioned the expulsion of Arabs from strategically sensitive zones and captured territory, asked David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, what to do about the 50E000 Arabs of Lydda and Ramle, the leader replied: “Expel them.”

Gilbert records that hundreds of Palestinians perished in this ethnic cleansing while the remainder laboured under repressive legislation until the 1960s. This much-delayed

acknowledgment of injustice is an essential ingredient of any reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.

Compared with his brilliant evocation of the battlefield, the treatment of Israel’s social and economic development is disappointing. With questionable judgment, Gilbert uses Fodor’s guide to Israel to explain the social and ethnic tensions of the 1970s.

Ben-Gurion is the hero, bullying a diverse population into a nation, but little is said about the cost. Zionism became an insipid statism. The past was literally excavated for integrative myths, such as the Zealots’ “heroic defence” of Masada against the Romans, which engendered an essentially negative, defensive mentality. From Masada to the Warsaw ghetto, Jews were depicted fighting and dying heroically, but for what? Once the existential threat subsided this question would implode Israeli society.

Culture is the key to understanding Israel’s angst, although Gilbert covers it skimpily. He is happiest with diplomacy and military history, giving an exemplary account of the 1956 Suez campaign without fudging the blatant anti-Egyptian collusion between Israel, France and Britain. The account of the 1967 Six Day War is a gripping read, while his narrative of the Yom Kippur War is immensely moving. Golda Meir’s obduracy provoked that war, but she escapes lightly at Gilbert’s hands.

He is less charitable to the advocates of settlement in the occupied territories who were galvanised by Israel’s 1967 victory, or the divisive religious extremism that burgeoned in its wake.

Gilbert’s affection is with the “other Israel” of Peace Now and Eli Geva, the tank commander who refused to bombard Beirut during the disastrous 1982 Lebanese venture. This is a very personal history, reflecting Gilbert’s friendship with Shimon Peres and his admiration for Yitzhak Rabin. Their lives are a thread running through the story, more textured than the careers of Begin, Shamir and Netanyahu.

After briskly narrating the road to the peace process, its initial, euphoric stages and Rabin’s assassination, the book suffers a dying fall. It ends with a rather perfunctory summary of Israeli society in the 1990s. His failure to get under the skin of Israeli life is the greatest weakness of this otherwise admirable chronicle. Gilbert nods towards the emergence of a vibrant Hebrew culture, but there is no mention of Israel’s pulsating rock music scene, its dynamic film industry, or the ethnic sub-cultures and popular religion that together bind Israeli society more effectively than clapped-out Zionist rhetoric.

The founders hoped Israel would be a light to the nations and regenerate world Jewry. In this respect, it is a glorious failure. At 50, Israel has to decide whether to be a Jewish state or a state which includes many faiths and ethnicities. It has to decide whether to be a pluralistic democracy which gives equal rights to all those under its sovereignty, or to perpetuate

domination over another people. Even if Israelis opt for a modest but “Jewish” state, they still have to decide the content of that Jewishness. If religious orthodoxy sets the benchmark, civil rights will suffer and so will ties to the Diaspora, which is predominantly non-orthodox.

Most likely, a synthesis will emerge like the hip-hop chazanut (rabbinic singing) or the Hebrew ballads sung to Arabic melodies played on electric guitars by blond, blue-eyed

“Jews” from Odessa who have decided on the basis of their own hybrid experience that it is better to live by messy compromise than to die for neat dogma. The fact that the disorderly and unconstrained debate goes on despite the strain of war and the burden of mass

immigration is the true monument to Israel’s achievement.