Book Review: 'My Promised Land' by Ari Shavit Israel's most influential columnist attempts an accounting of the Zionist soul. By Oren Kessler Nov. 8, 2013 1:18 p.m. ET In the spring of 1897 a steamer carrying a delegation of 21 British Jews left Port Said, Egypt, for Jaffa—the last leg of its journey to the Holy Land. Leading the pack was Herbert Bentwich, an affluent London lawyer and Zionist leader and the great-grandfather of Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Haaretz newspaper and one of Israel's most influential political commentators. In "My Promised Land," his first book in English, Mr. Shavit charts Israel's history partly through the lives of his pioneering forebears: His grandfather, Herbert's son, was a Cambridge-educated pedagogue who helped develop Israel's education system, while his father was a chemist at the eye of Israel's nuclear program. The result is roughly equal parts personal and family memoir, Israeli history, and prophecies for the land's future. It is one of the most nuanced and challenging books written on Israel in years. My Promised Land By Ari Shavit Spiegel & Grau, 445 pages, $28 Enlarge Image A storefront in Tel Aviv, 1948, adorned with portraits of Theodor Herzl. Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos Each chapter of "My Promised Land" is a portrait of a time and place (Lydda, 1948; the Alon Shvut settlement, 1975; Gaza Beach, 1991). Mr. Shavit writes of the Bentwich delegation's fateful journey, of its members touring their hoped-for homeland in white safari suits and cork hats. "Is this colonialism?" he asks. "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck." Even so, he goes on, "these pilgrims do not represent Europe. On the contrary. They are Europe's victims." Much of the book is told from the perspective of Mr. Shavit himself, from his childhood in the university town of Rehovot through his service as a paratrooper, his headlong jump into Israel's peace movement and then his partial decampment from it. At the time of the Oslo Accords, Mr. Shavit headed the nonprofit Association for Civil Rights in Israel and served as an unofficial spokesman for the Israeli left. But as he entered his 30s, the author found himself disenchanted with the activists who would give birth to the accords. This wasn't because he had come to support territorial expansion—he continues today to warn of the corrupting influence of the West Bank occupation—but because he deemed the Israeli left dangerously unconcerned by the Palestinians' attachment to terrorism and refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy. The author joined Haaretz as a reporter and columnist in 1995, but a year later, as suicide bombings became a monthly routine, he broke with the leftist consensus by penning columns blasting Oslo as a "fraud" foisted on Israel by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, Mr. Shavit is one of a handful of centrist journalists still standing at a paper that for several years has seemed to compensate for plummeting revenue by embracing a sensationalist, far-left radical chic. Quoted selectively, "My Promised Land" could serve as fodder for those looking both to flatter Israel and to fault it. Throughout the book, Mr. Shavit mulls Zionism's justice, necessity and costs. His conclusions are often of the yes-but variety. Yes, he says, Zionism involved the denial of self-determination to the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. Yet until well after Israel's birth, Palestinian Arabs didn't perceive themselves as a separate nation but rather as a corner of the region's Arab population and the vast Islamic umma. Yes, Israel's War of Independence brought the calamity of exile and statelessness to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, a dismal existence they suffer to this day. And yet the number of Jews expelled from the Arab lands in response to Israel's creation was even greater, and they were absorbed into Israel as the Palestinians could have been in the Arab states. One could go further: Had Palestinian and Arab leaders not launched a war of elimination against Israel after rejecting the 1947 United Nations partition, all of Palestine's Arabs could have remained in their homes. The Jews would have been left with a state roughly half the size of the one they won by war's end. But Mr. Shavit isn't selling the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other equivocation of the self-conscious centrist. Rather, he is earnestly, painfully trying to grapple with the vexing complexities of Israel's past and present. He examines critically early Israel's suppression of the land's Arab history, Jewish Diaspora culture and the Holocaust. None of these fit the script of new, fearless Jews reclaiming their ancient patrimony: "The Israelis of the 1950s bury both the fruit orchards of Palestine and the yeshivas of the shtetl, the absence of seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and the nihility of six million murdered Jews." Resource-poor and facing the largest influx of immigrants in modern history—Israel's population doubled during its first three years of existence, from 1948 to 1951—the new state didn't have time to process these traumas. As Mr. Shavit writes: "Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old country into which I was born." This, then, is his book's real power: On an issue so prone to polemic, Mr. Shavit offers candor. And yet like most in Israel's center, Mr. Shavit opposes successive Israeli governments' post-1967 bid to settle the West Bank, not because it killed an otherwise possible chance for peace but because it was bad for Israel's soul and global standing to rule over millions of people without granting them citizenship: "Regarding the occupation, the Left was absolutely right," Mr. Shavit writes. "It realized that occupation was a moral, demographic and political disaster. But regarding peace, the Left was totally wrong. It counted on a peace partner that was not really there." The author also condemns Israel's peace camp for lacking the courage to look honestly at the roots of the so-called Middle East conflict and its prospects for resolution: "There was a tendency to see the settlers and the settlements as the source of evil and to overlook Palestinian positions that were not occupation- based. There was a magic belief that Israel was the supreme power that could end the conflict by ending occupation," he says. "It ignored Arab aspirations and culture. It overlooked the millions of Palestinian refugees whose main concern was not occupation but a wish to return to their lands. It was not based on a factual state of affairs, but on a sentimental state of mind. It was a wish, a belief, a faith." If peace is an illusion, is Israel then destined for indefinite conflict with its neighbors? Mr. Shavit's short, grim answer is: probably yes. If Israel stays in the West Bank—the country pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005—the Jewish state will be diplomatically and morally doomed. But if it retreats, it could face a fanatical, Iran-backed Hamas regime on its eastern border whose missiles would endanger the country's central population hub. "After ending occupation, we'll have to establish a new, firm and legitimate iron wall on our postoccupation borders," he writes. "Facing a regional tide of radical Islam, Israel will have to be an island of enlightenment. Israel will have to be moral, progressive, cohesive, creative and strong." It's hard to disagree: For those of us who deem a solid Jewish majority more valuable than an Israel of biblical proportions, that's the best the country can do. And yet the devil remains in the details: Where exactly will the border run? What about the strategically vital Jordan Valley? What about the Palestinians' "right of return," the status of Jerusalem and a dozen other questions? Mr. Shavit doesn't offer easy answers to these quandaries. He shouldn't be expected to. "My Promised Land" is really the author's attempt at a national heshbon nefesh, or "accounting of the soul," a reckoning of good and bad deeds that Jews are commanded to perform on the High Holidays. Having run his numbers, this son of Zionist pioneers can't help marveling at the success—or "miracle," as he writes—of the Jewish national project. "Zionism's goal," he concludes, "was to transfer a people from one continent to another, to conquer a country and assemble a nation and build a state and revive a language and give hope to a hopeless people. And against all odds, Zionism succeeded. If a Vesuvius-like volcano were to erupt tonight and end our Pompeii, this is what it would petrify: a living people. People that have come from death and were surrounded by death but who nevertheless put up a spectacular spectacle of life." —Mr. Kessler, a former staff writer at Haaretz and correspondent at the Jerusalem Post, is director of the Henry Jackson Society's Center for the New Middle East .