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1949: The First Israelis
The founding of Israel in 1948--one of the seminal events of the century--offers a heroic narrative with few parallels in modern history. In 1949, a controversial best-seller in Israel, Tom Segev draws on thousands of declassified documents along with personal diaries and correspondence to reconstruct the unvarnished story of Israel's first year. Segev reveals the lofty aspirations that guided the state's leaders as well as the darker side of the Zionist the friction between the early settlers and the immigrants, the lack of good-faith negotiations with the Arabs; the clash between religious and secular factions; the daily collision of the Zionist myth with the severe realities of life in the new state. Unflinching in its observations, this bold chronicle is indispensible for understanding the dilemmas that continue to confront--and divide--Israeli society.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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566 people want to read
About the author
Tom Segev
33 books112 followersTom Segev (Hebrew: תום שגב) is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 9, 2011
just tooo long for the average reader, lots of fascinating information that would have more accessable if better editing
May 29, 2014
Now, 65 years after the State of Israel was created, we accept as a given that Israel was created for the Jews. But we forget that the Jews were dispersed over the earth and then summoned back to Israel. The struggles of bringing in masses of often destitute people, speaking different languages and trying to defend and create the country at the same time was a very difficult task, and fraught with chauvinism and prejudice. This deeply researched book, when it was published, was meant to be a forthright look at Israel's body politic. A hard read, but worth it for the understanding that you will gain.
December 12, 2014
a must read for everyone concerned by with or about the story of Israel
April 23, 2023
My personal mental model of a nation emerging from a war for independence is my own country, the United States. The Continental Congress was formed early in the struggle for the preservation of the colonists’ rights as Englishmen. Once it became apparent that there could be no peaceful resolution with the mother country aside from abject surrender, the Continental Congress declared independence and then drafted and adopted the Articles of Confederation. This was the form of national government during and immediately after the American Revolution. However, post-bellum experience demonstrated its inadequacy, and a new constitution was drafted in 1787. Once it was ratified, it replaced the Articles of Confederation, and a new, stronger, federal government replaced the Continental Congress.
In contrast, the Jewish Agency was in charge of the Yishuv in Palestine during the British mandate and declared the existence of Israel as an independent nation only at the end of the mandate. During the mandate period, the British government initially supported Jewish immigration (aliyah) into Palestine consistent with the Balfour Declaration but backed off on that support when it became obvious that it could keep the Arabs happy or it could keep the Jews happy; it could not possibly do both. Needing the support of the Arabs to secure various British interests, it sharply curtailed Jewish immigration into Palestine. Various Jewish groups within the Yishuv fought hostile Arabs, waged their own insurgency against the British and coordinated both legal and illegal Jewish immigration. Realizing that the situation in Israel was intractable, the British government washed its hands of the matter and punted to the United Nations, which voted for a partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish agency grudgingly accepted this as the best deal it could get, but the Arabs unequivocally rejected it. When the mandate ended, Britain withdrew from Palestine and the Jewish Agency declared the existence of the state of Israel. I am tempted to say that war between the Jews and Arabs began at that point, but that would be a lie. Arab insurgents had been blockading supply and communication routes to Jerusalem and Jewish settlements ever since the partition vote. What changed was that several Arab states sent their armies into Palestine. Over the course of a hard-fought war, Israel conquered all of Palestine with the exception of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The Zionist movement had long desired a Jewish state, and now they had it. Early on, a parliamentary body, the Knesset, was established, but there was never a written constitution, unlike the American system, and the Knesset still makes the laws of Israel today. However, like the American system, there was significant disagreement regarding what the new nation should look like. Dr. Segev tells the story of those early conflicts that set the stage for subsequent developments in Israeli history, dividing the book into four sections addressing different conflicts:
• Between Jews and Arabs
• Between veterans and newcomers
• Between the orthodox and the secular
• Between vision and reality
Because there is significant overlap between some of these conflicts, I don’t know that I can completely separate them in my review.
The territory conquered by Israel during the Independence War had a significant Arab population. During the war many fled, seeking safe refuge in friendly Arab cities, and others were forced out of their homes. For the most part, those who fled were not allowed to return. As far as I can tell, there were three motivations for this. First, it was not possible to have a Jewish state and a parliamentary system without a Jewish majority. Second, the Arab blockades during the war probably hardened attitudes against Arabs, especially those living in locations that could threaten lines of communication. After all, a lot of Jewish fighters perished on supply runs, and places such as the Jewish sector of Jerusalem stared starvation in the face. Third, regarding the right of return, Israel encouraged immigration of Jews, including those from Arab and other Islamic states. Some saw it as a trade. We take your Jews; you take our Arabs. Israel’s neighbors didn’t get the memo. Dr. Segev explicitly addresses the first and third options and hints at the second. I am unsure how much each factor contributed to the decisions to force Arabs from their homes and not to allow Arabs to return.
As part of securing a Jewish majority, Israel encouraged significant immigration of Jews from around the world. While it helped to solve one problem, it produced others. The dominant party at the time was Mapai, which was left-wing, secular and socialist, consistent with the values of the early Zionists, but there were a right-wing opposition as well as a religious opposition. The different parties tried to use access to jobs, housing and other resources to jockey for position for the hearts and minds of the immigrants although Mapai, with its dominant status, was better situated for this. At the same time, it proved quite adept at alienating religious immigrants. They wanted religious schools for their children, but it tried to ramrod secular schools down their throats. Orthodox Jews often wear sidelocks, but those running the camps to which immigrants were sent when they first arrived, often forced them to cut them off in the name of stopping the spread of lice, usually without even bothering to inspect them for lice. Dr. Segev gave an example of how Yemeni Jews were treated. Their clothes were taken from them, and they were given European-style clothes that left the women feeling immodest. In short, the secular Israelis were treating as inconsequential what the religious immigrants considered of highest importance. There were other issues, such as excessive time spent in the camps while waiting for permanent housing arrangements as well as lack of privacy and shortages of food in the camps. They were ultimately resolved, but Sephardic Jews, who primarily came from the Middle East, came away with the impression that Ashkenazi Jews, who primarily came from Europe, got preferential treatment from a government dominated by Jews of European orign, and this led to later political alignments.
Because the population of Israel was a mix of secular and religious Jews, and their different values placed them in conflict with each other. As noted above, secular Zionists tried foisting secular schools on religious communities, but the religious communities often succeeded in obtaining religious education for their children. Jewish religious observance includes dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and religious Jews felt that it wasn’t enough for them to comply wit them; to please God, all Israelis needed to comply. As a result, they often attacked theaters that started showing films before the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening or attacked people traveling by car on the Sabbath. So, it wasn’t only the secular Jews who had an attitude of my way or the highway, no highway option, as Shane Wolfe so eloquently stated in The Pacifier.
In America, I am accustomed to the left having its power base in urban areas and the right being more dominant in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. In early Israel, the opposite was the case. The early Zionists tended to settle Kibbutzim, communal agricultural settlements, where there was no private property. Prior to World War II, they sought out Jewish immigrants with a “pioneering spirit” and cultivated agricultural skills. This proved important during the Independence War because it helped them to control the countryside. Many of the Jewish immigrants who came after the Independence War had a background in the trades and in commerce and banking. For this reason, they preferred to live in the cities and maintain private property, although some were forced to settle down on Kibbutzim. In short, the rural left and the urban right had competing visions, and reality forced them to accommodate each other against a backdrop of shortages of everything coupled with other social problems. Grand vision had to take a back seat to issues of survival.
Dr. Segev is associated with the New Historians, a movement challenging traditional narratives. I don’t have a problem with revisionist history provided that it corrects myths and incomplete or incorrect narratives. Sometimes it is difficult determine the motivations of a revisionist historian. One issue I have in America is the contemporary attitude that because the founding fathers don’t measure up to our current values, they and everything they accomplished is worthless. Yes, they had their flaws, but they achieved a mighty work that completely dwarfs anything our current crop of leaders is fit to accomplish. I strenuously object when fools whose skill level isn't even up to building a teepee try to tear down architectural marvels, figuratively speaking. Let's face it, master craftsmen built Notre Dame, but it only took a mindless flame to destroy it. I have no respect for mindless flames masquerading as scholars. Dr. Segev doesn’t pull punches when discussing Israel’s flaws in its early days, but he doesn’t use it as a sledgehammer to tear down the legacy of the nation’s founders, either. So, I appreciate his perspective.
In contrast, the Jewish Agency was in charge of the Yishuv in Palestine during the British mandate and declared the existence of Israel as an independent nation only at the end of the mandate. During the mandate period, the British government initially supported Jewish immigration (aliyah) into Palestine consistent with the Balfour Declaration but backed off on that support when it became obvious that it could keep the Arabs happy or it could keep the Jews happy; it could not possibly do both. Needing the support of the Arabs to secure various British interests, it sharply curtailed Jewish immigration into Palestine. Various Jewish groups within the Yishuv fought hostile Arabs, waged their own insurgency against the British and coordinated both legal and illegal Jewish immigration. Realizing that the situation in Israel was intractable, the British government washed its hands of the matter and punted to the United Nations, which voted for a partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish agency grudgingly accepted this as the best deal it could get, but the Arabs unequivocally rejected it. When the mandate ended, Britain withdrew from Palestine and the Jewish Agency declared the existence of the state of Israel. I am tempted to say that war between the Jews and Arabs began at that point, but that would be a lie. Arab insurgents had been blockading supply and communication routes to Jerusalem and Jewish settlements ever since the partition vote. What changed was that several Arab states sent their armies into Palestine. Over the course of a hard-fought war, Israel conquered all of Palestine with the exception of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The Zionist movement had long desired a Jewish state, and now they had it. Early on, a parliamentary body, the Knesset, was established, but there was never a written constitution, unlike the American system, and the Knesset still makes the laws of Israel today. However, like the American system, there was significant disagreement regarding what the new nation should look like. Dr. Segev tells the story of those early conflicts that set the stage for subsequent developments in Israeli history, dividing the book into four sections addressing different conflicts:
• Between Jews and Arabs
• Between veterans and newcomers
• Between the orthodox and the secular
• Between vision and reality
Because there is significant overlap between some of these conflicts, I don’t know that I can completely separate them in my review.
The territory conquered by Israel during the Independence War had a significant Arab population. During the war many fled, seeking safe refuge in friendly Arab cities, and others were forced out of their homes. For the most part, those who fled were not allowed to return. As far as I can tell, there were three motivations for this. First, it was not possible to have a Jewish state and a parliamentary system without a Jewish majority. Second, the Arab blockades during the war probably hardened attitudes against Arabs, especially those living in locations that could threaten lines of communication. After all, a lot of Jewish fighters perished on supply runs, and places such as the Jewish sector of Jerusalem stared starvation in the face. Third, regarding the right of return, Israel encouraged immigration of Jews, including those from Arab and other Islamic states. Some saw it as a trade. We take your Jews; you take our Arabs. Israel’s neighbors didn’t get the memo. Dr. Segev explicitly addresses the first and third options and hints at the second. I am unsure how much each factor contributed to the decisions to force Arabs from their homes and not to allow Arabs to return.
As part of securing a Jewish majority, Israel encouraged significant immigration of Jews from around the world. While it helped to solve one problem, it produced others. The dominant party at the time was Mapai, which was left-wing, secular and socialist, consistent with the values of the early Zionists, but there were a right-wing opposition as well as a religious opposition. The different parties tried to use access to jobs, housing and other resources to jockey for position for the hearts and minds of the immigrants although Mapai, with its dominant status, was better situated for this. At the same time, it proved quite adept at alienating religious immigrants. They wanted religious schools for their children, but it tried to ramrod secular schools down their throats. Orthodox Jews often wear sidelocks, but those running the camps to which immigrants were sent when they first arrived, often forced them to cut them off in the name of stopping the spread of lice, usually without even bothering to inspect them for lice. Dr. Segev gave an example of how Yemeni Jews were treated. Their clothes were taken from them, and they were given European-style clothes that left the women feeling immodest. In short, the secular Israelis were treating as inconsequential what the religious immigrants considered of highest importance. There were other issues, such as excessive time spent in the camps while waiting for permanent housing arrangements as well as lack of privacy and shortages of food in the camps. They were ultimately resolved, but Sephardic Jews, who primarily came from the Middle East, came away with the impression that Ashkenazi Jews, who primarily came from Europe, got preferential treatment from a government dominated by Jews of European orign, and this led to later political alignments.
Because the population of Israel was a mix of secular and religious Jews, and their different values placed them in conflict with each other. As noted above, secular Zionists tried foisting secular schools on religious communities, but the religious communities often succeeded in obtaining religious education for their children. Jewish religious observance includes dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and religious Jews felt that it wasn’t enough for them to comply wit them; to please God, all Israelis needed to comply. As a result, they often attacked theaters that started showing films before the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening or attacked people traveling by car on the Sabbath. So, it wasn’t only the secular Jews who had an attitude of my way or the highway, no highway option, as Shane Wolfe so eloquently stated in The Pacifier.
In America, I am accustomed to the left having its power base in urban areas and the right being more dominant in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. In early Israel, the opposite was the case. The early Zionists tended to settle Kibbutzim, communal agricultural settlements, where there was no private property. Prior to World War II, they sought out Jewish immigrants with a “pioneering spirit” and cultivated agricultural skills. This proved important during the Independence War because it helped them to control the countryside. Many of the Jewish immigrants who came after the Independence War had a background in the trades and in commerce and banking. For this reason, they preferred to live in the cities and maintain private property, although some were forced to settle down on Kibbutzim. In short, the rural left and the urban right had competing visions, and reality forced them to accommodate each other against a backdrop of shortages of everything coupled with other social problems. Grand vision had to take a back seat to issues of survival.
Dr. Segev is associated with the New Historians, a movement challenging traditional narratives. I don’t have a problem with revisionist history provided that it corrects myths and incomplete or incorrect narratives. Sometimes it is difficult determine the motivations of a revisionist historian. One issue I have in America is the contemporary attitude that because the founding fathers don’t measure up to our current values, they and everything they accomplished is worthless. Yes, they had their flaws, but they achieved a mighty work that completely dwarfs anything our current crop of leaders is fit to accomplish. I strenuously object when fools whose skill level isn't even up to building a teepee try to tear down architectural marvels, figuratively speaking. Let's face it, master craftsmen built Notre Dame, but it only took a mindless flame to destroy it. I have no respect for mindless flames masquerading as scholars. Dr. Segev doesn’t pull punches when discussing Israel’s flaws in its early days, but he doesn’t use it as a sledgehammer to tear down the legacy of the nation’s founders, either. So, I appreciate his perspective.
December 22, 2020
A fascinating and detailed chronicle of a new nation struggling to understand itself. Occasionally a bit heavy on logistics but overall the book reads well and makes no attempt to romanticize the state's beginnings. The author's deep dive into archival materials reveals the origins of the country - much like the United States - are not as unblemished as national mythology. This is an accurate and important history.
November 8, 2021
informative accounts to the beginning of the Jewish state.
November 26, 2023
Upon its declaration of statehood in 1949, Israel was quickly beset by a rapid increase in immigration and challenges of integrating new arrivals into a cohesive national polity. 1949 portrays the complications of such national awakening – including a festering refugee crisis not only brought hundreds of thousands of new arrivals from the global Jewish diaspora to Israel’s newly configured borders, but also destitution, overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease. Statehood also introduced the toxic question of how to dispense with the Palestinian Arab co-inhabitants; answering this question often meant forced expropriation of land and property, as well as political supervision and isolation. Author Tom Segev, Israeli author and journalist, describes these hardships in vivid detail, without being wholly uncritical of Israeli’s responsibility for the settlement crises. Segev’s account of Israel’s formative years not only serves as a testament to the travails of immigrant resettlement, but also as an indictment of the country’s leadership for their tactlessness and recalcitrance in their pursuit of state building.
August 16, 2024
A fascinating book at the key moments surrounding the years immediately before and after the foundation of the state of Israel - the debates surrounding the basic laws, the expulsion of the Arabs, the treatment of the swarms of Jewish immigrants to the new state, and more. But as it was originally written for an Israeli audience with a strong understanding of the Zionist narratives which it seeks to contextualize and in some cases destroy, it can be very hard to get a foothold at times as an outsider. Names, institutions, places are dropped in with nearly no clear explanation and one is supposed to just grasp it all.
February 14, 2025
Fascinating book from historian Tom Segev on Israel’s early years after the state was established in 1948.
It tells the truth about the Jewish state showing the consequences of expelling the Arabs off their land as well as the inequalities apparent within the Jewish population (Jews from Middle Eastern countries like Yemen were treated poorly compared to Jews coming from
Eastern Europe).
Perhaps it’s a bit dry in places and the book ends somewhat abruptly but I learned lots.
It tells the truth about the Jewish state showing the consequences of expelling the Arabs off their land as well as the inequalities apparent within the Jewish population (Jews from Middle Eastern countries like Yemen were treated poorly compared to Jews coming from
Eastern Europe).
Perhaps it’s a bit dry in places and the book ends somewhat abruptly but I learned lots.
Read
January 1, 2024School
October 18, 2024
I was expecting to be debating and rolling my eyes at this quite a bit, after reading Segev's introduction about his enduring admiration for the first Israelis. I think that part might have been intentionally vague in order to let this book get published, because as the book continues, his condemnations of the very first settlers, the state of Israel's politicians, and of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine generally, very much ring out. Segev is scathing about Ben-Gurion especially, which is extremely refreshing after reading Benny Morris's account of the same events.
Impressively, it did leave me with a large amount of sympathy for the Israelis I think Segev was alluding to - the thousands of immigrants from the diaspora lured under false pretenses to a state that was in no way ready to take them. The Yemeni Jews forced to cut their sidelocks by the European immigrants who believed the Israeli culture must also be European, the Ethiopian Jews who were thrown out of their new houses by the IDF when the housing shortage became apparent, everyone who sent letters home saying Israel was not what they were promised it would be, only to have those letters confiscated and never received.
There were a couple times I'd question the wording of something, mostly just when Segev quotes an account from the time then continues to use its questionable use of terms for that paragraph without presenting them in quotation marks (which would show they're now inaccurate at best), but it's extremely minor. Overall I thought it was the best Israeli perspective you could want, and I can see why the Institute for Palestine Studies republished it.
Impressively, it did leave me with a large amount of sympathy for the Israelis I think Segev was alluding to - the thousands of immigrants from the diaspora lured under false pretenses to a state that was in no way ready to take them. The Yemeni Jews forced to cut their sidelocks by the European immigrants who believed the Israeli culture must also be European, the Ethiopian Jews who were thrown out of their new houses by the IDF when the housing shortage became apparent, everyone who sent letters home saying Israel was not what they were promised it would be, only to have those letters confiscated and never received.
There were a couple times I'd question the wording of something, mostly just when Segev quotes an account from the time then continues to use its questionable use of terms for that paragraph without presenting them in quotation marks (which would show they're now inaccurate at best), but it's extremely minor. Overall I thought it was the best Israeli perspective you could want, and I can see why the Institute for Palestine Studies republished it.
February 2, 2024
Segev's book is a revealing look at the issues Israel faced in its first years as a country, including the expulsion of Palestinians from their land. He does not hide the treatment of Palestinians or the treatment of non Ashkenazi Jews. I highly recommend it.
history
October 13, 2013(auf deutsch gelesen)
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