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Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit's Promised Land
My Promised Land by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit has been one of the most widely discussed and lavishly praised books about Israel in recent years. It has garnered encomiums from a broad spectrum of influential voices, including Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Jonathan Freedland, Jeffrey Goldberg, Franklin Foer, and Dwight Garner.
Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omission, distortion, falsehood, and sheer nonsense.
In brief chapters that analyze Shavit’s defense of Zionism and Israel’s Jewish identity, its nuclear arsenal and its refusal to negotiate peace, Finkelstein shows how highly selective criticism and sanctimonious handwringing are deployed to create a paean to modern Israel more sophisticated than the traditional our-country-right-or-wrong. In this way, Shavit hopes to win back an American Jewish community increasingly alienated from a place it once regarded as home. However, because the myths he recycles have been so comprehensively shattered, this project is unlikely to succeed.
Like his landmark debunking of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein’s clinical dissection of My Promised Land will be welcomed by those who prefer truth to propaganda, and who yearn for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on justice, rather than arguments framed by anguish and schmaltz.
Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omission, distortion, falsehood, and sheer nonsense.
In brief chapters that analyze Shavit’s defense of Zionism and Israel’s Jewish identity, its nuclear arsenal and its refusal to negotiate peace, Finkelstein shows how highly selective criticism and sanctimonious handwringing are deployed to create a paean to modern Israel more sophisticated than the traditional our-country-right-or-wrong. In this way, Shavit hopes to win back an American Jewish community increasingly alienated from a place it once regarded as home. However, because the myths he recycles have been so comprehensively shattered, this project is unlikely to succeed.
Like his landmark debunking of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein’s clinical dissection of My Promised Land will be welcomed by those who prefer truth to propaganda, and who yearn for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on justice, rather than arguments framed by anguish and schmaltz.
100 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Norman G. Finkelstein
21 books1,702 followersNorman Gary Finkelstein, is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Son of a holocaust survivor, Finkelstein is a fierce critic of Israeli policy, especially toward Palestinians. He has had a tense rivalry with his pro-Israel counterpart, Alan Dershowitz. In 2007 DePaul University denied his tenure, a decision for which Dershowitz lobbied. For his views and suspected connections to anti-Zionist groups, Israel has denied Finkelstein entry and banned him from the country for a decade.
Son of a holocaust survivor, Finkelstein is a fierce critic of Israeli policy, especially toward Palestinians. He has had a tense rivalry with his pro-Israel counterpart, Alan Dershowitz. In 2007 DePaul University denied his tenure, a decision for which Dershowitz lobbied. For his views and suspected connections to anti-Zionist groups, Israel has denied Finkelstein entry and banned him from the country for a decade.
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August 10, 2014
I should say first that Finkelstein's short book is a polemical dissection of Ari Shavit's My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, a book I have not and probably will not read. But after the last couple weeks of miserable articles about Israel and Gaza, and after reading Jonathan Freedland's The Liberal Zionists in the latest NRYB, I was curious to see what Finkelstein had to say (in part because Freedland had relatively little to say about his book).
Well – there are no surprises for anyone who's read Finkelstein before. His case against Shavit – and by extension all liberal apologists for Israel's occupation – is short, strongly worded and mostly focused. (There are some snide asides that have nothing to do with his argument.)
Israel is one of those topics one learns to avoid. Intelligent people, people who care, have already made up their minds on the main point, and beyond that there's only shouting and tears. I'm amazed that anyone still finds anything hopeful to say, but remarkably, even Finkelstein does.
Well – there are no surprises for anyone who's read Finkelstein before. His case against Shavit – and by extension all liberal apologists for Israel's occupation – is short, strongly worded and mostly focused. (There are some snide asides that have nothing to do with his argument.)
Israel is one of those topics one learns to avoid. Intelligent people, people who care, have already made up their minds on the main point, and beyond that there's only shouting and tears. I'm amazed that anyone still finds anything hopeful to say, but remarkably, even Finkelstein does.
Displaying 1 of 1 review