My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Into the 1930s many Zionists believed the movement could prevail only if Jewish Palestinian communities were integrated into the Middle East. Others began to believe the opposite—that Zionism could prevail only if Jews expelled their Arab neighbors from Palestine and formed a sovereign Jewish state. The Zionism that peacefully entered the Lydda Valley morphed into a cruel movement that sought to forcefully procure land. Lydda prospered in early Zionism.

Shavit sets the next section in 1947, when a United Nations inquiry commission concluded Jews and Arabs could not coexist in Palestine and proposed dividing Palestine into two nation-states. The UN General Assembly endorses the plan in Resolution 181, which is opposed by the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine. Violence erupts, inciting a civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs. The British leave Palestine, and on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel is founded. On May 15, 1948, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Lebanese armies invade. The nation-state of Israel is one day old and at war with five nations.

On July 10, the Israeli army sets to conquering Lydda. By the evening of July 11, Israel has taken Lydda. Israeli troops kill hundreds of Arab citizens in what Shavit describes as a massacre. The tens of thousands who remain are expelled from the city. They are now refugees forced to flee their homeland to Jordanian refugee camps. Gutman, who established the Masada ethos, is the military governor of Lydda after its occupation by Israeli forces.

Based on a series of conversations he carried out with Gutman, the author explains Gutman’s perspective: In the 1940s, the Jewish-Arab relationship changed. Zionists could no longer gradually purchase land and import well-trained immigrants to build a Jewish nation from the bottom up; they were forced to solve problems through war that they could not solve in peace. If Zionists were to form a sovereign state of Israel, they could not permit Arabs to remain in Lydda because it possessed an international airport.

Back in 1947, Gutman doesn’t want to kill the Arabs, but they cannot remain in Lydda. He doesn’t order them to leave. He can’t—a modern state cannot explicitly expel people. Facing the threat of slaughter, Arab leaders request their people be permitted to leave. Shavit illustrates:

Thousands of men are leaving the Great Mosque, their heads bowed. No one complains, no one curses, no one spits in his face. With complete submission, the masses march out and disperse […] The people of Lydda grab anything they can: bread, vegetables, dates and figs; sacks of flour, sugar, wheat, and barley; silverware, copperware, jewelry; blankets, mattresses. They carry suitcases bursting at the seams, improvised packs made from sheets and pillowcases. Everything is loaded on horse wagons, donkeys, mules. All is done in a rush, in panic: within an hour and a half, an hour, half an hour (122-23).

It is hot, and the elderly collapse. Families withdraw from the march to bury babies who perish in the heat. Some abandon babies whose death is certain. All suffer thirst and hunger.

Shavit reasons that the conquest and expulsion of Lydda were inevitable occurrences in the Zionist revolution and the formation of the state of Israel. Israel could not have been founded without these atrocities. Zionism cannot be accepted without also accepting as necessary evils the atrocities at Lydda. He elaborates:

I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor […] I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the State of Israel would not have been born […] They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live (131). 

The establishment of the state of Israel is an important moment to even secular Jews. Jews had been in exile for thousands of years and even before the Holocaust were the objects of discrimination, violence, pogroms, and hate almost everywhere they lived. With the inception of the state of Israel, Jews became their own masters: they were government ministers and military officers, they had a flag and a passport, they were assertive and self-reliant. Between 1945 and 1951, 750,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Israel. In less than four years, the number of immigrants surpassed the number of people accepting them. To accommodate its new citizens, Israel faced demographic challenges as well as challenges in accepting the often barely literate, sickly, and traumatized survivors of ghettos and concentration camps. Within a decade, Israel’s population tripled.

Conditions were dismal, but the young state acted to make necessary improvements. It constructed 121 refugee camps consisting of tin shacks, tents, and huts to house over 250,000 people. When the country slid into economic crisis in 1952, the government acted to halt immigration, slash the defense budget, raise taxes, and devalue the currency. These actions, combined with a German reparations agreement and bonds sold in the United States, reduced inflation and unemployment and raised growth and productivity. Between 1950 and 1959, Israel grew at more than 10% annually, and its GDP grew 165%. It renewed immigration in 1954.

Housing was Israel’s first national project of its economic boom. The state was committed to providing all immigrants with housing, so it constructed cheap and functional mass housing units and provided loans to new immigrants. The project was a success. Before the end of the decade, the Israeli rate of home ownership was among the world’s highest, and the housing estate was a defining feature of the country. Israel’s second national project was its agricultural settlement. At the start of the decade, Israel instituted 190 new kibbutzim. As kibbutzim populated rural Israel, agricultural production grew.

Israel’s third national project was industrialization. The state turned almost half its German reparations into government loans to help entrepreneurs establish factories. In 1954 the first Uzi submachine gun was manufactured, by 1955 a thriving aeronautics industry had been established, and in 1957 work began on a scientific nuclear reactor. Bromide, phosphate, metals, steel, and tire manufacturing flourished. The young state of Israel modernized the region.

Israel built a parliament, an administration, a judiciary, a conscription army, a state-run education system, a national bank, a social security system, a national employment service, public hospitals, and public health clinics. The state was egalitarian with narrow social gaps. It was a thriving socialist democracy on an unyielding mission. Israeli society lacked rights, due process, and laissez-faire. Israel did not treat Palestinians as equal and offered nothing for Palestinian refugees. The state did not acknowledge the Jewish Diaspora or lament the Holocaust. Israel denied 700,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and homeland; it denied six million Jews who died in the Holocaust and the trauma experienced by their living relatives. Israel’s only concern was moving Israel forward. Shavit explains, “The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories. Furthermore, the Israeli continuum does not have room for the individual” (161). Shavit contends that this denial was a life-or-death imperative.

Israeli policy prohibits Israelis from publicly discussing the Dimona nuclear reactor, so half a century after its construction, it remains an open secret. Some details are known. Israel’s protection in the Middle East among nations who wish to see the state destroyed requires a protective umbrella. Israel’s first protective umbrella was the British. After the British left, Western hegemony in the Middle East protected Israelis. In the 1950s, the colonial era was ending, and the West’s influence in the Middle East was waning. For Israel’s survival, it needed to ensure its own protection. In 1955, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decided Israel must possess nuclear weapons.

In 1956 Israel set out to join only the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom as a nation in possession of nuclear weapons. Many in Israel opposed the plan because they believed it would lead to economic, diplomatic, or military bankruptcy. Others believed the feat could not be accomplished by such a small nation. Others still believed Israel’s building of a nuclear weapon would incite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that would cause Israel’s destruction. They agreed to a compromise plan: to build a nuclear weapon, but not to discuss it, make proclamations, or use it to threaten Israel’s neighbors—in other words, to build the weapon, but to pretend they had not built the weapon. This was the nuclear age and Israel must be at its forefront, but it must do so without inciting hostilities.

In 1956, the Prime Minister sent Shimon Peres to Paris to obtain diplomatic acceptance of Israel’s nuclear ambitions and assistance in constructing the facility. The French agreed to an all-inclusive regime and to provide engineers, technicians, know-how, and training to construct a nuclear reactor, a facility for separating plutonium, and missile capabilities. Israelis worked alongside French scientists for over a decade, and by 1967 Israel had the capability to assemble a nuclear device. In the years that followed, Israel developed into a self-sufficient, advanced nuclear power, “guaranteeing Israel a half century of life” (189). It succeeded by not only utilizing French technology but also by innovating a new Israeli method.

Nuclear weapons and military might have provided a sense of security for Israelis. Under Dimona’s protective umbrella, the Israeli individual replaced the collective, the state modernized, and Tel Aviv became a cultural and artistic mecca. Dimona gave Israelis the security to pursue life beyond survival. The hegemonic military status Dimona bestowed on Israel stabilized the Middle East. In 1973, during heightened international tensions, Israel briefly revealed its nuclear missiles for Russian and American satellites to photograph. That is the closest it has come to using them.