Oded Balaban

On Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013.

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

2017

There are books that lie by concealing and books that lie by confessing. Ari Shavit’s belongs, with honors, to the second kind, which is the more dangerous, because it has discovered that the surest way to keep the loot is to declare it. My Promised Land was received (by David Remnick, by Spiegel & Grau, by the American Jewish-liberal salon that awarded it a prize even before it was published) as an act of courage: at last a Zionist who “looks squarely at” the Nakba. I hold the opposite. It is the most effective apology for the ethnic cleansing of 1948 ever written, and it is so precisely because it hides nothing. Shavit does not defend the crime; he pays for it. And the currency he pays with is emotion.

Take the chapter “Lydda, 1948,” the heart of the book. It spares not a single horror: the crammed mosque, “some sort of massacre,” the mother who “abandons her howling baby under a tree,” the soldier “with a thin mustache” who “enjoys every moment” as he presses the barrel of his gun into a father’s chest. It assembles, piece by piece, the prosecutor’s complete file. And then, with the evidence on the table, it passes sentence: “I am not only sad, I am horrified”; and, in the next breath: “I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the training group boys. On the contrary. If need be, I’ll stand by the damned… They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.” There is the whole machine, in broad daylight.

The atrocious detail does not contradict the absolution; it finances it. Only the one who “opens the black box,” who has seen everything, who declares himself “horrified,” earns the right to say “I will not damn.” Horror is no obstacle to pardon; it is its proof of payment. Shavit buys Lydda in the only currency that costs him nothing, feeling, and keeps the house in Rehovot.

Note the mechanics of the argument, which the solemnity conceals. From a historical premise (“the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution”) he draws, without further ado, a moral conclusion: therefore “I will not damn.” That is, from something having been necessary it follows that it is permitted. The old leap from is to ought, which any first-year philosophy student recognizes as a fallacy, is disguised here as tragic maturity: “the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” The dilemma is rigged (it excludes the only decent option, which is to accept Zionism and make amends for Lydda), but it does its job. It makes the reader choose between homeland and conscience, betting that he will choose the homeland.

And so that the sacrifice of conscience goes unnoticed, Shavit offers a spare conscience, at clearance prices: “I condemn Bulldozer. I reject the sniper.” He condemns a bulldozer and a gunman, the instruments, in order to bless the commander who sent them. It is the accomplice’s oldest trick, handing over the subordinate to save the operation, throwing the dog to the wolves so that the master may pass for a decent man.

What is truly revealing is whom he directs his contempt at. Not the executioners, but “the bleeding-heart Israeli liberals of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed.” The observation is accurate: it is hypocritical to enjoy the plunder and condemn the plunderer. Only Shavit, instead of resolving the hypocrisy by returning the plunder, resolves it by withdrawing the condemnation. He keeps the fruits and suppresses the reproach, and calls that amputation courage. He has found, in effect, the cure for liberal hypocrisy, which is to stop being liberal. From that height he crowns himself a “third approach,” the only one that can be “realistic and moral,” above a left that sees only occupation and a right that sees only threat. It is lucidity contemplated from the lawn in Rehovot, the man who, by looking at both sides, believes himself entitled to judge neither.

The whole book is built so that this operation moves the reader instead of repelling him, and the instrument is aestheticization. Shavit contemplates the column of deportees “through the haze” of the yellow heat from “the highest point of the Ben Shemen youth village” and turns it into landscape: “the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching.” A postcard. Other people’s suffering filmed against the light, with background music. And the book’s frame completes the job. It opens and closes in the same bar, with the same “single malt,” looking out at the port of Jaffa, “rehabilitated: galleries, restaurants, bars,” raised where “the old Arab warehouses” stood. The man sips a single malt over the gentrified ruins of what his people took, and calls it “a spectacular spectacle of life.” He is the connoisseur of his own crime, savoring it with tasting notes.

And when the time comes to render accounts, there is no one to render them. The book dissolves into a film metaphor: “We are a ragtag cast in an epic motion picture whose plot we do not understand and cannot grasp. The script writer went mad. The director ran away. The producer went bankrupt. But we are still here, on this biblical set… Come what may.” Note the evaporation of the agent. The script wrote itself and its author went mad; nobody expelled anybody, a movie happened. It is exactly what the subtitle promises, “The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel”: there is a triumph, concrete and with beneficiaries, and there is a tragedy, anonymous and without culprits. “Tragedy” is the oldest alibi of the powerful. It turns a decision into a destiny, a perpetrator into a character, an expulsion into a meteorological fatality. The gods did it; the scriptwriter went mad; the columns, on their own, “never stop marching.”

There is a figure, the witness who does not know he is testifying, who denounces while believing that he praises. Shavit is its perfect contemporary specimen. He thinks he is giving a lesson in national honesty, and he is signing, without noticing, the record of the procedure by which an ethnic cleansing still passes, three generations later, for political maturity. His book is not a confession. A confession asks for absolution from another and risks punishment. His absolves itself, in advance, and risks nothing. On the contrary, it collects: prizes, forewords, the gratitude of a public that needed exactly this, anguish and loot bound in a single volume, atonement at retail. A man who confesses to a murder in order to inherit the estate is no penitent. He is the heir. And My Promised Land is the will.