'Promised Land' Wrestles With Israel's Brutal Contradictions
In his new book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit tackles several basic questions: Why was Israel created? What has it achieved? What went wrong? Where is it heading? Will it survive?
The book is based on interviews with hundreds of Israelis — Jews and Arabs — as well as his own story and family history (two of Shavit's great-grandfathers became Zionists in the late 1800s).
Shavit, a columnist for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, was born in 1957. He says serving in the Israeli army in the occupied territories left him "morally outraged" and turned him into a peace and human rights activist. But he writes that there are no simple answers in the Middle East, which is why he prides himself on challenging "both right-wing and left-wing dogmas."
"The great challenge for Israel is that there's an inherent contradiction between our values — which are basically democratic, liberal, humane values — and the brutal reality we live in," Shavit tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And the challenge is to find a way to reconcile them [in] the best way possible, not to lose our soul and not to lose our values while we defend our [lives] and protect our future."
This is where the "triumph and tragedy of Israel" begins. My great-grandfather, who was one of the founders of Zionism of Britain, ... he arrives as a pilgrim in the port of Jaffa in April 1897, just a few months before the First Zionist Congress.
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http://www.npr.org/2013/11/18/245952983/promised-land-wrestles-with-israels-brutal-contradictions
