ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE: a well-written, moving, irresistible history by one of the finest historian-journalists in Israel today --TOM SEGEV
Followers of Israeli politics and its top historians are aware that there is quite a split: the earlier history books by Israelis tended to describe the usual beliefs about the creation of the state: who were its heroes and villains, why Palestinians have been so betrayed, abused and ignored by their fellow Arabs, the central role of the Holocaust in molding the minds of Israelis and the world toward the State's creation and survival, and more. Several recent writers have challenged what some describe as the "usual Zionist myths," and among these is the very gifted Tom Segev, best known for his earlier book, The Seventh Million, which discussed how the Shoah shaped Israeli identity.
Segev writes a regular column for the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, the name of which is telling: for years, it was "Katav Zar," which means "foreign correspondent"--yet his subjects were always about Israel, and he was writing it from there. Interesting. But what is really interesting is what this superb historian is writing about here--and don't let the term "Palestine" in its title throw you off:
Segev is describing in beautiful, entertaining prose those three painful decades when the British Mandate was in place, and when, to quote the book cover, "the seeds of today's conflicts were sown."
As most of us recall from our high school and university courses, history has usually been about the Big Guys (and rarely Gals, alas):
the Kings, the Popes, the Prime Ministers, the Generals. True, the author of this delightful, occasionally heart-rending study describes the Lawrence of Arabias, King Faisal, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Trumpeldor and others, but Segev also goes through the personal diaries of dozens of "ordinary, everyday citizens" who lived in Palestine between the Balfour Declaration and the War of Independence/creation of the modern State of Israel (fittingly called "Nakba" or "the catastrophe" by the Palestinian Arabs). We encounter charming Arab intellectuals, British functionaries who despise both Jews and Muslims almost equally, innocent families caught up in significant Arab riots in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1935, in which dozens of settlers of every faith were caught in cross-fires. This makes the entire, tense, awful period come alive for us; after all, aren't most of us more like other "average, normal" folk than the Greats of History? Of course, it is the latter who are often the most prescient, such as when a young labour leader from Eastern Europe, David Ben Gurion, gave a talk in 1919 in which he declared, "There is no solution! We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want the country to be theirs." How is that for prognostication?
How can I capture how exquisitely this book is written? Like a grand, Russian novel or play, characters by the dozen march past our eyes, filled with as much life, reality and passions as any Anna Karenina or Dr. Zhivago, or the three sisters of Chekhov, for that matter. Our hearts crack under the horror of discovering that while Chaim Weizmann, a beloved English Jew, was winning the sympathetic hearts and minds of Churchill and other young leaders in the post-Great War era, arguably one of the most influential forgeries of all time, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was being written and printed in Czarist Russia, an evil, conspiracy-ridden text which would inspire Hitler to destroy European Jewry and terrify British citizens, and millions of others of good will around the world, with the false belief that world Jewry was behind the Russian Revolution, and wielded more power than any other group on earth. (Better give them a land of their own, some thought; better not trust these Christ-killers and world-rulers, thought others.) It is agony to discover how the British often fought to please Arabs before and during the Second World war by curtailing Jewish immigration, since they felt that they already had the love of the Jews in their pocket--while tens of thousands of other Jews were going up in smoke across Eastern Europe nearly every single day.
Yes, it is fun to hear the huge controversy over the Nobel Prize-winning Albert Einstein, who was invited to speak at the opening of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but it had to be in Hebrew (which he did not know) rather than in German, which could have insulted the Zionist public. And readers may fight back tears when author Segev admits that the Arabs were given vague promises at the exact same time as the Balfour Declaration of 1917 "viewed with favour" the creation of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. Segev notes with no irony, "The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised." Yet you may be pleased to see the author reject the common belief that Israel was established in world response to the Holocaust, when the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) was well on its way to becoming a state in the 1940s, even without the mass murder of European Jewry to prod the consciousness of the world.
This is a powerful, moving, insightful, mind-churning book, and you will be justly rewarded for reading it. Over 500 pages, but, like eating potato chips, one truly cannot stop reading it; it's haunting and stunning. Bravo, Mr. Segev.
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Allan Gould is the regular book critic for KOLEL.ORG. He is the author of over forty books, including THE UNORTHDOX BOOK OF JEWISH RECORDS AND LISTS and the major anthology, WHAT DID THEY THINK OF THE JEWS? He lives in Toronto with his wife, not far from his two adult children.
