Book Review: Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, by Daniel Gordis
Concise and comprehensive history of Israel, good for understanding historical facts but won't untangle the conflicts.
Ecco, 2016, 560 pages
The first comprehensive yet accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present day, from Daniel Gordis, "one of the most respected Israel analysts" (The Forward) living and writing in Jerusalem.
Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future?
We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel's people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though Israel's history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people's story and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse - but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long history of Israel's deepening isolation.
With Israel, public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and rigorous, Israel sheds light on Israel's past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn.
I am educated and have always been interested in history and world politics. So I probably know more than the average American about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and what's going on in Palestine. But I'm hardly an expert, so given recent events, I decided it was time to learn some more.
Of course there is no such thing as an unbiased history. So I decided I would read the best book I could find presenting the history of Israel, and then read the best book I could find presenting the history of Palestine.
Israel, by Daniel Gordis, came highly rated and I found it to be a very good history. Gordis is an Israeli and is writing from an Israeli POV, but I think he was trying to write an accurate if not completely unbiased history. He is generally sympathetic to the Palestinians as people while clearly subscribing to the mainstream Israeli narrative that Arab/Palestinian leaders are mostly responsible for the last century of conflict. Below, I'm going to try to address some of the controversial points that remain contested to this day, and how Gordis addresses them.
(To put my own biases on the table: I think neither side is blameless and any narrative that casts the Israelis as either noble beleaguered Jews just trying to survive or colonialist settlers and genocidal villains is reductive and nonsensical. I generally agree with Gordis's take that the intransigence of what has passed for Palestinian leadership has scuttled any real chances for peace, time and again, and would go further and say that the Palestinians by and large do not act like a population that desires peaceful coexistence with the Israelis. That said, Gordis passes rather lightly over some of Israel's more ignoble episodes.)
Who Was Here First?
Most of Israel is about the modern nation-state of Israel. Gordis spends only the first chapter giving a brief history of Jews in ancient times. Originally the two kingdoms of Israel and Judea (which sometimes warred against one another), over the centuries they were conquered or made vassals of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and eventually Rome. It was the Romans who dealt the death blow to Jewish independence, crushing the kingdom of Judea after a series of revolts, destroying the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and triggering the Jewish diaspora. There would not be a Jewish homeland again until 1948.
The starting point of most debates about Israel is whether or not Jews have a right to live there in the first place. Prior to the 19th century, there were very few Jews living in the region. Jews began arriving in the late 19th century, and then in large numbers immediately after World War II. Jews have long held that they have a right to their ancestral homeland, while Palestinians claim that they were there first and got evicted by Zionist settlers. Some Israelis claim Palestine never existed and the "Palestinians" were no more than a few goatherds in a desert; some Palestinians claim there were never any Jews in Palestine and the Biblical narrative of Israel is completely mythological.
Assuming Israel did once exist and Jews originated from there, it's a legitimate question whether they were entitled to return two thousand years later and reclaim the land, notwithstanding the people who had been living there in the meantime.
The truth is complicated and probably not completely knowable. The well-known phrase "A land without a people for a people without a land" is sometimes used as a justification by modern Zionists, but it was not originally a Zionist slogan. (It was in fact invented by evangelical Christians.) It was clearly not literally true, as there were people living on the land. As for its "true" meaning (anti-Zionists sometimes ascribe a genocidal meaning to it), it is probably as contentious as the equally famous and controversial slogan "From the river to the sea."
Zionism
Zionism was a nationalist movement that began in the late 19th century, largely as a reaction to anti-Semitism in Europe, especially a series of vicious Russian pogroms. Theodr Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew, is regarded as the father of Zionism, which advocated that Jews secure a homeland for themselves. Herzl wanted Palestine, but the early Zionists were not fixed on historical "Israel" as the only possible location for the Jewish nation-state. Argentina was a contender, many other locations were considered, and for a while, Herzl advocated a rather strange scheme for Jews to settle in Uganda. This was rejected by the Zionist Congress because it was regarded as merely a temporary settlement when the end goal was Palestine.
Gordis only spends a couple of chapters talking about the Zionist movement, but he does explain a lot of things that many people who use the term today probably don't know. Originally, it was a secular movement, and associated with Zionism (and indeed, with the early nation-state of Israel) was the idea of a "New Jew," who would not be an oppressed underclass quietly studying the Torah but asserting themselves on the world stage. This secularism was opposed by religious Jews (who believed that when and how Jews would return to Jerusalem was for God to decide), and many secular, pacifist Jews also opposed Zionism because they (correctly) foresaw that the Zionist project could never be fulfilled without violence.
It is interesting to consider an alternate history in which one of the other candidates - Argentina, Uganda, Madagascar, even Alaska (!) - became the Jewish homeland. But beginning in the late 1800s, Jews began immigrating to Palestine in what were called Aliyahs ("ascents"), mostly fleeing persecution in Europe.
The early Zionists were optimistic. They sought support from European leaders, who they thought would be in favor of encouraging Jews to leave Europe (they were somewhat correct about this), and initially, bought land in Palestine with an eye towards legally settling there in what they hoped would be peaceful coexistence with their Arab and Christian neighbors. The original project was not to expel all the non-Jews.
This did not, of course, work out.
OG Terrorists
Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi: Jewish paramilitary precursors to the IDF.
The Palestinians regarded the influx of Jews with alarm. The Ottomans who governed Palestine at the time imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration (though these restrictions were easy to bypass with bribes). When the area came under British control after World War I, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour announced support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The so-called Balfour Declaration set the stage for a dramatic increase in Zionism, Jewish immigration, and future conflict with Palestinian Arabs.
Something I quickly noted is that even in this book, the place the Jews were moving to was clearly identified as "Palestine." The flip side of certain Arab historians who deny the historical existence of Israel is that many Israelis are fond of saying there has "never been any such nation as Palestine." This is literally true: Palestine has never been a nation in its own right. Historically it was governed by a succession of Muslim Arab caliphates, and then by the Ottomans (in which it was part of the province of Beirut). When the British took over the region, it became known as Mandatory Palestine. It's clear that the region has always been known as Palestine and the people living there called themselves Palestinians. Palestinians became nationalistic in response to Zionism; prior to that, the region had been more or less multicultural with no particular notion of "statehood."
The British had an ugly situation on their hands with Mandatory Palestine. Arabs were becoming increasingly hostile to the influx of Jewish settlers. There were Arab riots throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with frequent violence between Jews and Arabs and Christians, started (at various times) by all sides, often escalating from some stupid random encounter outside a village. The British, never particularly sympathetic to either the Arabs or the Jews, were not liked or trusted and accused by both sides of siding with the other.
In 1937, the Peel Commission concluded that the British Mandate was ungovernable and that Palestine should instead be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states.
This is where the contours of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict took shape: while Zionists were divided on the partition plan, they at least considered it worth negotiating. Arabs rejected it entirely; they wanted Palestine to be fully independent and they were unwilling to accept a Jewish state carved out of it.
This time period is one of the most heavily disputed by both Israeli and Palestinian historians. There were numerous atrocities committed by both sides. Ambushes, terrorist attacks, villages burned. The Jewish paramilitary organization known as the Haganah was formed in 1920 to defend Jewish settlements against Arab violence. The more radical Irgun and Lehi paramilitary groups splintered off of the Haganah and at times carried out acts of outright terrorism against both Arabs and the British. (Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was an Irgun Commander. Future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was a leader of Lehi.)
Daniel Gordis does not ignore the more disreputable actions of the Jewish militias, but he places much more emphasis on Arab violence, and the attitude of the British towards Jews (which ranged from indifference to outright hostility).
One of the most infamous events of this time period was the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. It is not in dispute that Irgun and Lehi fighters slaughtered over a hundred Arab civilians (the number was inflated to hundreds for many years), including women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. The Jewish paramilitary groups chose the village as a target because of its strategic location, during the civil war that ultimately led to the British relinquishing control of Palestine. But Deir Yassin had a peace pact with their Jewish neighbors and while Arab militants were active in the area, there isn't much evidence that the villagers of Deir Yassin were collaborating with them (and in fact they suffered retaliation when they refused). The most inflammatory claims, which are repeated to this day when Deir Yassin is brought up, are that the Jewish paramilitaries not only slaughtered women and children, but mutilated their bodies and gang-raped the women. The Israelis deny that there was any rape and claim that the casualties were mostly collateral, though after the battle Irgun and Lehi fighters admitted that some civilians were killed deliberately. The facts are difficult to determine as there were multiple conflicting eyewitness accounts from both sides. Given that we cannot know for certain which account is more "truthy," Daniel Gordis is, perhaps understandably, much more credulous of the Israeli accounts and dismissive of the more lurid Arab claims.
Following the official establishment of Israel in 1948, the Haganah became the modern Israeli Defense Force. Lehi lingered for several years and a few holdouts would continue to engage in terrorist activities into the 1950s. The Irgun mostly folded into the IDF, but their members would form the core of the right-wing Likud party.
OG gangstas and future prime ministers.
First Arab-Israeli War - 1948 - and the "Nakba"
Gamifying wars is fun.
Although Jewish and Arab militias had been fighting each other (and sometimes the British) for several years, the first "official" Arab-Israeli War happened literally the day after Israel officially became a country, on May 14, 1948.
Israel declared its independence at the expiration of the British Mandate. David Ben Gurion, head of the World Zionist Congress, became Israel's first Prime Minister. The entire Arab League promptly attacked.
Troops, tanks, and planes from Egypt, Syria, Jordan (known as "Transjordan" at the time), Iraq (which wasn't even adjacent to Israel), as well as Palestinian fighters, were joined by volunteers from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Daniel Gordis's description of the war is tense and highlights how uncertain Israel's future was at the time. Today we think of Israel as a country that punches well above its weight class (even without nukes, which Gordis goes into later), and the supreme military power in the region. In 1948, they were surrounded, badly outnumbered, short on weapons and supplies, and support from the UK and the US was halfhearted at best. Even the most optimistic Israelis thought their odds were at best 50/50. British and American intelligence analysts agreed.
That Israel would not only win, but eventually inflict a crushing defeat, was good luck, not historical inevitability. (It did help them that Arab armies have historically been, well, terrible, and the Arab countries invading Israel, while all on the same side, lacked good communications and were also competing for what they assumed would be spoils in the form of territory to be carved up.)
The war lasted for about a year, with several truces negotiated by the UN, all of which were violated by both sides. By the end of it, Israel had pushed the Arabs out and secured borders that were vastly greater than the original Jewish portion assigned in the UN's partition plan. The nation's future was not exactly secured, but they were in a much better position than they had been and feeling more confident.
The same was not true for the Palestinians.
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were, as they say, "displaced" during and after the war. This was the start of the Palestinian refugee crisis that continues to this day, and it remains one of the most heavily disputed points of contention between Israeli and anti-Israeli narratives.
The Israeli narrative (which I am here slightly distinguishing from the "Zionist" narrative) is that most of the Palestinians fled in advance of the Arab attack because they expected the Arabs to win, and they planned to return to seize back a Palestine cleansed of Jews.
The Palestinian narrative is that of the "Nakba" (Arabic for "Disaster") in which Israelis forcibly drove them out of their homes and territories in a deliberate and planned act of ethnic cleansing.
I distinguished the Israeli version from the "Zionist" version because the Zionists at the time were pretty clear that Israel needed to be a Jewish state, which meant that Palestinians were... problematic. So the truth is, as usual, probably a mix. Gordis leans towards the Israeli version, pointing out that the Israelis offered full rights to Arabs and even pleaded with them to stay. But he also admits that many prominent Zionists were pretty explicit about wanting to evict the Palestinians, though usually what they advocated was some sort of peaceful resettlement plan accompanied by compensation and peace treaties, not the wholesale debacle that occurred. Israelis today admit that Palestinians suffered as a result of the war, but also point out that the Palestinians were mostly rooting for, if not actively aiding, the invaders.
At this point it's worth noting the school of Israeli scholars known as the "New Historians." They are frequently critical of Zionism (though sometimes Zionists themselves) and have taken a more critical, pro-Palestinian view of the Nakba and Israel. This is one place where Daniel Gordis really shows his biases, because he spends several pages disparaging the New Historians and arguing, in a very journalistic way, that their scholarship is shit.
These tensions in Israeli society are some of the more interesting portions of Israel that aren't all about fights with the Arabs. For example, Gordis talks about confrontations between the younger generation of Israelis and the older generation consisting of many Holocaust survivors. Younger Israelis, feeling muscular and confident in their new nation, sometimes came to feel a kind of contempt for the downtrodden "village Jews" of Eastern Europe, and went so far as to ask Holocaust survivors, "Why did you just take it? Why didn't you fight?"
(Holocaust survivors of course had some poignant and/or pointed answers.)
1967 - The Third Arab-Israeli War
Wait, what happened to the Second Arab-Israeli War? Technically that was the Suez Crisis of 1956, which Gordis does cover, but in an effort not to just repeat the entire book, I'm skipping ahead a little because 1967 was sort of a redo of 1956. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser once again tried to close the Straits of Tiran to choke off Israeli commerce, which Israel regarded as an act of war. Egypt mustered troops on the Israeli border, called on their mutual defense pact with Jordan and Syria, and then...
Who started it?
Today, the Israeli version of the Six-Day War is that the Arabs (again) started it, and Israel finished it. Arabs, on the other hand, still accuse Israel of starting the war.
The truth? Yes, it's complicated (again).
At the time, Egypt and Israel accused one another of attacking first, but we now know that Israel did in fact strike first. In fact they launched a preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields and essentially destroyed the Egyptian air force in the first five minutes. Since in modern warfare air power is king, Israel more or less won the war right then, though Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would all roll tanks in, only to be driven back in less than a week.
Those who claim Israel started an unnecessary war claim that Nasser was saber-rattling but that a diplomatic resolution was still possible. Gordis clearly does not buy this, pointing out that Nasser was pretty explicit about his intention to invade (and destroy) Israel, and the evidence seems pretty strong that nothing was going to stop the Arabs from attacking. On the other hand, other historians have pointed out that Egypt, like Jordan, was frequently caught in tensions between the pragmatic desires of their leaders and the anger of the general population. More than one Arab leader (especially in Jordan) has been unwillingly dragged into a conflict with Israel they didn't really want because they were afraid of appearing too accommodating to the Jews.
At the end of the Six-Day War, Israel controlled even more territory, including what would come to be the festering sores of Gaza and the West Bank. This is why so much modern discourse about peace settlements talks about the "1967 borders" - i.e., Israel's borders before the war. The Israeli view is that they won the territory fair and square in a war they didn't start, and now they need it as a buffer against their hostile neighbors. The Arab view is, once again, that Israel should give up what wasn't originally theirs.
The Yom Kippur War
The Fourth Arab-Israeli War was fought in 1973. This time the Arabs unquestionably started it. Ironically, the King of Jordan, who really, really didn't want to get into another war with Israel, tried to warn the Israelis this time, and Prime Minister Golda Meir and Mossad intelligence essentially blew him off. When the Israelis were finally convinced the Arabs were going to attack, they refrained from a preemptive strike this time because Henry Kissinger told them they'd get no American support if they did.
Egypt and Syria invaded Israel and initially made better progress than they did in 1967. The Israelis eventually pushed the Syrians back and advanced into the Sinai and even threatened Cairo. The US and the USSR were both more heavily involved this time, making it a proxy war and increasing both sides' incentives to end it.
Lebanon - "Israel's Viet Nam"
Lebanon, on Israel's northern border, had been a mostly peaceful neighbor. Lebanon did not participate in any of the Arab-Israeli Wars. Beirut was once a beautiful cosmopolitan city, the "Paris of the Middle East."
That changed largely thanks to the Palestinians, specifically the PLO. Palestinian militants tried to stage a coup in Jordan; King Hussein responded with Black September, in which all the Palestinians in Jordan were expelled, mostly into Lebanon, where they promptly set up operations and began lobbing rockets into Israel. They also destabilized Lebanon and triggered the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975 and devastated the country over the next two decades.
Explaining what happened in Lebanon is a book in itself, so Gordis obviously mostly talks about it in terms of Israel's involvement. Israel invaded Lebanon several times, in response to PLO attacks. This led to a long simmering conflict which has been described as "Israel's Viet Nam." One of the most infamous events - another one frequently cited by critics of Israel on their list of Zionist atrocities - is the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. The short version is that Lebanese Christian militias who were allied with the Israelis slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Shatila refugee camp, while the IDF not only stood by and watched, but actively prevented Palestinians from escaping. This led to an investigation, the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, and a great deal of Israeli soul-searching about what their country had become.
Israel eventually withdrew from Lebanon, although they continue to have border conflicts with the Iranian-backed Hezballah. Lebanon has never fully recovered, and the Lebanese civil war set up more long-term misery for the Palestinians.
The Intifadas
The last third of Israel talks about the Palestinian Intifadas, or "uprisings," and the long-term consequences for the Palestinians.
The First and Second Intifadas, in the 1990s and early 2000s, were the period during which it seemed conflict with the Palestinians would be never-ending. (Then things kind of simmered down for a while, but never really became peaceful, until we arrived to where we are now in 2024 as of this writing...) Suicide bombings were a frequent occurrence, Israel was increasingly coming under criticism and terms like "Apartheid State" became common in UN debates. (Gordis reveals his biases most strongly when it comes to the UN, complaining rather stridently about how much criticism Israel receives compared to other nations like North Korea, China, and Sudan.) Gordis is more interesting when talking about the internal politics of Israel: for example, he points out the well-known phenomenon of the Israeli electorate tending to swing right when the security situation with the Palestinians is more fraught, and yet it was right-wing Prime Ministers who withdrew from Lebanon and later from Gaza.
(It was also former Irgun Commander Menachem Begin who won a Noble Peace Prize in 1978 for signing the Camp David Accords with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.)
Gordis is most critical of one of the pivotal figures in Israeli-Palestinian relations: Yasser Arafat. Leader of the PLO from 1969 to 2004, Arafat was an Arab nationalist and according to Gordis, probably more responsible than any other single person for the Lebanese Civil War, the Intifadas, and the long-term failure of the peace process. Whether this is an entirely fair assessment is probably debatable, but Gordis makes a strong case for Arafat's continuous duplicity throughout his career. US President Bill Clinton, say what you like about him, really did care about a few things, and one of them was trying to secure peace in the Middle East. According to Gordis, Arafat was smiling and shaking hands with Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the 2000 Camp David Summit all the while planning the Second Intifada. Clinton certainly believed this; he blamed Arafat directly for torpedoing the peace process, and told incoming President George Bush and Colin Powell not to trust Arafat. Bush would later also say that Arafat was a liar. (Arafat was well known for saying one thing in English to a Western audience and another thing in Arabic to his Arab audience.)
One State, Two States, No States for You
Israel was published in 2016. Obama was leaving office, Trump was about to become president, and while peace had held with most of Israel's neighbors, the Palestinians remained an intractable problem.
It's rather sad that most of my review (and most of this book) is about Israel's conflicts with its neighbors and with the Palestinians. That has dominated the country's history since its beginning. It's not all Gordis talks about. There are some interesting examinations of changes in Israeli society - for example, from its mostly secular beginnings to its more religious turn in recent years, and the problems this has caused with the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews who are exempt from Israeli military service and, by and large, do not work and simply draw welfare from the Israeli state). How the influx of former-Soviet Jews brought a wealth of talent and education to Israel that spurred its economic and tech boom. The complicated relationship Israelis have with American Jews. There are many other incidents large and small that Gordis talks about and all of them draw a fascinating picture and make this an excellent book if what you want is a good historical overview of the modern Israeli state.
Does it offer solutions? No. Gordis doesn't even talk much about the so-called "One State" or "Two State" solutions very much, except inasmuch as they have come up in debates and negotiations time and again, and never gotten anywhere. His verdict seems to be pretty pessimistic. While he strives to be a factual historical observer, he takes as a given the right of Israel to exist and (implicitly) the need for it to remain a Jewish state. This takes a one-state solution off the table, and a two-state solution depends on a security situation that would make Israelis believe there will not be yet another Arab-Israeli War or Intifada. This was a pretty remote hope in 2016, and after the events of October 7, 2023, probably nonexistent at least for a generation.
If you want an "unbiased" history... well, good luck finding it. Israel is a history from the Israeli point of view. No lies detected, but there remain many, many points of contention, historical ambiguities, and moral quandaries that can only be answered given your givens. So, if you tend to be sympathetic to Israel, you will probably like this book a lot. If you are more critical of Israel, I think you'll still find it informative but perhaps you will be frustrated at the author's obvious Zionist sympathies. And so with that, stay tuned for my review of the decidedly anti-Zionist Palestine, by Nur Masalha.
My complete list of book reviews.
Ecco, 2016, 560 pages
The first comprehensive yet accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present day, from Daniel Gordis, "one of the most respected Israel analysts" (The Forward) living and writing in Jerusalem.
Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future?
We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel's people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though Israel's history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people's story and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse - but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long history of Israel's deepening isolation.
With Israel, public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and rigorous, Israel sheds light on Israel's past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn.
I am educated and have always been interested in history and world politics. So I probably know more than the average American about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and what's going on in Palestine. But I'm hardly an expert, so given recent events, I decided it was time to learn some more.
Of course there is no such thing as an unbiased history. So I decided I would read the best book I could find presenting the history of Israel, and then read the best book I could find presenting the history of Palestine.
Israel, by Daniel Gordis, came highly rated and I found it to be a very good history. Gordis is an Israeli and is writing from an Israeli POV, but I think he was trying to write an accurate if not completely unbiased history. He is generally sympathetic to the Palestinians as people while clearly subscribing to the mainstream Israeli narrative that Arab/Palestinian leaders are mostly responsible for the last century of conflict. Below, I'm going to try to address some of the controversial points that remain contested to this day, and how Gordis addresses them.
(To put my own biases on the table: I think neither side is blameless and any narrative that casts the Israelis as either noble beleaguered Jews just trying to survive or colonialist settlers and genocidal villains is reductive and nonsensical. I generally agree with Gordis's take that the intransigence of what has passed for Palestinian leadership has scuttled any real chances for peace, time and again, and would go further and say that the Palestinians by and large do not act like a population that desires peaceful coexistence with the Israelis. That said, Gordis passes rather lightly over some of Israel's more ignoble episodes.)
Who Was Here First?
Most of Israel is about the modern nation-state of Israel. Gordis spends only the first chapter giving a brief history of Jews in ancient times. Originally the two kingdoms of Israel and Judea (which sometimes warred against one another), over the centuries they were conquered or made vassals of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and eventually Rome. It was the Romans who dealt the death blow to Jewish independence, crushing the kingdom of Judea after a series of revolts, destroying the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and triggering the Jewish diaspora. There would not be a Jewish homeland again until 1948.
The starting point of most debates about Israel is whether or not Jews have a right to live there in the first place. Prior to the 19th century, there were very few Jews living in the region. Jews began arriving in the late 19th century, and then in large numbers immediately after World War II. Jews have long held that they have a right to their ancestral homeland, while Palestinians claim that they were there first and got evicted by Zionist settlers. Some Israelis claim Palestine never existed and the "Palestinians" were no more than a few goatherds in a desert; some Palestinians claim there were never any Jews in Palestine and the Biblical narrative of Israel is completely mythological.
Assuming Israel did once exist and Jews originated from there, it's a legitimate question whether they were entitled to return two thousand years later and reclaim the land, notwithstanding the people who had been living there in the meantime.
The truth is complicated and probably not completely knowable. The well-known phrase "A land without a people for a people without a land" is sometimes used as a justification by modern Zionists, but it was not originally a Zionist slogan. (It was in fact invented by evangelical Christians.) It was clearly not literally true, as there were people living on the land. As for its "true" meaning (anti-Zionists sometimes ascribe a genocidal meaning to it), it is probably as contentious as the equally famous and controversial slogan "From the river to the sea."
Zionism
Zionism was a nationalist movement that began in the late 19th century, largely as a reaction to anti-Semitism in Europe, especially a series of vicious Russian pogroms. Theodr Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew, is regarded as the father of Zionism, which advocated that Jews secure a homeland for themselves. Herzl wanted Palestine, but the early Zionists were not fixed on historical "Israel" as the only possible location for the Jewish nation-state. Argentina was a contender, many other locations were considered, and for a while, Herzl advocated a rather strange scheme for Jews to settle in Uganda. This was rejected by the Zionist Congress because it was regarded as merely a temporary settlement when the end goal was Palestine.
Gordis only spends a couple of chapters talking about the Zionist movement, but he does explain a lot of things that many people who use the term today probably don't know. Originally, it was a secular movement, and associated with Zionism (and indeed, with the early nation-state of Israel) was the idea of a "New Jew," who would not be an oppressed underclass quietly studying the Torah but asserting themselves on the world stage. This secularism was opposed by religious Jews (who believed that when and how Jews would return to Jerusalem was for God to decide), and many secular, pacifist Jews also opposed Zionism because they (correctly) foresaw that the Zionist project could never be fulfilled without violence.
It is interesting to consider an alternate history in which one of the other candidates - Argentina, Uganda, Madagascar, even Alaska (!) - became the Jewish homeland. But beginning in the late 1800s, Jews began immigrating to Palestine in what were called Aliyahs ("ascents"), mostly fleeing persecution in Europe.
The early Zionists were optimistic. They sought support from European leaders, who they thought would be in favor of encouraging Jews to leave Europe (they were somewhat correct about this), and initially, bought land in Palestine with an eye towards legally settling there in what they hoped would be peaceful coexistence with their Arab and Christian neighbors. The original project was not to expel all the non-Jews.
This did not, of course, work out.
OG Terrorists
Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi: Jewish paramilitary precursors to the IDF.
The Palestinians regarded the influx of Jews with alarm. The Ottomans who governed Palestine at the time imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration (though these restrictions were easy to bypass with bribes). When the area came under British control after World War I, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour announced support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The so-called Balfour Declaration set the stage for a dramatic increase in Zionism, Jewish immigration, and future conflict with Palestinian Arabs.
Something I quickly noted is that even in this book, the place the Jews were moving to was clearly identified as "Palestine." The flip side of certain Arab historians who deny the historical existence of Israel is that many Israelis are fond of saying there has "never been any such nation as Palestine." This is literally true: Palestine has never been a nation in its own right. Historically it was governed by a succession of Muslim Arab caliphates, and then by the Ottomans (in which it was part of the province of Beirut). When the British took over the region, it became known as Mandatory Palestine. It's clear that the region has always been known as Palestine and the people living there called themselves Palestinians. Palestinians became nationalistic in response to Zionism; prior to that, the region had been more or less multicultural with no particular notion of "statehood."
The British had an ugly situation on their hands with Mandatory Palestine. Arabs were becoming increasingly hostile to the influx of Jewish settlers. There were Arab riots throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with frequent violence between Jews and Arabs and Christians, started (at various times) by all sides, often escalating from some stupid random encounter outside a village. The British, never particularly sympathetic to either the Arabs or the Jews, were not liked or trusted and accused by both sides of siding with the other.
In 1937, the Peel Commission concluded that the British Mandate was ungovernable and that Palestine should instead be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states.
This is where the contours of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict took shape: while Zionists were divided on the partition plan, they at least considered it worth negotiating. Arabs rejected it entirely; they wanted Palestine to be fully independent and they were unwilling to accept a Jewish state carved out of it.
This time period is one of the most heavily disputed by both Israeli and Palestinian historians. There were numerous atrocities committed by both sides. Ambushes, terrorist attacks, villages burned. The Jewish paramilitary organization known as the Haganah was formed in 1920 to defend Jewish settlements against Arab violence. The more radical Irgun and Lehi paramilitary groups splintered off of the Haganah and at times carried out acts of outright terrorism against both Arabs and the British. (Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was an Irgun Commander. Future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was a leader of Lehi.)
Daniel Gordis does not ignore the more disreputable actions of the Jewish militias, but he places much more emphasis on Arab violence, and the attitude of the British towards Jews (which ranged from indifference to outright hostility).
One of the most infamous events of this time period was the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. It is not in dispute that Irgun and Lehi fighters slaughtered over a hundred Arab civilians (the number was inflated to hundreds for many years), including women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. The Jewish paramilitary groups chose the village as a target because of its strategic location, during the civil war that ultimately led to the British relinquishing control of Palestine. But Deir Yassin had a peace pact with their Jewish neighbors and while Arab militants were active in the area, there isn't much evidence that the villagers of Deir Yassin were collaborating with them (and in fact they suffered retaliation when they refused). The most inflammatory claims, which are repeated to this day when Deir Yassin is brought up, are that the Jewish paramilitaries not only slaughtered women and children, but mutilated their bodies and gang-raped the women. The Israelis deny that there was any rape and claim that the casualties were mostly collateral, though after the battle Irgun and Lehi fighters admitted that some civilians were killed deliberately. The facts are difficult to determine as there were multiple conflicting eyewitness accounts from both sides. Given that we cannot know for certain which account is more "truthy," Daniel Gordis is, perhaps understandably, much more credulous of the Israeli accounts and dismissive of the more lurid Arab claims.
Following the official establishment of Israel in 1948, the Haganah became the modern Israeli Defense Force. Lehi lingered for several years and a few holdouts would continue to engage in terrorist activities into the 1950s. The Irgun mostly folded into the IDF, but their members would form the core of the right-wing Likud party.
OG gangstas and future prime ministers.
First Arab-Israeli War - 1948 - and the "Nakba"
Gamifying wars is fun.
Although Jewish and Arab militias had been fighting each other (and sometimes the British) for several years, the first "official" Arab-Israeli War happened literally the day after Israel officially became a country, on May 14, 1948.
Israel declared its independence at the expiration of the British Mandate. David Ben Gurion, head of the World Zionist Congress, became Israel's first Prime Minister. The entire Arab League promptly attacked.
Troops, tanks, and planes from Egypt, Syria, Jordan (known as "Transjordan" at the time), Iraq (which wasn't even adjacent to Israel), as well as Palestinian fighters, were joined by volunteers from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Daniel Gordis's description of the war is tense and highlights how uncertain Israel's future was at the time. Today we think of Israel as a country that punches well above its weight class (even without nukes, which Gordis goes into later), and the supreme military power in the region. In 1948, they were surrounded, badly outnumbered, short on weapons and supplies, and support from the UK and the US was halfhearted at best. Even the most optimistic Israelis thought their odds were at best 50/50. British and American intelligence analysts agreed.
That Israel would not only win, but eventually inflict a crushing defeat, was good luck, not historical inevitability. (It did help them that Arab armies have historically been, well, terrible, and the Arab countries invading Israel, while all on the same side, lacked good communications and were also competing for what they assumed would be spoils in the form of territory to be carved up.)
The war lasted for about a year, with several truces negotiated by the UN, all of which were violated by both sides. By the end of it, Israel had pushed the Arabs out and secured borders that were vastly greater than the original Jewish portion assigned in the UN's partition plan. The nation's future was not exactly secured, but they were in a much better position than they had been and feeling more confident.
The same was not true for the Palestinians.
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were, as they say, "displaced" during and after the war. This was the start of the Palestinian refugee crisis that continues to this day, and it remains one of the most heavily disputed points of contention between Israeli and anti-Israeli narratives.
The Israeli narrative (which I am here slightly distinguishing from the "Zionist" narrative) is that most of the Palestinians fled in advance of the Arab attack because they expected the Arabs to win, and they planned to return to seize back a Palestine cleansed of Jews.
The Palestinian narrative is that of the "Nakba" (Arabic for "Disaster") in which Israelis forcibly drove them out of their homes and territories in a deliberate and planned act of ethnic cleansing.
I distinguished the Israeli version from the "Zionist" version because the Zionists at the time were pretty clear that Israel needed to be a Jewish state, which meant that Palestinians were... problematic. So the truth is, as usual, probably a mix. Gordis leans towards the Israeli version, pointing out that the Israelis offered full rights to Arabs and even pleaded with them to stay. But he also admits that many prominent Zionists were pretty explicit about wanting to evict the Palestinians, though usually what they advocated was some sort of peaceful resettlement plan accompanied by compensation and peace treaties, not the wholesale debacle that occurred. Israelis today admit that Palestinians suffered as a result of the war, but also point out that the Palestinians were mostly rooting for, if not actively aiding, the invaders.
At this point it's worth noting the school of Israeli scholars known as the "New Historians." They are frequently critical of Zionism (though sometimes Zionists themselves) and have taken a more critical, pro-Palestinian view of the Nakba and Israel. This is one place where Daniel Gordis really shows his biases, because he spends several pages disparaging the New Historians and arguing, in a very journalistic way, that their scholarship is shit.
These tensions in Israeli society are some of the more interesting portions of Israel that aren't all about fights with the Arabs. For example, Gordis talks about confrontations between the younger generation of Israelis and the older generation consisting of many Holocaust survivors. Younger Israelis, feeling muscular and confident in their new nation, sometimes came to feel a kind of contempt for the downtrodden "village Jews" of Eastern Europe, and went so far as to ask Holocaust survivors, "Why did you just take it? Why didn't you fight?"
(Holocaust survivors of course had some poignant and/or pointed answers.)
1967 - The Third Arab-Israeli War
Wait, what happened to the Second Arab-Israeli War? Technically that was the Suez Crisis of 1956, which Gordis does cover, but in an effort not to just repeat the entire book, I'm skipping ahead a little because 1967 was sort of a redo of 1956. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser once again tried to close the Straits of Tiran to choke off Israeli commerce, which Israel regarded as an act of war. Egypt mustered troops on the Israeli border, called on their mutual defense pact with Jordan and Syria, and then...
Who started it?
Today, the Israeli version of the Six-Day War is that the Arabs (again) started it, and Israel finished it. Arabs, on the other hand, still accuse Israel of starting the war.
The truth? Yes, it's complicated (again).
At the time, Egypt and Israel accused one another of attacking first, but we now know that Israel did in fact strike first. In fact they launched a preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields and essentially destroyed the Egyptian air force in the first five minutes. Since in modern warfare air power is king, Israel more or less won the war right then, though Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would all roll tanks in, only to be driven back in less than a week.
Those who claim Israel started an unnecessary war claim that Nasser was saber-rattling but that a diplomatic resolution was still possible. Gordis clearly does not buy this, pointing out that Nasser was pretty explicit about his intention to invade (and destroy) Israel, and the evidence seems pretty strong that nothing was going to stop the Arabs from attacking. On the other hand, other historians have pointed out that Egypt, like Jordan, was frequently caught in tensions between the pragmatic desires of their leaders and the anger of the general population. More than one Arab leader (especially in Jordan) has been unwillingly dragged into a conflict with Israel they didn't really want because they were afraid of appearing too accommodating to the Jews.
At the end of the Six-Day War, Israel controlled even more territory, including what would come to be the festering sores of Gaza and the West Bank. This is why so much modern discourse about peace settlements talks about the "1967 borders" - i.e., Israel's borders before the war. The Israeli view is that they won the territory fair and square in a war they didn't start, and now they need it as a buffer against their hostile neighbors. The Arab view is, once again, that Israel should give up what wasn't originally theirs.
The Yom Kippur War
The Fourth Arab-Israeli War was fought in 1973. This time the Arabs unquestionably started it. Ironically, the King of Jordan, who really, really didn't want to get into another war with Israel, tried to warn the Israelis this time, and Prime Minister Golda Meir and Mossad intelligence essentially blew him off. When the Israelis were finally convinced the Arabs were going to attack, they refrained from a preemptive strike this time because Henry Kissinger told them they'd get no American support if they did.
Egypt and Syria invaded Israel and initially made better progress than they did in 1967. The Israelis eventually pushed the Syrians back and advanced into the Sinai and even threatened Cairo. The US and the USSR were both more heavily involved this time, making it a proxy war and increasing both sides' incentives to end it.
Lebanon - "Israel's Viet Nam"
Lebanon, on Israel's northern border, had been a mostly peaceful neighbor. Lebanon did not participate in any of the Arab-Israeli Wars. Beirut was once a beautiful cosmopolitan city, the "Paris of the Middle East."
That changed largely thanks to the Palestinians, specifically the PLO. Palestinian militants tried to stage a coup in Jordan; King Hussein responded with Black September, in which all the Palestinians in Jordan were expelled, mostly into Lebanon, where they promptly set up operations and began lobbing rockets into Israel. They also destabilized Lebanon and triggered the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975 and devastated the country over the next two decades.
Explaining what happened in Lebanon is a book in itself, so Gordis obviously mostly talks about it in terms of Israel's involvement. Israel invaded Lebanon several times, in response to PLO attacks. This led to a long simmering conflict which has been described as "Israel's Viet Nam." One of the most infamous events - another one frequently cited by critics of Israel on their list of Zionist atrocities - is the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. The short version is that Lebanese Christian militias who were allied with the Israelis slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Shatila refugee camp, while the IDF not only stood by and watched, but actively prevented Palestinians from escaping. This led to an investigation, the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, and a great deal of Israeli soul-searching about what their country had become.
Israel eventually withdrew from Lebanon, although they continue to have border conflicts with the Iranian-backed Hezballah. Lebanon has never fully recovered, and the Lebanese civil war set up more long-term misery for the Palestinians.
The Intifadas
The last third of Israel talks about the Palestinian Intifadas, or "uprisings," and the long-term consequences for the Palestinians.
The First and Second Intifadas, in the 1990s and early 2000s, were the period during which it seemed conflict with the Palestinians would be never-ending. (Then things kind of simmered down for a while, but never really became peaceful, until we arrived to where we are now in 2024 as of this writing...) Suicide bombings were a frequent occurrence, Israel was increasingly coming under criticism and terms like "Apartheid State" became common in UN debates. (Gordis reveals his biases most strongly when it comes to the UN, complaining rather stridently about how much criticism Israel receives compared to other nations like North Korea, China, and Sudan.) Gordis is more interesting when talking about the internal politics of Israel: for example, he points out the well-known phenomenon of the Israeli electorate tending to swing right when the security situation with the Palestinians is more fraught, and yet it was right-wing Prime Ministers who withdrew from Lebanon and later from Gaza.
(It was also former Irgun Commander Menachem Begin who won a Noble Peace Prize in 1978 for signing the Camp David Accords with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.)
Gordis is most critical of one of the pivotal figures in Israeli-Palestinian relations: Yasser Arafat. Leader of the PLO from 1969 to 2004, Arafat was an Arab nationalist and according to Gordis, probably more responsible than any other single person for the Lebanese Civil War, the Intifadas, and the long-term failure of the peace process. Whether this is an entirely fair assessment is probably debatable, but Gordis makes a strong case for Arafat's continuous duplicity throughout his career. US President Bill Clinton, say what you like about him, really did care about a few things, and one of them was trying to secure peace in the Middle East. According to Gordis, Arafat was smiling and shaking hands with Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the 2000 Camp David Summit all the while planning the Second Intifada. Clinton certainly believed this; he blamed Arafat directly for torpedoing the peace process, and told incoming President George Bush and Colin Powell not to trust Arafat. Bush would later also say that Arafat was a liar. (Arafat was well known for saying one thing in English to a Western audience and another thing in Arabic to his Arab audience.)
One State, Two States, No States for You
Israel was published in 2016. Obama was leaving office, Trump was about to become president, and while peace had held with most of Israel's neighbors, the Palestinians remained an intractable problem.
It's rather sad that most of my review (and most of this book) is about Israel's conflicts with its neighbors and with the Palestinians. That has dominated the country's history since its beginning. It's not all Gordis talks about. There are some interesting examinations of changes in Israeli society - for example, from its mostly secular beginnings to its more religious turn in recent years, and the problems this has caused with the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews who are exempt from Israeli military service and, by and large, do not work and simply draw welfare from the Israeli state). How the influx of former-Soviet Jews brought a wealth of talent and education to Israel that spurred its economic and tech boom. The complicated relationship Israelis have with American Jews. There are many other incidents large and small that Gordis talks about and all of them draw a fascinating picture and make this an excellent book if what you want is a good historical overview of the modern Israeli state.
Does it offer solutions? No. Gordis doesn't even talk much about the so-called "One State" or "Two State" solutions very much, except inasmuch as they have come up in debates and negotiations time and again, and never gotten anywhere. His verdict seems to be pretty pessimistic. While he strives to be a factual historical observer, he takes as a given the right of Israel to exist and (implicitly) the need for it to remain a Jewish state. This takes a one-state solution off the table, and a two-state solution depends on a security situation that would make Israelis believe there will not be yet another Arab-Israeli War or Intifada. This was a pretty remote hope in 2016, and after the events of October 7, 2023, probably nonexistent at least for a generation.
If you want an "unbiased" history... well, good luck finding it. Israel is a history from the Israeli point of view. No lies detected, but there remain many, many points of contention, historical ambiguities, and moral quandaries that can only be answered given your givens. So, if you tend to be sympathetic to Israel, you will probably like this book a lot. If you are more critical of Israel, I think you'll still find it informative but perhaps you will be frustrated at the author's obvious Zionist sympathies. And so with that, stay tuned for my review of the decidedly anti-Zionist Palestine, by Nur Masalha.
My complete list of book reviews.