Though Israel is key ally of the democratic West in a region afflicted by autocracy, violence, and poverty, most Europeans and Americans have only a poor understanding of the nation. The very existence of Israel is an offense to many in the secularist West. The media often presents little beyond caricatures of Israel as a warmonger and oppressor of the Palestinian people. Israel suffers unrelenting hostility from Western Europe largely because the existence of a democratic and proud nation-state—moreover, a country grounded in an essentially ethnoreligious view of nationhood—flies in the face of EU elites’ supranational, postreligious, and postethnic vision for the world. The fact that Israel dares to be fundamentally Western and yet rejects much of the progressive West’s perspective is a cardinal sin.
For those reasons and more, Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, published in 2016 and the winner of that year’s Jewish Book of the Year Award, maintains its relevance today. It is a readable and engaging history of Israel, a country that fascinates us all, whether critics, supporters or fence-sitters. Beginning with Theodor Herzl and the Zionist movement in late nineteenth-century Europe and continuing until the present day, Gordis chronicles the reawakening of the idea of a Jewish state, the realization of that idea, and then the development of that state, with all of its struggles, triumphs, failures and successes, into a vibrant and modern democracy that represents a unique mélange of Western and Middle Eastern cultures.
Since the book tells the story of Israel, it is an exceedingly complex and multifaceted tale. This complexity starts with Gordis’ account of Herzl and the Zionist movement. For those of us familiar with the biblical concept of Israel as the promised land, a “land flowing with milk and honey,” it is surprising that the Zionist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not at all primarily religious, but rather a highly secular undertaking. Suffused with the socialist ideology of the day, Zionism was “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.” A widespread motif of the Zionists throughout the approximately sixty years leading up to Israel’s establishment was the emergence of a “new Jew”: strong, assertive and ready to defend the Jewish people by force of arms if necessary. The new Jew was to be the exact opposite of the “passive, weak, fearful” religious Jews that some Zionist leaders in Europe imagined, who supposedly “huddled over ancient, sacred texts instead of defending themselves.”
But of course, Zionism wasn’t purely, or even primarily, a secular undertaking. Facing a Europe that bore a constant undercurrent of anti-Semitic oppression and violence, how could it be secular for Jews to reawaken the biblical promise of deliverance from the hand of the oppressor and a return to the homeland? Could a merely secular, political promise last as long as God’s solemn vow to his people, uttered through the Prophet Ezekiel during the Babylonian exile at the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC, to “take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and … gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land?”
After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the complexity and ambiguity of the Zionist movement becomes that of Israel itself. Drawing the most important strands of this tale together, Gordis brings the diversity of Israel to life, from the ultra-orthodox to the ultra-secular; the socialism of many of the founding generation to the ascendance of the right-wing Likud party of recent decades; the Ashkenazi Jews of European descent to the Sephardi or Mizrachi, those primarily from North Africa and the Middle East; the melting-pot effect of the Law of Return, which opened Israel’s borders to any Jew from anywhere in the world and welcomed immigrants from a myriad of cultural backgrounds, to the continued fraught co-existence of Jewish Israelis with mostly Muslim Palestinian and Israeli Arabs.
Although clearly written by a man who loves his adopted land, Israel: A Concise History is not a polemic. In this chronicle of all the wars the Israelis have fought, most of them forced upon them, Gordis presents not only Israel’s courage and the atrocities visited upon the Jews, but also the sometimes brutal violence Israelis committed against Arabs. For example, Gordis devotes an entire section to the tale of Israeli soldiers who killed 47 people, including women and children, in the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Kassem in 1956. Ben-Gurion called this massacre a “dreadful atrocity,” and Gordis does not try to soften the story.
Gordis’s account of the occupation of Palestine is sensitive, informative, and balanced. The chapter entitled “Burden of Occupation” describes both the compelling reasons for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and its inevitable moral repercussions. Quoting the Israeli writer and intellectual Amos Oz, Gordis concludes with him that “even unavoidable occupation is corrupting occupation.”
Gordis does not speak of his faith nor does he take any positions that would belittle the perspectives of anyone of non-Jewish faith. However, neither does he try to avoid the inescapable fact that the story of Israel is a religious story. The book is clear that that all of the complexities and ambiguities of Israel’s existence are connected to that fact. Jerusalem in particular is the place where three powerful and all-encompassing religions—Judaism, Islam and Christianity—converge. As such, it is a place where weighty religious interests and deeply held religious convictions clash. Gordis’ greatest accomplishment is that he tackles the array of questions arising from this unique state of affairs with great skill. He does so by focusing not on faiths or ideologies, but on events and people in all their religious and moral complexity. He avoids the dogmatic, black-and-white oversimplifications all too common among the militant secularists of Europe and America whose animosity toward Israel has everything to do with their distaste for religious faith.
Ultimately, as Gordis affirms, the founding and the success of the State of Israel can only be described in religious terms: the flourishing existence of today’s Israel is a miracle. One can’t help but think of the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. In chapter 37 of that book, the Lord leads the prophet Ezekiel to a valley full of dry bones. The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy—to speak—to the dead bones:
Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.
God causes sinews and flesh to be restored to the dry bones, and skin to cover them. And then he causes breath to come to them from the four winds, and the breath breathes life back into them. Then the Lord tells Ezekiel to utter the following message:
Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
Referring further to the land of Israel, God instructs Ezekiel to elaborate:
Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived.
The meaning of this prophesy is disputed; nevertheless, it is difficult to read Ezekiel 37 from today’s perspective without being reminded of the unspeakable horrors that the Jews of the diaspora suffered in twentieth-century Europe and the miraculous establishment of the Jewish state of Israel only three years after the Holocaust. In the light of such overwhelming tragedy and triumph, which of us who believes in the God of the Bible could doubt that the history that Gordis so dramatically recounts in this book witnesses to the fact that God is the Lord of human history?
