cover image Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel

Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel

Yaron Ezrahi. Farrar Straus Giroux, $25 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-374-25279-3

When the author's grandfather came to Palestine from Russia at the end of the 19th century, he shed the family name ""Krichevsky"" for ""Ezrahi,"" the Hebrew word for citizen. ""In choosing to connect the private and the public in such a way he probably could not have anticipated the ambivalence of at least one of his grandsons, who would share his enthusiasm for... citizenship for Jews but would feel an equally insistent impulse to keep the family domain separate from the public space and public duties."" In this deeply personal book, Ezrahi traces how Jews of his grandfather's generation were transformed from ""a disempowered and vulnerable religious minority into an armed citizen-soldier of a sovereign state governed by a Jewish majority."" But Ezrahi, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of The Descent of Icarus, sees younger Israelis shrugging off that militarized collective in favor of individual conscience. In the stretched metaphor of the title, Ezrahi asks whether the rubber-clad steel bullets issued to soldiers for use against demonstrators represent real concern for the demonstrators or ""a compromise between our recent recognition of the need to use force to secure our independence and our traditional moral critique of power, our own moral identity as Jews?"" While there can be no question of the breadth of Ezrahi's knowledge (Rousseau, Bettelheim, the Bible) when combined with post-modern political analysis and memories of, say, his summer swimming escapades, it is diffuse and likely to convince only the converted. (Mar.)