Israel: A Personal History

Journalist Rosenberg (Another Zionism, Another Judaism) offers a harsh and ruminative look at Israel’s early years. Born and raised in Sweden to Polish parents, Rosenberg migrated to Israel as a teen in 1962 with his mother after his father’s death. During the two and a half years Rosenberg lived there before returning to Sweden, he never so much as spoke to an Arab Palestinian, he recalls, even as the “Arab threat” was a constant refrain, with Arabs routinely portrayed in pop culture as “sneaky, bloodthirsty and cowardly.” The European Jews that dominated elite Israeli society weren’t much nicer to “oriental or Sephardic” Jews either, he notes, considering them uncivilized. Drawing on archival sources alongside his own recollections, Rosenberg traces how Zionists conceptualized Israel as a homeland for the “new type of Jew”—“blonde, blue-eyed, tough, physical and nonintellectual”—which made the fact that Israel had to be constituted with “weakling” Holocaust survivors a shameful disappointment to Zionists. At the same time, he notes, the memory of the Holocaust made vengeance a central tenet of political life. (He points to an Israeli soldier and Auschwitz survivor who admitted to killing hundreds of Egyptian civilians during the 1956 Sinai War because it was “great revenge.”) To this day, Rosenberg argues, a potent mix of shame and vengeance keep Israelis caught in a cycle of violence. It’s a profound reckoning. (Oct.)