Tom Segev Research Articles

Tom Segev. A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion.

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A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev

Reviewed by: A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev Christopher L. Schilling (bio) A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion By Tom Segev. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019. 817 pp. Born in 1945, Tom Segev is an Israeli journalist and historian widely associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group that challenges many of the country's traditional narratives. In his previous book, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (Macmillan, 2007), Segev controversially denies any existential threat to Israel from a military point of view and believes that its Arab neighbours would not have attacked Israel in 1967. Segev argues that because major parts of the Israeli population feared Egypt and Syria, pressure increased and led the Israeli government to a preemptive attack. In his critique, Michael Oren subsequently disregarded Segev, despite his doctorate in history, as a journalist: "He's not really a trained historian."1 Oren asserts that Segev "contradict[ed] himself" and committed "glaring oversights."2 In the same vein, Benny Morris called Segev's analysis "essentially false," contributing to the "contemporary delegitimation of Israel" while pointing "readers and scholars in no worthwhile direction."3 Segev describes Ben-Gurion as a humorless, pork-eating, Shabbatworking atheist—a man who suffered from depression, spent weeks in bed, lied, forged academic documents to get into university in Istanbul, and ran away from his responsibilities. Segev faults Ben-Gurion for security failures, as well as for dismissing Holocaust survivors as disappointing "human capital" and Sephardi Jews as "primitive." He tells of a Ben-Gurion who excitedly waited to see Trotsky on the Red Square in Moscow and bought Mein Kampf at a train kiosk in Munich; of a man of moods and outbursts, one who was always between supreme happiness and suicidal depression; of a man who consulted a Romanian fortune teller, and once claimed to have seen a flying saucer. [End Page 307] The book focuses in great detail on the four women with whom Ben-Gurion allegedly had extramarital affairs. Segev defends his focus on these affairs arguing that they are of genuine historical value rather than mere gossip: "The first answer is the standard one—that if the leader isn't faithful to his wife, maybe he's not faithful to his voters, either. If he cheats on her, maybe he cheats on them, too […] I don't think it's unreasonable to know about his weaknesses and distress, and about the women whose company he enjoyed while making important decisions."4 Whether or not it is persuasive to deduce that an individual who cheats on his wife is more likely to lie to voters, or to assume a politician would necessarily be persuaded by women with whom he shares his bed, Oren's critique of journalism versus academic analysis comes to mind. Following such logic, one might be inclined to ask Segev whether a politician who is faithful to his wife is less likely to lie to his voters. Segev's book sees women simply as historical bystanders in the formation of the Jewish state. Unfortunately, women are described only in relation to their male counterparts: "His young wife took down the rifle and rushed after him [farmer Shimon Melamed] to give him the weapon. She went home to watch their child, and her husband went up to the farm" (94); "He [Ben-Gurion] handed over most of the money to a woman who was also a party member, in exchange for which she cooked his dinners" (102). Segev's book often seems to adhere to a tradition of narrating Israeli history in which women are depicted as artists, martyrs, or grieving mothers, with the exception of Israel's only female prime minister, Golda Meir. Too often, the contributions of women who participated in the development of the State of Israel and its institutions—the "state at any cost"—have been buried in archives or remain family stories. Only recently has this participation begun to slowly appear in the literature. And it is about time: the year A State at Any Cost was published in Israel marks...

“PRE-Postmodern”

For some years now, an opposition has been drawn, not only among Israeli academics but among politicians and journalists as well, between Jewish nationalist or Zionist thought and the kind of thinking that is called “postmodern.” The argument is that a Zionist cannot be a postmodernist and vice versa, the two being incompatible. It appears that this opposition originated with an identification made between “post-Zionist” historical revisionism (of the kind associated with Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and Tom Segev) and postmodernist methods, assumptions, and claims. In some cases, the identification was made by the “new historians” themselves. While there is considerable bad blood between post-Zionist scholars and those, inside and outside the academy, who defend one or another version of the Zionist narrative, it needs to be demonstrated that postmodernism has nothing to do with their adversarial relations. The effort of this article is to show that, even before postmodernism was heard of, nationalist thinkers such as Rabbi A. I. H. Kook (1865 – 1935), Rabbi M. A. Amiel (1883 – 1946), Rabbi Abraham Hazan (1920 – 2003), and Professor André Neher (1914 – 1988) mounted Zionist arguments of a sort that we now regard as poststructuralist or postmodern.

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Shlomo Sand's &lt;em&gt;The Invention of the Jewish People&lt;/em&gt; and the End of the New History

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People and the End of the New History Derek J. Penslar (bio) Israel’s “New History” has itself become history. What in the late 1980s and 1990s appeared to be shocking revelations about Israeli policy in 1948 have become anodyne. In Israeli academia, many of the New Historians’ arguments have become mainstream, as they have been debated, examined, and found to be by and large accurate. What is more, the New Historians’ findings now spur little controversy in Israeli society as a whole. Some Israelis outside of academia have developed a more critical approach to their country’s past, but many more have responded to the nearly constant Israeli-Arab strife of the past decade by forming a jaundiced view of the country’s historical record and justifying Israeli aggression and brutality as unfortunate but necessary measures in an endless war against an unappeasable foe. Thus recent revisionist accounts of the 1967 war have received far less press and been far less controversial than their predecessors on 1948 and 1956. So what, Israelis may ask, if, as Tom Segev’s massive tome on 1967 argues, Israel hankered for war in order to pull the country out of the funk induced by the 1966 recession?1 Assuming, as many Israeli Jews do, that the Arab foe is implacable, it does not matter to them if Israel was the aggressor in this or any other circumstance, as the only alternative to aggression is destruction. (The most prominent of the New Historians, Benny Morris, has himself come to espouse this view.) The decline of the New History is part of a general crisis of historical consciousness in contemporary Israel. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Israelis took umbrage at the New Historians’ criticisms of their country’s behaviour in 1948 because they felt an intimate connection with the state and a need to defend its virtue. By the noughts of the twenty first century, however, Israel had completed a longstanding process of transformation into a highly [End Page 156] individualistic consumer society, and with the exception of the radical right, it had lost the sense participating in a heroic political venture. Israelis are increasingly alienated from their own history, seeing a chasm between their world and that of the first generations of the state. In the midst of this historical anomie, however, lies one certainty. Ongoing conflict with the Palestinians and hostile global public opinion encourage retreat into the panic room of Jewish peoplehood. The State of Israel, which its founders hoped would be fundamentally different from the diaspora, is now seen as its extension—no less threatened, no less unjustly maligned. Thus it is no surprise that in our own day the most notorious critique of Israel generated by one of its own intellectuals does not offer, as did New Historians like Benny Morris or Avi Shlaim, an archive-based, carefully documented counter-narrative of Israel’s political and military history, but rather a polemical attack against the very concept of Jewish peoplehood. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People became a cause celèbre almost immediately upon its publication four years ago. The book’s arguments are by now well known—that the Jews of the Common Era were mostly descended from converts or converts themselves, and therefore not tied in any genetic or historical manner to Eretz-Israel; that Zionist scholarship has cleverly obscured this fact by acknowledging the extent of Jewish conversion over time but inventing a Jewish demographic as well as spiritual origin in the land of Israel; that Jews comprise a religious civilization, not a people, because they lack a secular literary culture; that the State of Israel anxiously seeks to compensate for its own lack of ethnic integrity by employing its scientists to obsessively search for unique Jewish genetic material over the ages; and that the bankruptcy of Zionist assertions of Jewish peoplehood is apparent from the Jewish state’s reliance upon religious law, symbols and concepts in its government and public culture. I would like to evaluate these arguments and speculate why this book has enjoyed such popularity, in Israel and...

Overcoming the Trauma of the Holocaust

Overcoming the Trauma of the Holocaust

Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany

Francis Nicosia begins his excellent book on a controversial note. Whereas previous works have tended to focus on the incompatible world views of largely liberal Jews seeking absorption and of largely illiberal Germans denying them equality, his book is intent on examining a rather more complicated connection, namely that between völkisch German nationalism and völkisch Jewish ideology. Nicosia's theme is not new. As early as 1970 George Mosse commented on the ‘influence of the volkish idea on German Jewry’. Later, Jehuda Reinharz wrote seminal pieces on the Zionist response to German antisemitism. More recently, Dina Porat and Tom Segev have examined Palestinian-Zionist policy towards the Third Reich. Even so, many of these works became involved either in quarrels about German-Jewish ‘self-deception’ or in disputes about the validity of Zionist historiography. Nicosia's work, by contrast, is indifferent to these earlier confrontations, and seeks to address the predicament of German Zionism in an old-fashioned, empathetic way.

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (review)

Reviewed by: 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East Doron Shultziner 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. 673 pp. $35.00. The "Six Day War," as Israel coined it in 1967, constituted a major transformative event in the history of Israel and the Middle East at large. Tom Segev's book about this war provides an up-to-date historical account of the Israeli domestic setting before the war, the political dynamics leading to and through the war, and the new realities and dilemmas following the war. The book makes important contributions to the history of the war, but these contributions are somewhat handicapped by three main problems. First, the book spans almost six hundred pages, excluding footnotes. The writing is journalistic in style, relying heavily upon direct quotes, which often makes the book feel like a very long newspaper article. The first third of the book provides exhaustingly long, mundane, and redundant details of ordinary life in 1966, drawn from letters and diaries, which is likely to deter some readers. Second, Segev makes far-reaching inferences from selected letters and newspaper articles, arguing that Israelis sank into what he describes as depression, solemn mood, bereavement, distress, sense of helplessness, and similar [End Page 199] cognitive attributes. These generalizations often seem overstated and exaggerated in order to justify the incorporation of the first part of the book. Most of the social problems that Segev notes had been constant characteristics of Israeli politics and society since independence. Segev explains that on top of these, Israel also experienced special problems from 1966 until the war, such as an economic recession (following years of prosperity), and the relatively high emigration rate from Israel, but he fails to demonstrate that these factors fed into the general national mood of depression and distress that he reconstructs. Third and more important, even if one does accept that a widespread psychological depression was building up among the Israeli public in the weeks prior to the war, Segev still does not demonstrate a causal mechanism between these factors and the natural panic that hit the Israeli public after Nasser's threats suddenly turned into action. Segev simply reiterates that "[i]t was not Nasser's threats that had brought this [panic] about—or, at least, not only his threats—but the quicksand of depression that pulled so many people down for so many months" (p. 286). But it remains unclear exactly how and why this prior national depression (if it existed) was a necessary condition for the war. By way of counterfactual argument, it is simply hard to envision that Israelis would have reacted differently even if all the known problems that Segev mentions were absent. Unfortunately, Segev does not differentiate between sentiments pertaining to these larger social factors and the mass panic that ensued after Nasser's moves. Indeed, these factors are largely forgotten when the book begins discussing the political dynamics that led to war following the Samoa operation (Chapter 3) and especially the border escalation with Syria (Chapter 4). It is here that Segev makes a greater contribution by providing updated records of Israeli government meetings that were not previously published. These include secret communications with King Hussein and Palestinian leaders; power and prestige struggles between Israeli Defense Force generals and Government Ministers, especially with PM Levi Eshkol; and complicated relations with the Johnson administration and the anticipation for a green light from the U.S. to initiate the preemptive strike on Egypt. Segev extensively surveyed primary resources and uncovered important documents that provide new details of the background calculations and especially the emotions running in the hearts and minds (and often egos) of the Israeli protagonists. The book also makes a contribution to understanding Israeli political psychology. The public panic and fear of a second Holocaust following Nasser's moves reveal a deep-seated cognitive map among many Jewish Israelis who are highly suspicious of the intentions of their Arab neighbors. [End Page 200] Segev also details the irrational reactions to Nasser's moves. Many Israelis yearned to replace uncharismatic PM...

Tom Segev,1967—Israel, War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, and, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez,Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War

Tom Segev,<i>1967—Israel, War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East</i>, and, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez,<i>Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War</i>

Israeli Policy towards the Occupied Palestinian Territories: The Economic Dimension, 1967-2007

This article focuses on economic dimension of Israeli policy towards Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. The article argues that since 1967, both before and after Oslo process, Israeli policy was directed at preventing Two, i.e. division of land into two states and two economic (and political) sovereign entities, while also negating One, i.e. establishment of a single political and economic entity. Although Israeli policy repudiated both Two and One, it changed character and formulations from time to time. Thus, Israeli policies will be examined with all their twists, turns, and reversals, discussing their repercussions on Israel and especially on Palestinian economy. INTRODUCTION: THE DILEMMA OF THE OCCUPATION to me if I do, and woe to me if I don't. - Former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, quoting Talmud to Israeli Defense Force generals in 1967 Many Israelis, including those who shaped country's policies after June 1967 War, did not realize that Israel would continue to rule West Bank of Jordan River for so many years. At first, declarations and private meetings indicated that it was probably temporary, partly since there were serious doubts about Israel's ability to hold and continue to rule newly occupied Territories.1 A clear message came from leading global powers against future annexation of Territories and there was also a major discrepancy between Israel's desire to expand its sovereign territory and international law. However, Israeli policy-makers, among them Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, had other doubts arising not from country's political ability to expand geographically, but from implications of such a decision. In a recent account of 1967, Tom Segev wrote: Once Eshkol shared his thoughts with IDF generals, there was no doubt as to what he wanted: A large country empty of Arabs. But not for first time he relayed feeling that Israel was a victim of various forces and historic processes beyond its control. Thus he used Talmudic expression: Woe to me if I do, woe to me if I don't ... The effect of continuing conquest on Israel as a democratic, Jewish state disturbed Eshkol more than it did Moshe Dayan; this was only real difference between them. All rest were ego and politics.2 The far-reaching consequences of integrating Territories into Israel were well-understood by some leaders. Annexing Territories and erasing pre-war economic and political borders - the Green - meant forming one geo-political unit. Forming one unit could bring about integration of Palestinians into Israeli polity and generate a new political reality. Conversely, preserving border and not annexing Territories could lead to establishment of two political and economic units between Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. The controversy between integration and separation, between erasing Green Line and preserving it, between One and Two, has haunted discussions from very beginning.3 Understanding continued tension between integration and separation is an integral part of any analysis of years since 1967. In this article I will focus on economic dimensions of Israeli policy which refrained from deciding one way or other, avoiding a decision on Two entities or One. I will argue that since 1967 Israeli policy has been directed at preventing Two, i.e. division of land into two states and two economic (and political) sovereign entities while also negating One, i.e. establishment of a single political and economic entity. Although since 1967 Israeli policy has repudiated both Two and One, it changed character and formulations from time to time. Thus, I will examine Israeli policies in depth, with all their twists, turns, and reversals, discussing their repercussions on Israel and especially on Palestinian economy. …

Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security &amp; Foreign Policy (review)

Reviewed by: Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security & Foreign Policy Shlomo Aronson Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security & Foreign Policy, by Zeev Maoz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. $ 45.00. This book was written by a "strategist," as described by the author, as against the "linear" approach based on documents, which, in his view, is common to historians. The main thesis of this book is that Israel's foreign and security policies were, and still are, caught between two poles: that of unwarranted paranoia, and that of unjustified arrogance. The criticisms of both policies are not new, regardless of their various forms and contents, and some were born with Israel itself. Yet the author did not feel obliged to add to previous critical opinions—many among them politically inspired—any new data, anchored in serious archival research, done in the newly opened American, British, French, German, Israeli, and former Soviet primary sources (I acknowledge that primary Arab sources are usually unavailable). Moreover, the author declares at the opening of his book that historical research is not necessary in order to offer "strategic," i.e., value-bound, advice or a "critical" analysis of Israel's problems, even though he engages in most parts of the book in historical issues, already much debated, pertaining to the same problems. As a "strategist," the author feels free to find evidence for his "critical" analysis wherever he can find it, though he avoids archival research, but his information on Israel's foreign policy decisions and Israel's wars was is based upon secondary sources. Several among them, such as Avi Shlaim, Motti Golani, Tom Segev, and others, are criticized for ideological bias or missing facts, but they are clear-cut "histories" used by a "strategist" for his own purposes. Several other works used by him, including their methodology, were published more than three decades ago, when "perceptions" attributed to Israel's policy makers substituted for the missing primary sources, or indeed seemed to IR experts to be an analytical tool replacing them almost altogether. The necessary givens of Israel's domestic political system, based as it is on multi-party coalitions, elected by a proportional ballot, were mentioned, but hardly connected to the strategic-political developments around it; we learn about them by using both newly opened and older primary sources. The analyses of Arab sources—all of them secondary—would have benefited from either the knowledge of Arabic or some expertise in using authorized translations. The use of the late Malcolm Kerr's Arab Cold War (Kerr was a distinguished "Arabist," who had declared President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and the ensuing peace process between Israel and Egypt "a betrayal of the Arab cause" and Israel as the factor which prevented the Arabs from pursuing normal national development) may be a tribute to Professor Kerr's memory, after his death at [End Page 199] Hezbollah's hand while serving as President of the American University in Beirut, simply because he was an American. The author's contempt for "historical" research leads him, to begin with, to several, surprising observations, which are "historical" all the same, among them that "Israel is by far [reviewer's italics added] the most conflict-prone state in modern history." One need only think of Prussia-Germany, starting with Frederick the Great, all the way through the Danish, the Austrian, and the French Wars, to WWI and WWII, with the millions who died as a result of them, or of revolutionary France, the Napoleonic wars, or France's colonial wars before and after its defeat in 1870, in order to criticize our "critical" author for simple, and yet arrogant ignorance, which might have been avoided if his historical—comparative—knowledge had been acquired first. Yet his treatment of Israel's wars is in many cases totally, or almost totally, the result of his pre-conceived "criticism." A major theme in the author's discussion of Israel's security policy is its nuclear program, which was David Ben-Gurion's main aim thanks to Israel's alliance with France in the Sinai Campaign—a central explanation...

Eichmann on the Air: Radio and the Making of an Historic Trial

In his book Justice in Jerusalem, Gideon Hausner provides a detailed account on the prosecution and sentencing of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli court tribunal in 1961. As chie...

A Worthless Flock with No Shepherd: Bechor Shalom Shitrit's Representation-based Approach to Political Crisis Resolution

A Worthless Flock with No Shepherd: Bechor Shalom Shitrit's Representation-based Approach to Political Crisis Resolution

Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 243–246 TOM SEGEV. Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. Pp. 167. Keter Books published this slender volume in Hebrew in 2001 as part of a series of works designed to present fresh, unconventional assessments of ‘‘the Israelis.’’ Its original title, Ha-tsiyonim ha-h .adashim (The New Zionists ), seems to refer with equal measures of irony to the two main types of Israeli Jews it depicts: 1) those who are discarding collectivist Zionist ideals and adopting individualistic, American-style values and 2) those who are trying to take Israel down a ‘‘road from Zionism to Judaism’’ (p. 97). The title and subtitle of the English version obviously focus on only the first of these categories. But whatever may have been the reason for this alteration, it is not a misleading one. Segev devotes much more attention to forces promoting the de-Zionization of Israel than those seeking its re-Judaization. Unfortunately, he sheds very little new light on either of these tendencies. Segev sets his account of the rise of ‘‘the new Zionists’’ against the backdrop of a hastily outlined sketch of the old Zionism. Among other things, he stresses how incapable this movement was of achieving its ultimate goal of rescuing masses of European Jews from anti-Semitic persecution. ‘‘The tragedy of Zionism in a nutshell,’’ he writes, with characteristic exaggeration, ‘‘is that while it may have foreseen the catastrophe , the solution it offered was irrelevant’’ (p. 31). Yet this dismissal of the Zionist movement does not preclude an acknowledgment of its considerable achievements. ‘‘In one hundred years of activity’’ it has ‘‘led a part of the Jewish people to partial independence in a part of the Land of Israel, and for all the downside, it’s a success story’’ (p. 12). This success would have been more complete, Segev seems to believe, if Theodor Herzl’s ‘‘somewhat dim, pale, moderate, and compromising, really not at all patriotic’’ outlook had not been eclipsed for too long a time by a very different ‘‘local breed of Zionism’’ (p. 17). Perhaps because he originally wrote this book for his fellow countrymen, who could be presumed to be well informed on the subject, Segev spends little time describing this inferior local Zionism. He refers to it mainly in the course of recounting Israel’s recent steps away from it. He gladly notes, for instance , how Israelis’ sense of their own distinctive personal identities has expanded in recent years. ‘‘They stopped being first person plural. They were I’s’’ (p. 69). 244 JQR 94:1 (2004) It is above all ‘‘the Americanization of Israel’’ that ‘‘has weakened social solidarity and, in contrast with original Israeli Zionism, has made the individual the centerpoint of life’’ (p. 49). That this should have happened requires hardly any explanation. In the twentieth century, everyone in the world tried, ‘‘to one degree or another, to emulate’’ the ‘‘American experiment’’ (p. 52). In his rather commonplace retelling of the Israeli chapter of this universal story, Segev betrays absolutely no regrets. He gladly takes the presence of a larger-than-life statue of Elvis Presley at a diner on the road to Jerusalem as a sign of the victory of America over ‘‘the Bolshevism of the early Ben-Gurion years’’ (p. 49). His portrait of today’s Herzliya, with its glass-and-steel office buildings and stores with ‘‘names like Tophouse, Columbus, and Beverly Hills,’’ concludes with a rapturous description of a large delicatessen specializing in pork-based cold cuts. ‘‘Huge crowds of Israelis shop there; on Saturdays every parking place in the vicinity is taken. Herzl would have been thrilled. Actually , if Herzl lived in Israel today, he too might be attacked as a postZionist . In many ways, in fact, Herzl was the first post-Zionist’’ (p. 15). This is surely not the heroic Herzl recently reconstructed by Yoram Hazony, and although Segev probably knows it, he does not bother to mention it. He pegs Hazony instead as...

B2. Victor Gilinsky, ““Israel's Bomb,”” Letter to the Editor N.Y.Review of Books) concerning Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb, New York, 13 May 2004.

Gilinsky's letter to the editor was published in the New York Review of Books on 4 May. Notes have been deleted for space. Walid Khalidi wrote the following introduction for JPS:When Avner Cohen, an Israeli living in the United States, published his Israel and the Bomb in 1998, a Ha'Aretz reviewer described the book as a ““bombshell,”” while the Israeli historian Tom Segev declared that it would necessitate ““the rewriting of Israeli history.”” Although the book was based on documents mostly in the public domain in the United States, Israeli intelligence was so angered by Cohen's defiance of its taboo on matters nuclear that it subjected him to fifty hours of interrogation upon his first visit to Israel following publication. Cohen's book has now come out in a paperback edition, reviewed by Israeli writer Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books (15 January 2004). This review elicited, in its turn, the letter published here by Victor Gilinsky, formerly both a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and head of the physical sciences department at Rand Corporation.Those who have not read Cohen's book may want to know what it contained, despite the significant omissions pointed out in Gilinsky's letter. Basically, Israel and the Bomb tells how, with the exception of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Israel was able to win the acquiescence of successive U.S. administrations to Israel's introduction into the Middle East of nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which according to recent estimates now comprise up to two hundred nuclear bombs and thirty-five tactical thermonuclear devices with the long-range missiles to deliver them.Already by 1960 (thanks to French help, in retaliation for Egyptian president Gamal `Abd al-Nasser's support of the Algerian revolution) Israel was well on its way to nuclear weapons capacity. Christian Herter, secretary of state in the outgoing Eisenhower administration, briefed John Kennedy on the subject on his first day in office in 1961. An interesting tidbit in Cohen's book is that Israel's nuclear program in the 1960s was common knowledge in Israeli and American Jewish business circles——Israeli businessmen having been solicited for funds for the Dimona reactor, with American Jews led by Abe Feinberg, a Democratic activist (chairman of the America Bank and Trust Co. and a trustee of the Weizmann Institute of Science), lending a hand. For the first two years after Kennedy was inaugurated, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion successfully stalled increasingly persistent U.S. demands that Dimona undergo twice yearly inspections——then deemed the minimum for meaningful inspection. By May 1963, Kennedy's patience was running out, and he sent Ben-Gurion a sharp letter warning that U.S. commitment to Israel would be ““seriously jeopardized”” unless Israel was more forthcoming on the nuclear issue. One month later, Ben-Gurion resigned his premiership, handing it over to the more pliant Levi Eshkol whom he despised and expected to give in to Kennedy. In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. Ironically, it was Kennedy who authorized the first U.S. delivery of heavy weapons——the Hawk missiles——to Israel, and these ended up deployed around the Dimona reactor.Thenceforth, it was plain sailing for Israel——Lyndon Johnson not being too particular about nuclear (especially Israeli) proliferation. Presently the regulating doctrine in U.S.-Israeli nuclear discourse became that of ““ambiguity”” or ““opacity,”” whereby Israel declares it will not be the ““first”” to introduce nuclear WMDs in the Middle East, even though both Tel Aviv and Washington know only too well that it has already done so. In return for this Israeli stance, the United States provides Israel with massive infusions of conventional weapons to ““dissuade”” it from resorting to its nuclear arsenal——an idyllic case for Israel of having its cake and eating it too. This charade continues to this day, even as the United States went into Iraq to prevent its acquisition of WMDs and is breathing fire and brimstone against Iran's nuclear intentions——themselves a response to Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (review)

Reviewed by: Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel Ronald Charles Epstein Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel, by Tom Segev. Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002. 168 pp. $23.00. Elvis in Jerusalem, the American title of Ha’aretz columnist Tom Segev’s 2001 book Hatzionim Hahadashim, is a cruel come-on. This Israeli “new historian” deals with “post-Zionism,” not “rock ‘n roll.” This book is of special interest to American readers because Segev argues that U.S. influence has turned Israel into a more open and democratic society. This is an unusual position for any foreigner to assume—ask any citizen of France or Canada. If a resident of a developed country were to advocate the Americanization of his (or her) nation, he (or she) might be viewed as the sociopolitical equivalent of Ben Affleck exchanging his Hollywood wardrobe for ex-Congressman James Traficant’s retro outfits. If Snoop Dogg did the same thing, his choice might be viewed as an improvement. Does that mean that Israeli adoption of American ways is the equivalent of a hard-core rapper’s switch to denim leisure suits? Perhaps—too many people view the Jewish state as the “gangsta” of the Middle East. Segev is not one of them. He is not an anti-Zionist who views Israel as a geopolitical mistake, but a post-Zionist who exposes the Jewish state’s errors. According to him, one of its greatest faults is its packaging of idealistic hagiography as history. He asserts that “real” history began when “. . . the government began declassifying documents from the state’s early years.” For Israelis, this historical legacy is a double-edged sword. These “new historians” opened a Pandora’s Box of revelations that challenged popular assumptions about Israel, creating controversies and sowing divisions between Zionists and post-Zionists. However, the fact that the archives were opened is the mark of a democratic society. Segev himself writes that “Israel is relatively liberal in this regard—there are countries that don’t open their archives at all.” He does not give any examples—is he being subtle, or merely negligent? [End Page 182] Traditional Zionists may view him as worse than negligent, concerning the most sensitive subject of all—the Holocaust. He charges that “. . . the Jewish independent administration in Palestine . . . preferred to prevent the arrival of the elderly and ill. In a few cases it even sent people back to Nazi Germany because they had become a burden on the community in Palestine.” This is a very grave charge against Israel’s founding fathers, which suggests a willingness to skim off the cream of German Jewry and discard the rest. Segev may have promised Zionism without propaganda, but instead offers “Judaism without embellishment.” This last phrase is not just a figure of speech—it is also the title of a notorious 1960s antisemitic book by Soviet professor Trofim Kichko. Segev is no apostate, but some readers may be too furious to distinguish between the two. The author surreptitiously discredits traditional Orthodoxy. He divides this book into sections, centered around the statues of four individuals: Theodor Herzl, Elvis Presley, fallen Israeli soldier Gadi Manella, and Sephardic spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Of this group, only the rabbi is still alive. The fact that he is honored in this manner suggests a personality cult, alienating intelligent readers. The author realizes that post-Zionism is a non-starter in the age of the suicide bomber. Unfortunately, his realism is that of the outlaw who realizes that he is surrounded by the sheriff’s posse. Jews face cultural boycotts, purges of Israeli academics, and violent outbursts that recall frightening historical events; the smart post-Zionist does not state that “Commentators have reverted to condemning criticism from the outside world, particularly from Europe, as anti-Israeli, even as disguised anti-Semitism.” These days, perhaps the only option available to post-Zionists is to explain their ideology to foreigners. If that is the case, then Segev is probably the movement’s most qualified advocate. He may not be able to convert American readers, but he deals with this...

Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK

Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK

A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (review)

Reviewed by: A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians James Renton A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians, by Sahar Huneidi, with a foreword by Walid Khalidi. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001. 348 pp. $65.00. Over the past decade and a half a new generation of Palestinian and Israeli historians have published a substantial body of revisionist scholarship concerning the emergence and perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although these scholars do not constitute a monolithic or uniform entity in either methodology or conclusions, there exists among them a common will to deconstruct what are seen as the myths that have underpinned and shaped both Zionist collective memory and historical writing. Intrinsically linked with this project is the creation of a space in which the previously marginalized voice of Palestinian narratives is given special focus, an attempt to subvert the power effects of Zionist discourse. One of the key bones of contention that emerged out of these analyses, with a particular focus on the foundation of the Jewish state and the birth of the Palestinian Refugee problem, was the role played by Great Britain, which had occupied the country during the First World War and had officially been the mandatory [End Page 197] power since 1923. Scholars such as Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé have argued that although Great Britain was predominantly perceived by Zionists to have been an obstructive force in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, it played an important function in its establishment as well as preventing the possibility of Palestinian national independence. More recently historians such as Tom Segev have begun to re-examine the development of the conflict under the British mandate, arguing its importance in fostering the significant growth of the Zionist project in Palestine that made a Jewish state possible. Sahar Huneidi’s work, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians, is an addition to this welcome trend of placing the crucial inter-war period under fresh scrutiny. Huneidi’s study concerns the record of Herbert Samuel as the first High Commissioner of the British civil administration in Palestine from 1920 to 1925. Although a Jew and staunch pro-Zionist, Samuel was traditionally seen by Zionists as having been a disappointment. His tenure as Commissioner was thought to have been marked by a policy of overt appeasement towards the Arab population in the face of violent opposition, particularly after the Jaffa riots of 1921. As a result, according to this view, Samuel pursued a minimalist interpretation of the British Government’s commitment to create a Jewish national home, as declared in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In contrast to this interpretation, Bernard Wasserstein’s classic work1 on the period presented a much more complex and nuanced picture of Samuel’s administration. Wasserstein’s work highlighted the fundamental tension between Samuel’s British Imperialism, Liberalism, and Zionism, his belief in both the need and possibility of obtaining the acceptance of the Palestinian Arab population for the British mandate, and his unremitting commitment to creating the Jewish national home. Samuel continually attempted to incorporate Palestinians within the administration, claiming to treat the Arab population as though there was no Zionist policy, contending that the latter was misunderstood and did not threaten their rights or position in the country. At the same time, he proceded to put into practice a passive policy that allowed for and fostered the growth of a Jewish national home, reflecting the gradualist Zionism that had prompted his desire to serve in Palestine, a cause to which he remained faithful throughout his administration. However, in her analysis Huneidi goes much further and places Samuel’s Zionism at the very center of his policies as High Commissioner, reducing his attempts to placate Palestinian Arabs as mere lip service to the dual obligations of the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. Such efforts are referred to as either meaningless rhetoric or tactical [End Page 198] manoeuvres that had no relation to his objectives or policies. In answer to her central question—was Samuel an impartial administrator?—Huneidi puts forward an emphatic no, asserting that he clearly and consistently betrayed obligations to Palestinian...

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate: Tom Segev

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate: Tom Segev

Book Reviews

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev. Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, edited by Philip Mattar. Israel's First Fifty Years, edited by Robert O. Freedman. The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon 1967–1976, by Farid El‐Khazen. China and the Middle East: The Quest for Influence, edited by P. R. Kumaraswamy. The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine, by Ray Takeyh. The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, by Robin Wright. Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics, by L. Carl Brown. Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia– 1937 to 1940, by Thomas C. Barger. Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition, by Joshua Teitelbaum.