Saturday, July 21, 2018

Israel Has Moved Hardcover – February 28, 2013 by Diana Pinto (Harvard University Press)



Pinto's book begins provocatively. She claims that "Israel has abandoned its Arab neighborhood," and, what's more, is "in the process of forfeiting its more than 2,000-year-old anchoring...within the grand Western symbiosis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem....Israel today thinks of itself as living in its own cyberspace...inside its own utopia," while "its postmodern future is being built on scientific innovation, and yet the country seems to be rooting itself in an increasingly ancient, even archaic, past whose tenets are ever more religiously and ethnically exclusive" (p. 1). And it concludes provocatively as well. Israelis no longer think much about a two-state solution because it seems unattainable. Instead, "Today's Israel, dashing toward the future with an incredible creative energy but also with a self-satisfaction bordering on hubris will not be able to endure in its current setting" (p. 190).

Though well-written and full of interesting observations, Israel Has Moved basically repeats two conventional tropes. First is the idea of the "bubble," claiming that Israelis, especially the well-off in and around Tel Aviv, are living in a fantasy world, oblivious to the harm they are causing others and the danger they are in. Second is the claim that Israelis don't think very much about the two-state solution, a view encapsulated in the headline of Ethan Bronner's New York Times article of May 25, "What Mideast Crisis? Israelis Have Moved On."

I'll mention three problems with the book. First, Pinto very confidentally makes bold claims about Israel (as in "Israel has abandoned its Arab neighborhood") and Israelis without any evidence to back them up, beyond her own impressions, gathered who knows how? Of course some of the claims are figurative (Pinto knows Israel hasn't moved physically) but they still represent very bold claims about Israelis' state of mind based on--what? Second, though it is surely true that many Israelis ignore the danger they're in on a day-to-day basis, it's difficult to claim that this is a general phenomenon, given the constant coverage of Israel's problems, domestic and foreign, in the media, literature, the arts, publications by think tanks, etc., etc. Third, Pinto is guilty of what she accuses Israelis of--ignoring the outside world. If one had visited the U.S. during much of the Cold War, when there was a real threat of nuclear annhilation, when the Civil Rights movement was at its peak, when the U.S. was staying in Vietnam despite protests against its being there, what would one have found most people--not all, by any means--thinking about on a daily basis? Earning a living, family relationships, shopping, and so on. That didn't mean people didn't care about the threat of nuclear war, or civil rights, or Vietnam--it just meant that people don't spend their time worrying about big issues they can't do anything about. It would have helped a lot had Pinto treated Israelis like regular people, responding to big national and international conflicts and dangers much the way others do. Or if Israelis are uniquely oblivious to their circumstances, it would have been helpful to provide some evidence that this is so. Pinto has provided some thought-provoking rhetoric, but no one should mistake this for a book from which one can learn much about Israel.

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