Israel Book Review: A Israel and Palestine: in My Promised Land.... Th...

Israel Book Review: A Israel and Palestine: in My Promised Land.... Th...: A Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations by Avi Shlaimis published by Verso,  My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy ...

A Israel and Palestine: in My Promised Land.... The Triumph and Tragedy of Zion

A Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations by Avi Shlaimis published by Verso,
 My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit published by Scribe,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé, Oneworld Publications 

The moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism: Ilan Pappé and Ari Shavit view Israel from different vantage points, but they agree the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians can't be sustained



The separation wall on the West Bank that divides Palestinians and Israelis. Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty

Zionism achieved its greatest triumph with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Zionist idea and its principal political progeny are the subject of deeply divergent interpretations, not least inside the Jewish state itself. No other aspect of Zionism, however, is more controversial than its attitude towards the indigenous population of the land of its dreams. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the state of Israel, famously said that it is by its treatment of the Palestinians that his country will be judged. Yet, when judged by this criterion, Zionism is not just an unqualified failure but a tragedy of historic proportions. Zionism did achieve its central goal but at a terrible price: the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians – what the Arabs call the Nakba, the catastrophe.

The authors of these two books are both Israelis, but they approach their subject from radically different ideological vantage points. Ilan Pappé is a scholar and a pro-Palestinian political activist. He is one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living in exile, having moved from the University of Haifa to the University of Exeter. He is also one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy.

Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all its citizens.

Ari Shavit is a member of the editorial board of the liberal Zionist paper Ha'aretz, and one of Israel's most influential columnists. He is an eloquent exponent of liberal Zionism, but he also exemplifies its ambiguities, inner contradictions and moral myopia.

Pappé has published a large number of books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most controversial is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today in politics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.

History is usually written by the victors, and the Middle East is no exception. Pappé himself is a leading member of the group of "new" or revisionist Israeli historians that emerged in the late 1980s and included Simha Flapan, Benny Morris and myself. In our different ways we all challenged the dominant narrative, the narrative of the victors. Using recently released documents we debunked many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of Israel and the 1948 war. Intentionally or otherwise, our work thus lent credibility to the Palestinian historical narrative about the war for Palestine.

In his new book, Pappé deals with recent developments in the historiographical sphere, especially on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The big question has always been: did they leave of their own accord or were they forced out? Israeli governments have always denied that they drove the Palestinians out. In his ground-breaking 1989 book on the subject – The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 – Morris presented incontrovertible evidence of Israeli involvement in creating the refugee problem. Evidence subsequently gathered by Morris points to an even higher degree of Israeli responsibility. But following the outbreak of the second intifada, Morris veered to the right and radically changed his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He concluded it was a mistake not to expel all the Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948. Pappé argues that the new documents prove that the expulsion of 730,000 Palestinians was more premeditated, systematic and extensive than Morris had ever acknowledged. In short, he claims that when war provided an opportunity, the Zionist idea was translated into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The role of the Holocaust in empowering the struggle for Jewish statehood is another sensitive issue in the debate about the past. Pappé denounces any political manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of moral blackmail designed to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. His sharpest comments are reserved for Israeli officials who have perfected such manipulation as a diplomatic tool in their struggle against the Palestinians. His deeper concern, however, is to understand the impact and significance of the Holocaust memory in constructing and marketing the idea of Israel. Israelis have harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this self-image, he argues, has prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in a more realistic light, and impeded a reasonable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The argument that what happened to the Palestinians was just a small injustice to rectify a greater injustice (the destruction of European Jewry) is rejected with some vehemence. The only hope Pappé sees of making peace with the Arabs is for Israelis to free themselves of their Shoah mentality.



Ari Shavit is one of Israel's most influential columnists. Photograph: Sharon Bareket/Courtesy of Spiegel

Shavit's position is more conflicted and therefore more opaque. He is a passionate but not uncritical Zionist. His book is also not a history of Israel but a series of stories of individuals and significant events that shed a great deal of new light on the making of the Jewish state. Among the cast of characters on whom Shavit draws to construct his picture of Israel are Holocaust survivors; a youth leader who helped to turn Masada into a symbol and shrine of post-Holocaust Zionism; an enigmatic engineer who was instrumental in building the atomic bomb in Dimona to defend the Jews against the threat of a second genocide; the zealous religious Zionists who spearheaded the settler movement; leftwing academics in Jerusalem; and pedlars of sex and drugs in Tel Aviv nightclubs. But, above all, this is a personal story. As the author explains in the introduction: "This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider narrative of his nation."

The most vivid illustration of Shavit's attitude to this wider narrative is his account of the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of 50,000-70,000 of the Arab residents of Lydda and the massacre of 70 civilians in a small mosque in July 1948. The grisly story has been told many times before, but Shavit's reconstruction is riveting. His original contribution consists of interviews with the Jewish brigade commander and the military governor in which they speak frankly about their strategic and moral dilemmas. Shavit refers to this episode as "our black box" in which lies "the dark secret of Zionism". But he goes on to say that the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of its inhabitants "were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state". "Lydda," he asserts, "is an integral and essential part of our story." Like Morris, Shavit evidently thinks that the end justifies the means; I don't. The massacre of innocent civilians can never be justified under any circumstances. It is a heinous war crime and it must be denounced as such even if the perpetrators are Jews and, yes, even if they are Holocaust survivors.

Both authors engage with the essence of Zionism as well as with its more problematic parts. While Pappé represents the cutting edge of radical anti-Zionism, Shavit exposes the dissonance, the double standards and intellectual incoherence of liberal Zionism. Shavit, by his own acronym, is a Wasp – a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace. His liberal credentials were burnished by serving as chair of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in the early 1990s. In addition, he enjoys the great advantage of writing like an angel. The smoothness and beauty of his prose is all the more remarkable given that English is his second language. But the brilliance of Shavit's style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism.

On one thing the two authors agree: the current status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is unsustainable. Both of them see the writing on the wall. The occupation, the relentless expansion of illegal settlements, the construction of the monstrous "security barrier" on the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, the flagrant violations of international law, the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights and the rampant racism – all are slowly but surely turning Israel into an international pariah. No sane Israeli relishes the prospect of living in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime. But few Israelis are ready for a truly honest historical reckoning with the people they have wronged and oppressed and whose land they continue to colonise. To blame the victims for their own misfortunes, as the people in power habitually do, is both disingenuous and despicable. This is no way for any nation to behave, especially one with such an acute historical memory of the bitter taste of victimhood.

The Al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and its Consequences. Barak Mendelsohn. Oxford University Press. 2016.

The Al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and its Consequences. Barak Mendelsohn. Oxford University Press. 2016.


In the decade after 9/11, al-Qaeda expanded its operations to several new arenas, whilst at the same time its central command experienced the severe impact of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and global counter-terrorism efforts. In The Al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and its Consequences, Barak Mendelsohn explains the connection between al-Qaeda’s post-9/11 setbacks and its decision to pursue an expansionary strategy of franchise building. Joe Devanny commends Mendelsohn’s theoretical approach, which helps readers to understand the decision-making process of terrorist organisations contemplating expansion. 

For many people, the word ‘franchise’ conjures connotations of fast food. Shifting the franchise concept from Big Macs to Bin Laden, Barak Mendelsohn’s The Al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and its Consequences highlights the value of a theoretical approach to the question of how and why terrorist organisations decide to expand.

Whatever the organisation, decisions about whether or not to open a new franchise can have both operational and declaratory meaning. Assessing which of these is the primary motive requires an understanding of the context and a framework for analysing the role played by competing or overlapping objectives. Sometimes expansionary decisions are made from a position of strength. Other times they are a sign of weakness, a means of keeping an organisation in the news when its operational capability or sub-par performance no longer merits the headlines it needs to uphold its brand value and further burnish its reputation.

This might seem counter-intuitive, a risky reason for an organisation to decide to expand, but Mendelsohn argues that it is an accurate explanation of why al-Qaeda chose, after the 9/11 attacks, to branch out by creating franchises in several different arenas.

Mendelsohn underpins his argument with a sensibly structured, theoretical approach to help readers understand the decision-making process of terrorist organisations contemplating whether and how to expand. He distinguishes between four different modes of expansion: absorption; branching-out or franchising; unification; and the creation of an umbrella group (or ‘front’).

Created in 1988, al-Qaeda set itself apart from other jihadist groups in concentrating its attacks on the ‘far enemy’ of the United States rather than the ‘near enemy’ of governing regimes in majority-Muslim nation states – a distinction explained in Fawaz Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went Global. Al-Qaeda’s attacks targeted the US, at first overseas (e.g. the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole), and then by executing the 9/11 attacks.

Willingness to fight the ‘far enemy’ was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a jihadi group to be accepted by al-Qaeda. Mendelsohn explains that it has also usually been necessary for a group to be the dominant jihadi organisation in its sphere of operations: al-Qaeda likes to pick winners, although the situation of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria is different, where ‘al-Qaeda went to great pains to depict itself as a multiplying force rather than a competitor to the other rebel groups’. (It is also possible to see this flexibility in al-Nusra’s recent rebranding, as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and its concomitant public disavowal of its affiliation to al-Qaeda.)

Prior to 9/11, al-Qaeda had pursued different strategies for expansion: in 1998 it coordinated a broader jihadi umbrella group, the not-so-snappily-named ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’, and formally merged with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad in mid-2001 after Zawahiri’s group suffered several years of severe operational and financial setbacks. But in the years following 9/11, al-Qaeda started to adopt the franchise model, beginning with Saudi Arabia in 2003. Rather than representing a triumphal expansion following 9/11, Mendelsohn attributes al-Qaeda’s franchise turn to its organisational weakness.

9/11 successfully provoked a response from the US, but Mendelsohn argues that al-Qaeda was unprepared for the scale and intensity of that response in the form of the invasion of Afghanistan: ‘Nearly decimated by the US attack, al-Qaeda encouraged its affiliates and existing cells outside Afghanistan to carry out attacks against Muslim regimes and Western targets, while al-Qaeda was preoccupied with its survival in Pakistan’s tribal areas.’

Image Credit: The US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, after the 7 August 1998 al-Qaeda bombing (DS Records, Wikipedia Public Domain).

Whilst the invasion dealt a severe blow to al-Qaeda’s central command, Mendelsohn contends persuasively that the next US-led invasion (Iraq, 2003) had precisely the opposite effect: it ‘redirected US operational and intelligence assets from Afghanistan to Iraq, providing al-Qaeda and the Taliban breathing space (that would later result in a comeback) and ammunition for its propaganda campaign.’

In the meantime, al-Qaeda established franchises in Saudi Arabia (2003), Iraq (2004), Algeria (2006), Yemen (2009), Somalia (circa 2010), Syria (2012) and the Indian sub-continent (2014). Mendelsohn explores each as a case study, as well as several striking instances of al-Qaeda failing to create a franchise (e.g. in Palestine to rival Hamas).

Taken together, Mendelsohn’s case studies produce a nuanced narrative, explaining why al-Qaeda made rushed and counter-productive decisions (Iraq), and also slower, more cautious but still ultimately counter-productive choices (Somalia). Only its Yemen franchise, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), appears a qualified success, built on al-Qaeda’s existing strengths in terms of loyal supporters and fighters already in place, advantages which most other candidate areas for expansion did not possess.

Where circumstances were less auspicious than in Yemen, al-Qaeda’s branching-out strategy has been fraught with risk, has reduced organisational cohesion and has led to challenges to the authority of the central al-Qaeda leadership. Mendelsohn notes that in:

going the franchising route, giving affiliates the benefits of a brand name while preserving their organizational structure, al-Qaeda hastened its own hollowing-out. The group expanded geographically, but its resources did not increase correspondingly to give it sufficient leverage over its affiliates.

Most infamously, with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, but also with franchise leaders like Ahmed Abdi Godane in Somalia, its affiliates have embarrassed al-Qaeda by operating independently of the central leadership, flouting its calls for restraint in perpetrating increasingly brutal attacks or internal purges.

The Al-Qaeda Franchise is a well-conceived and evenly-balanced book, but the construction of such a cohesive whole entails difficult decisions about what to leave out or to cover superficially. The book would, for example, have benefited from a more detailed exploration of al-Qaeda’s activities in East Africa and ties to local jihadi groups there, as well as a more nuanced picture than the relatively short section on Somalia in Chapter Seven. A more extended treatment of al-Qaeda’s operational history in East Africa in the 1990s and 2000s would have been particularly valuable in contextualising the 2010 decision to formally adopt al-Shabab as an al-Qaeda franchise.

Mendelsohn offers a bleak assessment of al-Qaeda’s current status and likely future prospects:

Al-Qaeda’s position is weaker than anytime since it became a household name worldwide, synonymous with non-state terrorism. It is headed by an uninspiring leader, its strategy is in shambles, the United States routinely targets its commanders from the air, and ISIS – its main competitor – is much more exciting and successful.

Mendelsohn sees no realistic prospect for al-Qaeda to improve its position under the leadership of al-Zawahiri, who took over after Bin Laden was killed in a US Special Forces operation in May 2011. Irrespective of the leadership question, al-Qaeda’s future is indelibly associated with that of its erstwhile affiliate, Islamic State. Mendelsohn is right to argue that ‘the future cohesiveness of al-Qaeda has become intricately linked to the fortune of ISIS. The more established the “caliphate” becomes and the more territories and people it brings under its control, the greater the internal pressure al-Qaeda’s branches experience.’


Mendelsohn is less persuasive in arguing that Islamic State’s capture and holding onto territory is a model that al-Qaeda must emulate in order to survive:

to rejuvenate, al-Qaeda must show that it can do more than kill. Governance is particularly important because ISIS has created new standards for success, while regional instability has created ungoverned spaces where jihadi groups could demonstrate their ability to rule.

This is arguably the wrong lesson to draw from Islamic State’s eclipse of al-Qaeda as the world’s most fashionable jihadist group. Mendelsohn might have afforded himself more space to compare al-Qaeda’s and Islamic State’s approach to attacking Europe and the US. He notes that ‘al-Qaeda emphasizes fighting the “far enemy” and postponing governance, while ISIS has been all too willing to fight the “near enemy” while simultaneously introducing an Islamic state.’ Islamic State has, of course, perpetrated attacks outside of Iraq and Syria, and other acts of terrorism have been carried out in Europe and the US by individuals claiming (with varying degrees of credibility, but clearly in line with the group’s aspiration) to act in the name of Islamic State.


Islamic State may have come to prominence as it expanded its territory, but it is unlikely to wane significantly so long as it can continue to perpetrate and inspire similar attacks. This is surely an easier model for al-Qaeda to emulate, and it is much more consistent with its past practice. In this light, a more obvious proxy for measuring a future al-Qaeda resurgence would be the number of terrorist attacks credibly attributed to it, or reportedly inspired by it, rather than the quantity of territory it can capture and administer.


The Al-Qaeda Franchise is a relatively short book with an attractive cover. The publisher may hope for a broad, general readership. It should be stressed that this is very definitely an academic rather than a trade book, with an even balance of theoretical and empirical chapters; its prose reflects this (Mendelsohn uses the verb ‘to problematize’ perhaps more often than one should). This isn’t a criticism of the book – any more than it is a criticism of a giraffe to say that it is not an elephant – but merely a guide to prospective readers. This is a sound text, aimed primarily at the undergraduate market, very clearly structured and well-signposted, with summary conclusions closing each chapter. It will have broader appeal to those who are more generally interested in the subject matter, so long as they are prepared to engage with it on its own terms.

Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman,Princeton University Press

Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman,Princeton University Press

Is the American Jewish pro-Israel Consensus Dying?Professor Dov Waxman argues that American Jewish disagreement about Israel 'reflects broader shifts in the American Jewish community' in his new book, 'Trouble in the Tribe.'

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2015.Bloomberg

International affairs professor Dov Waxman thinks otherwise. In his new book, "Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel," Waxman argues that American Jewish disagreement about and discontent with Israel “is not just a reaction to events six thousand miles away in Israel and Palestine,” but rather “reflects broader shifts in the American Jewish community.” No short-term political changes, whether in America or Israel, will resolve what Waxman sees as a central communal struggle in American Judaism. Waxman argues that this fight stems from fundamental shifts in demography and culture, such that the American Jewish pro-Israel consensus is likely dying.

Waxman starts by showing how fragile that consensus was. He shows how the American Jewish pro-Israel establishment was built after the Six-Day War, some two decades after Israel’s founding. Historically, however, American Jews rancorously debated Zionism. The Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform pronounced, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and in 1950, the head of the American Jewish Committee told Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, “American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion... that they are in exile.” Isaiah “Si” Kenen, the founder of the “American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs,” changed its name to AIPAC to avoid offending non-Zionists. Moreover, Ben-Gurion happily accepted American Jews’ money while discouraging them from further interest in Israeli politics or society. Before 1967, relatively few Jews even visited Israel.

David Ben-Gurion at his home in Sde Boker in 1968. Happily accepted American Jews' money while discouraging them from further interest in Israeli politics or society.Fritz Cohen / GPO

The 1967 war, especially given the rise of identity politics, inspired Jewish pride in the victorious Israeli state, as well as fear for its future. For upwardly mobile young Jews, the virile, powerful Israel may have oddly but potently symbolized their own newfound success in American society. As the Israeli army was shattering the Syrian tank line, American Jews were shattering glass ceilings in law firms and universities, increasingly entering the upper reaches of American society. That may be fuzzy thinking, but indeed, American Jews’ attitudes to Israel were primarily fuzzy and symbolic, an expression of longings and myths rather than a concrete engagement in Israeli culture or politics.

Not only the Jews, but also American politics, were shifting to be more hospitable to pro-Israel institutions. The Six-Day War, Waxman argues, inspired a realignment of American foreign policy: While President Eisenhower had courted Arab states and been largely unreceptive to Jewish appeals, increased Russian investment in Egypt and Syria made that strategy implausible and seemed to require a counter-balance. So President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made Israel a key American client-state in the Cold War.

In the 1980s, Reagan treated AIPAC as the central representative body of American Jews, because he wanted to sideline other, domestically liberal Jewish groups like the National Community Relations Advisory Council (now called the Jewish Council for Public Affairs). Meanwhile, changes in campaign-finance laws allowed the rise of pro-Israel political action committees, organizations for bundling together large amount of political money (confusingly, AIPAC is not itself a PAC). When we talk about American Jews standing lockstep behind Israel and getting what they want, we are talking about a period of twenty-five years, from the mid-1980s until the second intifada — that is, roughly the length of a generation.

That fact is no coincidence. The American college students who donned machine guns in the Israel Defense Forces or picked oranges on a kibbutz after the ‘67 war then crafted a powerful, unified pro-Israel establishment. In turn, many of their children are busy dismantling it.

Younger American Jews are simply more cosmopolitan. They frequently come from intermarried families, a background that is obviously inhospitable to particularistic nationalism. Perhaps as importantly, their universities teach them to value diversity, which has become a central value in higher education over the last several decades. Most importantly, Jews — excluding the Orthodox, who buck all these trends — are simply growing more secular, and as Waxman argues, “the more secular Jews are, the less attached they are to Israel.” This is increasingly so as Israel grows more religious and nationalistic. While American Jews are learning to use gender-neutral pronouns and marching in Black Lives Matter protests, Israeli schoolchildren are sent to visit the right-wing-narrative-promoting City of David excavations, and racist attitudes toward Arabs are on the rise.

Young Jews arrive in Israel for a Birthright trip. Courtesy of Birthright

Younger American Jews have also grown more critical of Israel in part because they know it better than their parents. Since 1999, more than 400,000 of them have flown to Israel on Birthright trips paid for by American Jewish mega-donors and the Israeli government. Birthright responded to the infamous 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which showed increasing rates of intermarriage and disaffection; visiting Israel was supposed to guarantee that American Jews would stay Jewish. But those trips routinely feature in the spate of Israel-disillusionment stories that are now a regular part of American Jewish stories.

Birthright encourages participants to see themselves as having personal, “real” knowledge of Israel, weakening American Jewish institutions’ hold over the Israel discourse. The elite youth, some of whom who learn Hebrew in day schools and spend gap years in Israel, can then independently read Israeli newspapers and watch Israeli television. Rather than a mythical, abstract Israel, they encounter a messy country with a half-century-old occupation of Palestinian territory, periodic military clashes with a beleaguered Gaza, and a rising hyper-nationalist right wing. Paradoxically, American Jews’ attempt to “engage” their children with Israel is producing the base for liberal and left-wing groups like Open Hillel, J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace.

A pro-BDS student attending the first Open Hillel conference in Harvard, Oct., 2014. Illustrative.Gili Getz

To be sure, Waxman does not exclusively concentrate on the question of age. In a plodding, 20-page typology of the American Jewish right, the center-right, the center-left, and (wait for it...) the left, he shows how even older American Jews hold a range of views. Indeed, much of the book covers ground well known to anyone who reads Jewish newspapers. Waxman densely quotes and impressively cites, but he rarely says much that is original.

Nonetheless, the book usefully dismantles the idea that American Jews’ troubles with Israel are ephemeral or passing. It does not matter, for instance, how well (or poorly) the Netanyahu government handles Conservative and Reform complaints about the Western Wall. Many younger American Jews have no interest in praying anywhere.

Older American Jews wanted their children to have a tensionless, comfortably assimilated American lifestyle, and they conceived of Israel as the convenient guarantor of their children’s Jewishness, a safe haven in case of catastrophe. They got what they wanted. Young Jews are fully American, and they are “engaged” with Israel. Unfortunately, as Waxman illustrates, the two societies are headed in radically different directions, and for American Jews, the juxtaposition is only getting more jarring.

Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman,Princeton University Press

Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman,Princeton University Press

Is the American Jewish pro-Israel Consensus Dying?Professor Dov Waxman argues that American Jewish disagreement about Israel 'reflects broader shifts in the American Jewish community' in his new book, 'Trouble in the Tribe.'

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2015.Bloomberg

International affairs professor Dov Waxman thinks otherwise. In his new book, "Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel," Waxman argues that American Jewish disagreement about and discontent with Israel “is not just a reaction to events six thousand miles away in Israel and Palestine,” but rather “reflects broader shifts in the American Jewish community.” No short-term political changes, whether in America or Israel, will resolve what Waxman sees as a central communal struggle in American Judaism. Waxman argues that this fight stems from fundamental shifts in demography and culture, such that the American Jewish pro-Israel consensus is likely dying.

Waxman starts by showing how fragile that consensus was. He shows how the American Jewish pro-Israel establishment was built after the Six-Day War, some two decades after Israel’s founding. Historically, however, American Jews rancorously debated Zionism. The Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform pronounced, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and in 1950, the head of the American Jewish Committee told Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, “American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion... that they are in exile.” Isaiah “Si” Kenen, the founder of the “American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs,” changed its name to AIPAC to avoid offending non-Zionists. Moreover, Ben-Gurion happily accepted American Jews’ money while discouraging them from further interest in Israeli politics or society. Before 1967, relatively few Jews even visited Israel.

David Ben-Gurion at his home in Sde Boker in 1968. Happily accepted American Jews' money while discouraging them from further interest in Israeli politics or society.Fritz Cohen / GPO

The 1967 war, especially given the rise of identity politics, inspired Jewish pride in the victorious Israeli state, as well as fear for its future. For upwardly mobile young Jews, the virile, powerful Israel may have oddly but potently symbolized their own newfound success in American society. As the Israeli army was shattering the Syrian tank line, American Jews were shattering glass ceilings in law firms and universities, increasingly entering the upper reaches of American society. That may be fuzzy thinking, but indeed, American Jews’ attitudes to Israel were primarily fuzzy and symbolic, an expression of longings and myths rather than a concrete engagement in Israeli culture or politics.

Not only the Jews, but also American politics, were shifting to be more hospitable to pro-Israel institutions. The Six-Day War, Waxman argues, inspired a realignment of American foreign policy: While President Eisenhower had courted Arab states and been largely unreceptive to Jewish appeals, increased Russian investment in Egypt and Syria made that strategy implausible and seemed to require a counter-balance. So President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made Israel a key American client-state in the Cold War.

In the 1980s, Reagan treated AIPAC as the central representative body of American Jews, because he wanted to sideline other, domestically liberal Jewish groups like the National Community Relations Advisory Council (now called the Jewish Council for Public Affairs). Meanwhile, changes in campaign-finance laws allowed the rise of pro-Israel political action committees, organizations for bundling together large amount of political money (confusingly, AIPAC is not itself a PAC). When we talk about American Jews standing lockstep behind Israel and getting what they want, we are talking about a period of twenty-five years, from the mid-1980s until the second intifada — that is, roughly the length of a generation.

That fact is no coincidence. The American college students who donned machine guns in the Israel Defense Forces or picked oranges on a kibbutz after the ‘67 war then crafted a powerful, unified pro-Israel establishment. In turn, many of their children are busy dismantling it.

Younger American Jews are simply more cosmopolitan. They frequently come from intermarried families, a background that is obviously inhospitable to particularistic nationalism. Perhaps as importantly, their universities teach them to value diversity, which has become a central value in higher education over the last several decades. Most importantly, Jews — excluding the Orthodox, who buck all these trends — are simply growing more secular, and as Waxman argues, “the more secular Jews are, the less attached they are to Israel.” This is increasingly so as Israel grows more religious and nationalistic. While American Jews are learning to use gender-neutral pronouns and marching in Black Lives Matter protests, Israeli schoolchildren are sent to visit the right-wing-narrative-promoting City of David excavations, and racist attitudes toward Arabs are on the rise.

Young Jews arrive in Israel for a Birthright trip. Courtesy of Birthright

Younger American Jews have also grown more critical of Israel in part because they know it better than their parents. Since 1999, more than 400,000 of them have flown to Israel on Birthright trips paid for by American Jewish mega-donors and the Israeli government. Birthright responded to the infamous 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which showed increasing rates of intermarriage and disaffection; visiting Israel was supposed to guarantee that American Jews would stay Jewish. But those trips routinely feature in the spate of Israel-disillusionment stories that are now a regular part of American Jewish stories.

Birthright encourages participants to see themselves as having personal, “real” knowledge of Israel, weakening American Jewish institutions’ hold over the Israel discourse. The elite youth, some of whom who learn Hebrew in day schools and spend gap years in Israel, can then independently read Israeli newspapers and watch Israeli television. Rather than a mythical, abstract Israel, they encounter a messy country with a half-century-old occupation of Palestinian territory, periodic military clashes with a beleaguered Gaza, and a rising hyper-nationalist right wing. Paradoxically, American Jews’ attempt to “engage” their children with Israel is producing the base for liberal and left-wing groups like Open Hillel, J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace.

A pro-BDS student attending the first Open Hillel conference in Harvard, Oct., 2014. Illustrative.Gili Getz

To be sure, Waxman does not exclusively concentrate on the question of age. In a plodding, 20-page typology of the American Jewish right, the center-right, the center-left, and (wait for it...) the left, he shows how even older American Jews hold a range of views. Indeed, much of the book covers ground well known to anyone who reads Jewish newspapers. Waxman densely quotes and impressively cites, but he rarely says much that is original.

Nonetheless, the book usefully dismantles the idea that American Jews’ troubles with Israel are ephemeral or passing. It does not matter, for instance, how well (or poorly) the Netanyahu government handles Conservative and Reform complaints about the Western Wall. Many younger American Jews have no interest in praying anywhere.

Older American Jews wanted their children to have a tensionless, comfortably assimilated American lifestyle, and they conceived of Israel as the convenient guarantor of their children’s Jewishness, a safe haven in case of catastrophe. They got what they wanted. Young Jews are fully American, and they are “engaged” with Israel. Unfortunately, as Waxman illustrates, the two societies are headed in radically different directions, and for American Jews, the juxtaposition is only getting more jarring.

What is Modern Israel? by Yakov M. Rabkin Jul 15, 2016,Paperback,$18.11 Pluto Press

What is Modern Israel? by Yakov M. Rabkin  Jul 15, 2016,Paperback,$18.11 Pluto Press

Those who believe that Zionism is a sequel of Judaism may do well to read this book: those who believe that Israel is a Jewish state must read this book

In A Threat from Within, ( 2006, Zed Books)Professor Yakov M. Rabkin  examined the reasons why Zionism was initially rejected not only by rabbis but also by the vast majority of Jews. In the What is Modern Israel? he goes further. He spells out the origins of Zionism, including religious ones, to look at the evolution of Israeli society and its relations with world Jewry, as well as at the roles played by Jews from Russia. The Russian dimension explains many aspects of contemporary Israel that remain otherwise puzzling.

What exactly is "the Russian dimension"?

While Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was meeting kings and ministers, Jews from the shtetls in the Russian Empire formed the backbone of Zionist settlement in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently they entrenched themselves in positions of leadership. Even though the Soviet Union did not allow emigration from the 1920s on, over 60 per cent of the members of Israeli parliament in the 1960s were of Russian origin. There has never been a prime minister in Israel who was either not born in the Russian Empire, or whose parents were.

Moreover, a million Russian-speaking Jews settled in Israel in the late 20th century. They are mostly estranged from Judaism; they consider themselves of "the Jewish nationality" and are therefore quite unabashed about ethnic nationalism and the use of force to impose it. Most of them vote for the right and the extreme right parties. Their success in penetrating the highest echelons of power and moving Israeli politics to the nationalist right has been impressive. The recent appointment of Moldova-born Avigdor Lieberman as minister of defence illustrates this accomplishment quite convincingly.

 Christian Zionism 

The role of Christian Zionism did not end with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 or the unilateral proclamation of independence by David Ben-Gurion in 1948. Certain interpretations of Paul's Epistle to the Romans argued for the "ingathering [of] the Hebrews" into Palestine as early as the 17th century. This affected the public imagination in the English-speaking countries, particularly those with anti-Semitic prejudices who wanted to get rid of local Jews. This mind-set is clearly reflected in the Balfour Declaration.

This Christian motivation for the Restoration of the Jews in the Promised Land lent a powerful practical impulse to a group of assimilated Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in search of a collective "solution of the Jewish question." The Judaic hope of Return had been traditionally characterized by an entirely different sensibility and ultimate goal. Jewish tradition holds that this return must be a part of a messianic project rather than a political and a military enterprise. In fact, there was little room for Jewish tradition in the Zionist scheme, which not only originated among Protestants, but was sustained by individuals of Jewish origin who were mostly atheists or agnostics.

A recent Pew poll shows that 82 per cent of white Protestants in the United States believe that "Israel was given to the Jewish people by God." Only 40 per cent of Jews do. This is why Christian Zionists constitute a much more reliable source of political and financial support for Israel than Jews. Recent Israeli governments and settlers in the territories, which Israel conquered in 1967, have developed close ties with major organizations such as Christians United for Israel. Its leader, Pastor John Hagee, claims that his organization represents 50 million people. This is nearly four times more than the entire Jewish population of the world, which is estimated at 14 million. And one should also take into account the millions of Christian Zionists in Latin America, South Korea, Japan,South Africa, China, Russia, Poland,Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

 Israel's claim that it represents all of the world's Jews? The distinctions between Judaism and Zionism?

The Jews of Israel constitute about one half of the world's Jewish population. But Israeli leaders have consistently claimed that they speak on behalf of all Jews since, in their view, the Zionist state somehow belongs to Jews around the world, even though these Jews exhibit no desire to move to Israel and are citizens of their respective countries. The claim to represent all Jews is politically empty, but is an effective tool to blur fundamental differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Jews and the state of Israel. This claim therefore holds Jews hostage to Israel's political and military behaviour.

It is quite clear that anti-Jewish violence in Europe and elsewhere is fuelled by the conflict in Israel/Palestine. For the Zionists, this is a win-win situation because this violence breeds insecurity and destabilizes Jewish communities. This, in turn, results in emigration, some of it in the direction of Israel, a country that needs Jews in order to ensure a non-Palestinian majority there. Currently, Palestinians constitute a majority on the land controlled by Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Peace in Israel/Palestine, given the steady rightward trend of the Israeli electorate?

Outside pressure. This is the consensus of Israeli peace activists. The Israeli government also understands this and is behind unprecedented legislation in several Western countries forbidding boycotts of Israel and its exports. Western governments permit Israel to act with impunity, but this policy suffers from a serious democratic deficit: citizens of most countries in Europe and North America view Israel very critically and consider it a threat to world peace. It is this grassroots pressure that may help Israel decide to embrace decency and peace.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Doubleday

Hardly anyone used it, but it provides us with moral comfort—and white heroes.


The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label—this side up with care—it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to 31 North Fifth Street. The person to whom the box had been shipped, James Miller McKim, was waiting there to receive it. When he opened it, out scrambled a man named Henry Brown: five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the first person in United States history to liberate himself from slavery by, as he later wrote, “getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”

McKim, a white abolitionist with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had by then been working for the Underground Railroad for more than a decade, and he was awed by the courage and drama of Brown’s escape, and of others like it. In an article he wrote some years later, he predicted that future generations of Americans would come to share his emotions:


Now deemed unworthy of the notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists, these acts of sublime heroism, of lofty self-sacrifice, of patient martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will yet become the themes of the popular literature of this nation, and will excite the admiration, the reverence and the indignation of the generations yet to come.

It did not take long for McKim’s prediction to come true. The Underground Railroad entered our collective imagination in the eighteen-forties, and it has since been a mainstay of both national history and local lore. But in the past decade or so it has surged into “the popular literature of this nation”—and the popular everything else, too. This year alone has seen the publication of two major Railroad novels, including Oprah’s first book-club selection in more than a year, Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” (Doubleday). On TV, the WGN America network aired the first season of “Underground,” which follows the fates of a group of slaves, known as the Macon Seven, who flee a Georgia plantation.

Nonfiction writers, too, have lately returned to the subject. In 2004, the Yale historian David Blight edited “Passages to Freedom,” an anthology of essays on the Underground Railroad. The following year, Fergus Bordewich published “Bound for Canaan,” the first national history of the Railroad in more than a century. And last year, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia, published “Gateway to Freedom,” about the Railroad’s operations in New York City. Between 1869 and 2002, there were two adult biographies of Harriet Tubman, the Railroad’s most famous “conductor”; more than four times as many have been published since then, together with a growing number of books about her for children and young adults—five in the nineteen-seventies, six in the nineteen-eighties, twenty-one in the nineteen-nineties, and more than thirty since the turn of this century. An HBO bio-pic about Tubman is in development, and earlier this year the U.S. Treasury announced that, beginning in the next decade, she will appear on the twenty-dollar bill.

Other public and private entities have likewise taken up the cause. Since 1998, the National Park Service has been working to create a Network to Freedom, a system of federally designated, locally managed Underground Railroad sites around the country. The first national museum dedicated to the subject, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in Cincinnati in 2004, and next March the Park Service will inaugurate its first Railroad-related national monument: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park, in Cambridge, Maryland, near Tubman’s birthplace.

This outpouring of interest suggests that we have collectively caught on to what McKim long ago understood: that the stories of those who fled slavery and those who helped them to freedom are among the most moving in our nation’s history. It was McKim’s hope that these stories would excite our admiration, reverence, and indignation, and they do. But, as more recent work has made clear, they should also incite our curiosity and skepticism: about how the Underground Railroad really worked, why stories about it so consistently work on us, and what they teach us—or spare us from learning—about ourselves and our nation.

No one knows who coined the term. Some ascribe it to a thwarted slave owner, others to a runaway slave. It first appeared in print in an abolitionist newspaper in 1839, at the end of a decade when railways had come to symbolize prosperity and progress, and three thousand miles of actual track had been laid across the nation. Frederick Douglass used the term in his 1845 autobiography—where he laments that indiscreet abolitionists are turning it into “an upperground railroad”—and Harriet Beecher Stowe used it in 1852, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” when one slave-catcher cautions another against delaying pursuit of a fugitive “till the gal’s been carried on the underground line.” By the following year, the Times was reporting that the term had “come into very general use to designate the organized arrangements made in various sections of the country, to aid fugitives from slavery.”

Seldom has our national lexicon acquired a phrase so appealing to the imagination, or so open to misinterpretation. In his new novel, Colson Whitehead exploits both those qualities by doing knowingly what nearly every young child first learning our history does naïvely: taking the term “Underground Railroad” literally. His protagonist, a teen-age girl named Cora, flees the Georgia plantation where she was born into slavery and heads north on a series of rickety subterranean trains—one- or two-car numbers, driven by actual conductors and reached via caves or through trapdoors in buildings owned by sympathetic whites.

Whitehead has a taste for fantastical infrastructure, first revealed via the psychically active elevators in his brilliant début novel, “The Intuitionist.” Those elevators were the perfect device—mingling symbolic resonance with Marvel Comics glee, absolved of improbability by the particularity and force of Whitehead’s imagination. In “The Underground Railroad,” he more or less reverses his earlier trick. Rather than imbue a manufactured box with mystery, he turns our most evocative national metaphor into a mechanical contraption. It is a clever choice, reminding us that a metaphor never got anyone to freedom. Among his other concerns in this book, Whitehead wants to know what does: how the Underground Railroad really worked, and at what cost, and for whom.

Those questions were first asked in an extensive and systematic way by an Ohio State University historian named Wilbur Siebert. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when many parents of the Civil War dead were still alive to grieve for their children and former slaves still outnumbered freeborn African-Americans, Siebert began contacting surviving abolitionists or their kin and asking them to describe their efforts to aid fugitives from slavery. The resulting history, published in 1898 and entitled “The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom,” depicted a network of more than three thousand anti-slavery activists, most of them white, who helped ferry largely anonymous runaways to freedom. That history has been diffusing through the culture ever since, gathering additional details along the way and profoundly shaping our image of the Underground Railroad. In that image, a clandestine organization of abolitionists—many of them Quaker or otherwise motivated by religious ideals—used covert methods (tunnels, trapdoors, concealed passageways) and secret signals (lanterns set in windows, quilts hung on laundry lines) to help convey enslaved African-Americans to freedom.

That story, like so many that we tell about our nation’s past, has a tricky relationship to the truth: not quite wrong, but simplified; not quite a myth, but mythologized. For one thing, far from being centrally organized, the Underground Railroad was what we might today call an emergent system: it arose through the largely unrelated actions of individuals and small groups, many of whom were oblivious of one another’s existence. What’s more, even the most active abolitionists spent only a tiny fraction of their time on surreptitious adventures with packing crates and the like; typically, they carried out crucial but banal tasks like fund-raising, education, and legal assistance. And while fugitives did often need to conceal themselves en route to freedom, most of their hiding places were mundane and catch-as-catch-can—haylofts and spare bedrooms and swamps and caves, not bespoke hidey-holes built by underground engineers. As for the notion that passengers on the Underground Railroad communicated with one another by means of quilts: that idea originated, without any evident basis, in the eighties (the nineteen-eighties).

The putative role of textiles and architecture in antebellum activism doesn’t matter that much, but other distortions in Siebert’s story do. No one disputes that white abolitionists were active in the Underground Railroad, but later scholars argued that Siebert had exaggerated both their numbers and their importance, while downplaying or ignoring the role played by African-Americans. Among religious sects, for example, the Quakers generally receive the most credit for resisting slavery, with secondary acknowledgment going to the wave of evangelical Christianity that spread across the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, in the movement known as the Second Great Awakening. Yet scant mainstream attention goes to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in 1816, in direct response to American racism and the institution of slavery, and played at least as crucial a role in raising money, aiding fugitives, and helping former slaves who had found their way to freedom make a new life.

This lopsided awareness holds not only for institutions but for individuals. Many people know of William Lloyd Garrison, one of the country’s leading white anti-slavery activists, while almost no one knows about the black abolitionist William Still—one of the most effective operators and most important historians of the Underground Railroad, whose book about it, published a quarter of a century before Siebert’s, was based on detailed notes he kept while helping six hundred and forty-nine fugitives onward toward freedom. Likewise, more people know the name of Levi Coffin, a white Midwestern Quaker, than that of Louis Napoleon, a freeborn black abolitionist, even though both risked their lives to help thousands of fugitives to safety.

This allocation of credit is inversely proportional to the risk that white and black anti-slavery activists faced. It took courage almost everywhere in antebellum America to actively oppose slavery, and some white abolitionists paid a price. A few were killed; some died in prison; others, facing arrest or worse, fled to Canada. But these were the exceptions. Most whites faced only fines and the opprobrium of some in their community, while those who lived in anti-slavery strongholds, as many did, went about their business with near-impunity.

Black abolitionists, by contrast, always put life and liberty on the line. If caught, free blacks faced the possibility of being illegally sold into slavery, while fugitives turned agents faced potential reënslavement, torture, and murder. Harriet Tubman is rightly famous for how boldly she faced those risks: first when she fled slavery herself; then during the roughly twenty return trips she made to the South to help bring others to freedom; and, finally, during the war, when she accompanied Union forces into the Carolinas, where they disrupted supply lines and, under her direction, liberated some seven hundred and fifty slaves. By then, slaveholders in her home state of Maryland were clamoring for her capture, dead or alive, and, in the words of her first biographer, publicly debating “the different cruel devices by which she would be tortured and put to death.”

Tubman, of course, is the one black conductor on the Underground Railroad whose fame is commensurate with her work. She is also the only black conductor most people know—though William Still’s reputation may be on the rise, courtesy of his small but compelling role in the uneven but often excellent TV series “Underground.” Still, while white abolitionists remain statistically overrepresented in stories about the Underground Railroad, the recent set suggests that, more than a century after Siebert, the balance may finally be shifting. “Who built it?” one of Whitehead’s fugitives asks, on first reaching a station on the Underground Railroad and peering down a tunnel where iron tracks disappear into darkness. “Who builds anything in this country?” the agent answers.

The fugitive-slave narrative presents a curious paradox. In terms of content, it describes one of the darkest eras of American history; in terms of form, it is, in a way, the perfect American story. Its plot is the central one of Western literature: a hero goes on a journey. Its protagonist obeys the dictates of her conscience instead of the dictates of the state, thereby satisfying our national appetite for righteous outlaws. And its narrative arc bends in our preferred direction: from Tubman to Katniss Everdeen, from “The Shawshank Redemption” to Cheryl Strayed, we adore stories of individuals who fight their way to actual or psychological freedom.

Although such heroes make their journeys under duress, fugitive-slave stories are also a form of travel narrative. And, while in real life fugitives ran in every imaginable direction and were often caught or forced to turn back or died en route, in our stories the direction of travel is more nearly uniform. On the Underground Railroad, geography is plot: the South represents iniquity and bondage, the North enlightenment and freedom.

Whitehead, a canny storyteller, makes use of this narrative tradition in “The Underground Railroad,” while also considerably complicating it. Freedom is illusory in his novel, and iniquity unbound by latitude, but he knows that the story of slavery is fundamentally the story of America, and he uses Cora’s journey to observe our nation, from an upper-crust mixed-race family in Boston to a farming community in Indiana. Some of the finest parts of the novel involve the effort to make sense of a new place—whether through the tiny attic window from which Cora studies the cultural, political, and natural landscape of a North Carolina town or on the long, strange wagon ride she takes through a Tennessee landscape devastated by wildfire. As in “Lolita,” the moral crisis is so consuming that it’s easy to miss the journey—but the journey is the essence of this novel.

Indeed, the most effective liberties that Whitehead takes are not with Cora’s mode of transport but with the terrain through which she travels. Station by station, he builds a physical landscape out of the chronology of African-American history. Cora’s northward journey first lands her in South Carolina, where what initially seems to be a policy of paternalistic benevolence toward blacks turns out to mask a series of disturbing medical interventions: a kind of early, statewide Tuskegee experiment. From there, she moves on to North Carolina, which has implemented, to genocidal ends, the ideals of the American Colonization Society—a real organization and social movement, evoked but unmentioned by Whitehead, that sought to end slavery and return all blacks to Africa, not least to make real the enduring fantasy of a white America. In Whitehead’s fictional version, new race laws forbid blacks to enter the state, and those caught within its borders are tortured, murdered, and left hanging on trees as a warning to others. North Carolina, one character observes, has succeeded in abolishing slavery. “On the contrary,” another corrects him. “We abolished niggers.”

As all this suggests, Cora is trying to escape from much more than a plantation. In the temporally elastic landscape through which she flees, it is slavery, as much as the slave-catcher, that is pursuing her, and anyone alive in today’s America knows that she will never entirely outrun it. Indeed, at times Cora seems to be already traversing a future bereft of full freedom—the landscape blighted by proto-Jim Crow, her journey a private Great Migration. Behind the slave-catcher we can almost glimpse the police officer misusing lethal force; behind the manacles on the walls of a train depot, the bars of mass incarceration.

Still, for all the liberties that “The Underground Railroad” takes with the past, they have nothing on those in “Underground Airlines” (Mulholland Books), by the novelist and playwright Ben Winters, best known for his 2009 parody, “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.” (As it happens, Colson Whitehead’s previous book was about zombies.) Winters posits an alternate history in which the Civil War was averted and slavery, never abolished on the national level, persists into our own era, in what are called the Hard Four: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, which together hold three million people in bondage. The protagonist, known mostly as Victor, is a fugitive slave who, after being apprehended, makes a Faustian bargain: in exchange for keeping his freedom, he agrees to work for the U.S. Marshals Service to catch other runaways.

When “Underground Airlines” opens, Victor is working his two-hundred-and-tenth case, trying to track down a mysterious fugitive, nicknamed Jackdaw, who has run away from an Alabama textile plantation. To find him, Victor must infiltrate the national anti-slavery network known as the Underground Airlines—not a literal entity here but “the root of a grand, extended metaphor,” now updated: airport security, gate agents, connecting flights, baggage handlers. “The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers,” Winters writes. “It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier’s check or blow job.”

Winters, also the author of several mysteries, is working partly in the genre of the hardboiled detective novel; Victor is a classic noir antihero, whose self-interested amorality cloaks a troubled heart. But “Underground Airlines” also belongs to the tradition of counterfactual secession stories, à la Harry Turtledove’s “The Guns of the South” and MacKinlay Kantor’s “If the South Had Won the Civil War.” Such alternate histories run the risk of piling on textbooky details in the interest of proving the credibility of events that never happened, but Winters gets the balance right. He is careful to set up a plausible case for how history shifted off-kilter (Lincoln is assassinated before an armed conflict can break out; Congress, in grief and chaos, jams through a compromise that preserves both the Union and slavery), and he paints a convincing picture of what fugitive life would look like in our own era. (Homeland Security has a division called Internal Border and Regulation, the slave-catchers’ most fearsome tools are technological, and plantation overseers are supplied by private contractors.) But he is ultimately far more interested in the political, intellectual, and moral compromises that people make in order to live in the presence of, and sustain the existence of, legal bondage. Like Whitehead, though in a strikingly different way, he wants to get us to see the past in the present—the innumerable ways that we still live in a world made by slavery.

The first train ride that Cora takes in “The Underground Railroad” begins just below a farmhouse in rural Georgia and ends underneath a tavern in South Carolina. Whitehead, who knows his history, sneaks a little asterisk into the escape. “It was commonly held,” he writes, “that the underground railroad did not operate this far south.”

It did not. Contrary to a claim made by Siebert and subsequently reflected in myriad popular representations, the Underground Railroad didn’t lead “from the Southern states to Canada.” In fact, with very rare exceptions, it didn’t operate below the Mason-Dixon Line at all. Aside from a few outposts in border states, the Railroad was a Northern institution. As a result, for the roughly sixty per cent of America’s slaves who lived in the Deep South in 1860, it was largely unknown and entirely useless.

These are inconvenient facts for those who like to locate America’s antebellum conscience in the North. Had that region really been so principled, it wouldn’t have needed a clandestine system to convey fugitives beyond its borders to a foreign nation. Instead, while slavery itself was against the law in the North, upholding the institution of slavery was the law. As a nation, the United States regarded it as a legitimate practice, respected the right of white Southerners to own other human beings, and expressed that respect in laws that governed not half but all of the land.

This was a moral disaster for our country, and a terror for fugitive slaves. The obligation to return them to their owners was enshrined in the Constitution, then further codified in 1793, and in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—which, as Foner notes, was among the most draconian laws ever enacted in this nation. It rendered impotent any Northern ordinances designed to protect fugitives; compelled citizens to assist in capturing them; set harsh civil and criminal punishments for failing to do so; created a legal document ordering a specific fugitive to be returned to his or her master that could not be challenged in any court of law; and established a fee system whereby officials adjudicating fugitive-slave cases earned ten dollars if they decided in favor of the owner and five if they decided for the slave.

“We could see no spot, this side of the ocean, where we could be free,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his autobiography: fugitives themselves knew that they were only marginally better off in the ostensibly free state of Ohio than across the border in Kentucky, only marginally safer in Maine or Michigan or Wisconsin than in Maryland and North Carolina and Washington, D.C. Outside of scattered pockets in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and the Midwest, moral opposition to slavery was not the norm above the Mason-Dixon Line, and fugitives were not exactly welcomed with open arms. In 1858, an editorial in a Vermont newspaper demanded that “a log must be laid across the track of the underground railroad,” and went on to argue, in terms that echo today’s debates over refugees, for the immediate cessation of “the illegal introduction of colored persons in the free states” to “prevent a large yearly increase of that class of population which is hanging like a millstone around the neck of our industrial progress.” Several ostensibly free states, including Illinois and Indiana, did just that, passing laws that prohibited free blacks from settling inside their borders. On the eve of the Civil War, the mayor of New York proposed that the city secede from the Union to protect its economic relationship with the South.

We should not be surprised, then, that most people who slipped the bonds of slavery did not look north. In fact, despite its popularity today, the Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. Instead, those who fled generally headed toward Spanish Florida, Mexico, the Caribbean, Native American communities in the Southeast, free-black neighborhoods in the upper South, or Maroon communities—clandestine societies of former slaves, some fifty of which existed in the South from 1672 until the end of the Civil War. Together, such runaways likely outnumbered those who, aided by Northern abolitionists, made their way to free states or to Canada.

Moreover, most slaves who sought to be free didn’t run at all. Instead, they chose to pursue liberty through other means. Some saved up money and purchased their freedom. Others managed to earn a legal judgment in their favor—for instance, by having or claiming to have a white mother (beginning in Colonial times, slave status, like Judaism, passed down through the maternal line), or by claiming to have been manumitted. In “Slaves Without Masters,” the historian Ira Berlin quotes an irate man addressing a neighbor who had freed his slaves. “I will venture to assert,” he complained, “that a vastly greater number of slave people have passed and are passing now as your free men than you ever owned.”

The more you try to put the Underground Railroad in context, in other words, the tinier it seems. Most runaways did not head north, and most slaves who sought their liberty did not run away. And then there is the largest and most important context, the one we least like to acknowledge: from the vast, vicious, legally permitted, fiercely defended enterprise that was American slavery, almost no one ever escaped at all.

No one knows for sure how many enslaved Americans escaped with the help of the Underground Railroad. Foner estimates that, between 1830 and 1860, some thirty thousand fugitives passed through its networks to freedom. Other calculations suggest that the total number is closer to fifty thousand—or, at the highest end, twice that many.

What we do know for sure is this: in 1860, the number of people in bondage in the United States was nearly four million. By then, slavery in this country was more than two hundred years old, and although estimates are hard to come by, perhaps twice that many million African-Americans had lived their lives in chains. Most accounts of fugitive slaves do not invoke those numbers, and most Americans do not know them. The Underground Railroad is a numerator without a denominator.

The problem, then, is not the stories we tell; it’s the stories we don’t tell. In 1988, after her own story about a runaway slave, “Beloved,” won the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison described the scope of this silence. “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves,” Morrison said. “There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no three-hundred-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence, or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi.”

In the decades since Morrison spoke, all of that has only barely begun to change. We have told a few more stories, organized a few more exhibits, planned a few new museums, including one devoted to all of African-American history, opening next month on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., and the privately funded Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana, the first to be wholly dedicated to slavery. Yet, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, you still will not find, anywhere in our country, a federal monument to the millions of people whom we, as a nation, kept in bondage. To put that omission in perspective, there are more than eighty national parks and monuments and countless other federal memorials commemorating the Civil War. That war lasted four years. Slavery lasted two and a half centuries.

Until the very end of that time, most white Americans, North and South, either actively fought to maintain the institution of slavery or passively sustained and benefitted from it. Only a small fraction had the moral clarity to recognize its evils without caveat or compromise, and, before the war broke out, very few did anything to directly challenge it. Fewer still took the kind of action that later made agents of the Underground Railroad such widely admired figures. Exactly how few is hard to know, but most historians now dismiss Siebert’s original tally of three thousand as considerably exaggerated, compiled as it was from post-hoc accounts. Eric Foner, making the best of difficult data, suggests that, across the country and throughout the duration of slavery, the number of white Americans who regularly aided fugitives was in the hundreds.

Only after the fact—when it no longer required vision or courage or personal sacrifice; when the Civil War was over and the effort to distance ourselves from the moral stain of slavery had begun—did large numbers of white Americans grow interested in being part of the story of African-American liberation. That interest led to the first major renovation and expansion of our favorite piece of mythic infrastructure, a project that began with the work of Wilbur Siebert. A similar expansion is under way in our own times. Much of it is welcome: over all, the recent crop of underground stories feature more black agency, fewer white saviors, greater attentiveness not only to runaways but to what they were running from. The boom in public exhibitions and institutions honoring Railroad sites, however, in part reflects the fact that it has now become not only morally but also economically advantageous to be associated with the Underground Railroad; in contrast to even twenty years ago, significant numbers of people will pay to visit such places. A similar trend is appearing in private real estate. As the historian David Blight wondered, “Is there a realtor in the Northern or border states selling old or historic homes, largely to white people, who has not contemplated the market value of space that might have been used in the nineteenth century to hide black people who were fugitives from slavery?”

That desire to literally own part of the story of the Underground Railroad is extremely widespread and is much of what makes it so popular in the first place. In the entire history of slavery, the Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes. It is also one of the few slavery narratives that feature black Americans as heroes—which is to say, one of the few that emphasize the courage, intelligence, and humanity of enslaved African-Americans rather than their subjugation and misery. By rights, the shame of oppression should fall exclusively on the oppressor, yet one of the most insidious effects of tyranny is to shift some of that emotional burden onto the oppressed. The Underground Railroad relieves black and white Americans alike, although in very different ways, of the burden of feeling ashamed.

White Americans also feature as villains in Underground Railroad stories, of course, but often in ways that minimize over-all white responsibility. Because the stories focus on the fugitive, much of the viciousness of slavery is displaced onto the slave-catcher—an odious figure, to be sure, but ultimately an epiphenomenon of an odious system. Some recent Underground Railroad stories manage to resist that figure’s allure. Victor, the slave-catcher in “Underground Airlines,” is interesting not only because he is a former fugitive but because he is an essentially bureaucratic figure—one of many such people employed by the federal government to navigate and enforce the byzantine system by which slavery endures. But Arnold Ridgeway, the slave-catcher in Colson Whitehead’s novel, and August Pullman, in “Underground,” are Ahab-like characters, privately and demonically obsessed with tracking down specific fugitives. They both come off as irrationally committed to the hunt (and, like all supervillains, irrationally unkillable), and both risk locating the atrocities of slavery in individual pathology.

In reality, and notwithstanding the viciousness of its many enforcers, slavery was institutional. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, was personal: a scattering of private citizens, acting on conscience, and connected for the most part only as the constellations are—from a great distance, by their light. They have earned our admiration and reverence, as McKim knew they would, and we have made much of their few stories, in part for suspect reasons: because they assuage our conscience, distract us from tragedy with thrilling adventures, give us a comparatively comfortable place to rest in a profoundly uncomfortable past.

Yet there are also deep and honorable reasons that we are drawn to these stories: they show us the best parts of ourselves and articulate our finest vision of our nation. When Congress approved funding for the Network to Freedom, it noted, correctly, that “the Underground Railroad bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality; spanned state lines and international borders; and joined the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to the extraordinary actions of ordinary men and women working in common purpose to free a people.”

It is to our credit if these are the Americans to whom we want to trace our moral genealogy. But we should not confuse the fact that they took extraordinary actions with the notion that they lived in extraordinary times. One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. The great virtue of a figurative railroad is that, when someone needs it—and someone always needs it—we don’t have to build it. We are it, if we choose.