
“Good for the Jews?” – The Wrong Question
“Is he/she good for Israel/the Jews?” It's probably the question most frequently asked by my students about any particular politician. I’m not surprised. Having grown up in the American Jewish…
“Is he/she good for Israel/the Jews?” It's probably the question most frequently asked by my students about any particular politician. I’m not surprised. Having grown up in the American Jewish…
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman suggested that Obama and Netanyahu should read it: the book “is a real contribution to changing the conversation about Israel and building a healthier relationship with it.” …
We have created for you eight individual discussion units based on particular chapters of the book. You can work with these units in a nine-part series of meetings that culminate in the Whole Book Discussion, or you can work with the units as individual stand-alone modules.
For each discussion you will need
Here are some of what we may call the principles of provocative facilitation, in no particular order:
This chapter focuses specifically on the Harod valley, (the south eastern part of the Yizrael valley), populated by a few poor Arab villages before Zionism arrived there in the Autumn of 1921. For centuries the valley had been sparsely populated and lightly farmed. A place of brackish water and disease. Shavit describes the new situation of Eastern European Jews and of Zionism at the end of the First World War. The crisis of the former had become much more acute and the forces awakening in the Zionist movement had responded with more radical and widespread solutions, including the idea of large scale settlement in the Yizrael (Jezreel) valley, a valley that resonated with Biblical memory. (more…)
Masada in 1942 lies at the center of the chapter symbolically but Shavit’s narrative begins in the violent years of the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939. These three years of almost unrelenting terror put Jew clearly against Arab and made it impossible for the Jews to maintain any kind of blindness to the Arab question that so many had exhibited up till then. In Shavit’s description, the 1936 campaign brought about a toughening of the Jewish psyche, a final realization that non-violent confrontation would be impossible.
“Lydda 1948” takes us to another valley, the Lydda valley in the centre of the country and tells the story of the Zionist development of the valley from the first initiatives before the First World War through to the deportation of the inhabitants of Arab Lydda in the course of the 1948 war. (more…)
In chapter six, Shavit chronicles a time when the population more than doubled as hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into the young country. The majority of immigrants came from great trauma, whether the trauma of the Shoah or the trauma of radical and sudden dislocation from Arab lands. Through four personal stories, three from central and eastern Europe and one from Iraq, Shavit leads us into the lives of some of the traumatised Jews who arrived in the country in these years. (more…)