ISRAEL

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…

This book, originally published in Swedish in 1996, is reissued now in English—with a new preface and final chapter—in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The author grew up in a Swedish Jewish family after World War II. After the early death of his father, he moved with his mother and siblings to Israel in the early 1960s. There, he came face to face with the founding ideologies of the state of Israel and with the everyday realities that challenged them. The author’s “personal history” of Israel is as follows. The early-20th-century Zionist impulses for a Jewish homeland morphed into what he calls a “messianic frenzy.” The founders of the state were largely Ashkenazi, European, secular men, committed to a communitarian philosophy of pastoral labor and social health. Challenged by the influx of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish immigrants, this group found itself an elite in retreat—still in power over the major cultural and political institutions of the country but out of step with families that came not out of principle but out of need. The rise of the ultra-Orthodox communities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries similarly challenged the hegemonies of this communal, labor-based, secular group, which, the author argues, never fully accepted the Palestinian Arab population as its peers or even as cohabitants. For the author, these fissures in the modern state of Israel have created what he sees as an impossible condition. Explicitly defining the current situation as a “genocidal war in Gaza,” the author concludes that “the choices made have led Israel into a dead end; its geopolitical vulnerability has increased, its security has weakened, and the prospects for a peaceful sharing of the land have been actively shattered.” This book is unlikely to change minds or hearts, even as it chronicles the author’s own change of both.

A personal story of disillusionment with the state of Israel, told by a Swedish immigrant.