A Normal Nation?
AIKMAN, DAVID
A Normal Nation? Everyday life in the promised land. BY DAVID AIKMAN It is nearly impossible for someone in the United States who is not deliberately avoiding the newspaper, radio, or television,...
...The greatest challenge to anyone attempting to comprehend the nature of Israeli society is the sheer complexity of Israeli society...
...Rosenthal is particularly good at taking the reader behind the closed doors of the ultra-orthodox...
...the Russian Jews, more than one million of whom migrated to Israel during the 1990s...
...In the chapters "A People's Army" and "Dating and Mating Israeli-style," she writes about the ubiquitous presence of military uniforms and the apparent casualness with which young men and women conduct their romantic business...
...Orit knew instantly what had happened...
...And yet, somehow, despite all this, many Americans hardly know the first thing about the people of Israel...
...By paying attention to the concerns of all, she illuminates many of the internal social conflicts that preoccupy Israeli politicians...
...Endless op-eds discuss "Israel and the Palestinians," or, worse, "the Middle East peace process...
...How Israel will deal with terrorism and yet reach out to Arabs she leaves to others to elaborate...
...Then she turns to the more founda-tional divide, between the religious communities on the one hand and the mass of predominantly secular citizens on the other...
...Whether she is writing about sexuality in the Israeli army, or Russian crime syndicates, or the vast families of Israel's ultra-orthodox Jews, Rosenthal manages to convey a sense of life and death...
...Rosenthal focuses initially on what foreigners often notice during any trip to Israel...
...Like the United States, Israel is primarily a nation of immigrants...
...the Mizrahim, Jews from Arab lands, who have often had to struggle for a place at the table...
...That huge lacuna is amply filled by Donna Rosenthal's The Israelis...
...Raffi had died, along with eighteen other passengers, after Muhammad al-Ghoul, a graduate student at Al-Najah University on the West Bank, detonated himself just after boarding the bus...
...Rosenthal is also adept at capturing the dilemma of Israel's Arab Christians, a community that feels itself under suspicion from fellow Arabs because it is not Islamic and from ordinary Israelis because it is Arab...
...She writes, for example, of Raffi Berger, who boarded Jerusalem bus number 32 A on June 18, 2002, to go to his chemistry lab at Hebrew University...
...His wife, Orit, an elementary school music teacher, took a later bus that suddenly veered onto an alternate route...
...and the Ethiopians, black Jews from Africa...
...BY DAVID AIKMAN It is nearly impossible for someone in the United States who is not deliberately avoiding the newspaper, radio, or television, to live through a week without hearing the word "Israel...
...Rosenthal has produced an informative and interesting book about Israel, one of the most fascinating and detailed insights into any country written by a close observer in recent memory...
...She dialed Raffi's cell phone again and again, with no answer...
...But then she moves on to describe the major separate ethnic groups in Israeli society: the Ashkenazim, Jews from Europe, who for much of Israel's history were in the driver's seat of Israel's culture and government...
...But most of us couldn't tell you the first thing about ordinary Israelis...
...Israel's construction of a vibrant, modern society has had to take place through five wars within five decades, with the problems of acquiring a language not spoken anywhere else on earth, in an area about the size of New Jersey...
...A trip to the national forensic institute in Tel Aviv confirmed what she already suspected...
...But The Israelis demonstrates how much can be accomplished by diligent reporting and a commitment to capture wide variations in experience and viewpoint fairly...
...She is scrupulously fair in describing Muslim households in Umm al-Fahm, the "capital" of the Israeli Islamic Movement, and she records the sense of neglect that is felt by many Israeli Arabs...
...There were certainly Arabs and Jews living within today's Israel before the Zionist immigration to Palestine got under way in the 1880s...
...Her dispassionate style is more powerful than any angry narrative would be...
...Innumerable analysts dissect Israeli diplomacy and politics...
...But modern Israel is the culmination of wave after wave of new Jewish immigrants from such diverse parts of the world that the country's contemporary demographic composition almost defies analysis...
...In her epilogue, she makes it clear that, despite all of the obvious problems, many Jews and Arabs work very hard to establish working relationships with each other, and every now and then, in school or in the theater, they establish breakthroughs in mutual respect...
...Even when going into great detail about the motivations of Arab suicide bombers, Rosenthal maintains the disciplined approach of a mature, seasoned reporter Rosenthal's politics stay so emphatically out of the way that it is not easy to speculate, on the basis of her book, on how Israeli-Palestinian problems might be resolved...
...Rosenthal's tale begins in a vivid description of what it can be like living in a country where the lives of friends and loved ones can be destroyed without warning by a suicide bombing...
...To be sure, we have a few stray images lurking around: the founding David Aikman is a former bureau chief for Time magazine in Jerusalem, a senior fellow of The Trinity Forum, and the author of a new book about Christianity in China, Jesus in Beijing of the nation, the fighter-pilots of the Six Day War, the kibbutzniks (now a community greatly eroded), religious Jews in their side-curls and black hats standing in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem...
...But she offers no grandiose prescriptions and she avoids sentimentalism...
...Yet the thread of a constant, existential threat to life itself winds through The Israelis...
Vol. 9 • January 2004 • No. 17
