How Israel Survived

Jonathan Adelman is the author of The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. He is a full professor in the Graduate School of International Studies--and served as the doctoral dissertation adviser to Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Here he writes about how and why he wrote his new book:

...after teaching at Hebrew University in 1986 and the University of Haifa in 1990, I became fascinated by Israel, how it came to exist and how it survived and flourished despite enormous obstacles.

When I started reading the literature on Israel’s origins and causes for its successes against great obstacles, I was surprised that none of the three main camps—Arabist, post-Zionist, or (for lack of a better word) mainstream Zionist—really dealt with this question. The Arabists largely dismissed its relevance, for they saw Israel as a lackey and running dog of powerful Western imperialism. They focused on the West, not Israel, as the source of Israel’s victories and successes. The revisionist post-Zionists, focusing on Israel’s numerous (and sometimes real) sins of omission and commission, were not interested in looking at the questions that would put Israel in a positive light. The mainstream Zionists (especially of the previous generation), whom one would have expected to be interested in the question, largely saw the rise of Israel as inevitable or as a product of the reaction to the Holocaust.

I hope the book has several impacts. First, it serves to remind the reader of how Israel, with few resources, had to overcome enormous obstacles—Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire from 1939-1949, the Soviet Union, much of the Arab world, international religious and political organizations—that none of over 130 other new states after World War Two had to face. Second, it shows how so many of the labels put on Israel, such a racist, colonialist, imperialist, Nazi-like, have little academic relevance to the topic. Third, it shows that Israel, far from being a running dog of Western imperialism or born in original sin, came into being and flourished because of its ability to originate and carry through two revolutions—first, a nationalist, democratic socialist revolution (1882-1977) and a second, incomplete semi-capitalist, globalist revolution (1977-present).

Read the whole thing.

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