Impossible Takes Longer
75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE RABBI SACKS BOOK PRIZE
A nuanced examination of the Israel’s past, present, and future, after reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary and enduring its most challenging year ever, from the two-time National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Israel. Revised and updated throughout for the paperback edition.
In 1948, Israel’s founders sought a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. The state they ultimately made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering.
When it marked its seventy-fifth anniversary, Israel was in the throes of a judicial reform crisis, its most dangerous internal rupture ever. Then, with the October 7th War, it was attacked from the outside and plunged into existential uncertainty. In light of those first seventy-five years and the events of 2023 that shook the country to its core, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of its founders?
Using Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Gordis measures Israel’s achievements, critiques its failures, and acknowledges its inherent contradictions—ultimately suggesting that, though it has often fallen short, the Jewish state is a success far beyond anything its founders could have imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The history of Israel is "a combination of unexpected successes and maddening disappointments," according to this even-handed chronicle. Comparing drafts of the 1948 Declaration of Israeli Independence, historian and journalist Gordis (We Stand Divided) notes that "there was a chorus of often conflicting voices that gave rise not only to the Declaration but to the country itself." Once the state was created, tensions between aspirational goals and grim reality soon emerged, particularly over the doctrine of havlagah, or using force only for defensive purposes. Though Gordis defends Israel's preemptive air strikes against Egypt in 1967, he casts a critical eye on the complicity of the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Amid harrowing episodes of political and religious violence, Gordis highlights many remarkable achievements, including the staving off of economic collapse in the 1950s and Israel's emergence as "a leader in agricultural technology, a formidable economic engine, and a technological powerhouse." On balance, Gordis concludes the Jewish state has met its primary objectives, even if it has done so imperfectly. Though unlikely to change minds, this is an accessible overview of Israeli history and a well-reasoned case for why it's worth supporting.
