Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2005, page 70

Book Review

How Israel Lost: The Four Questions

By Richard Ben Cramer, Simon & Schuster, 2004, 307 pp. List: $24; AET: $18.50

Reviewed by Janet McMahon

In the interest of avoiding charges of bias, let it be noted at the outset that among the many resources cited in Richard Ben Cramer’s “Author’s Note and Acknowledgments” is this magazine—along with the Electronic Intifada, the Foundation for Middle East Peace and other proponents of justice for Palestinians. But all the wide-ranging reading in the world is of no avail without an open mind. Despite passing on some widely held misconceptions, however—such as that “in 1967, Israel was forced into war” (when, in fact,  Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1982 described the Six-Day War as a “war of choice”)—Cramer’s lack of an agenda is refreshingly rare. And there’s no question that he is a writer who calls them as he sees them.

As The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent from 1978 to 1985, Cramer writes, “What I had to learn first was the depth of my ignorance.” In so doing, he met and befriended not only Jews, but Palestinians—whom he describes as “hospitable, dignified, rational, articulate and oppressed. But,” he recalls, “the true astonishment was, simply, they were here.”

Cramer returned to Israel/Palestine in 2002 to learn what had caused the world—even The New York Times!—to temper, if not abandon, its unadulterated admiration for the Jewish state. How Israel Lost is the result.

Himself an American Jew, Cramer answers his first question, “Why do we care about Israel?”, by noting that it is not the land or the state itself that so concerns America, but “that turtle-ish Jewish survivor.” The Israelis—“no dummies”—have worked diligently over the years to foster the impression that “they are like us.” Cramer describes as Israel’s “first growth industry” the concept of “hasbarah—which literally translates as ‘explaining,’ but we might call it propaganda, or spin.”

In discussing the ways in which, as a result of its post-1967 occupation, Israel has lost much of its original character, Cramer provides useful insights into the Israeli mentality. He notes on p. 3, for example: “Whatever Israel is for, most of the world opposes. The Palestinians see Israel’s unpopularity as confirmation of their cause.…The Jews see it as confirmation of a tenet even more deeply held: the whole world is against them—no matter what they do.”

Cramer is not a self-hating Jew, however (although he undoubtedly has been called one since writing this book). He “utterly loved” Israel, he explains, and writes passionately of Jews’ “earnestness about examining life”—the loss of which he laments, along with a coarsening of national standards, in “the grim lab of Zion.”

In posing his second question, “Why don’t the Palestinians have a state?”, Cramer notes that, unlike the Israelis, the Palestinians failed to “take control of their own national narrative”—the result being that, three decades after the nakba, journalists such as himself did not realize that, prior to the arrival of European Zionists, Palestine was, in fact, a land with people.

He proceeds to describe bluntly and unequivocally life under occupation, and its effect on a society based on honor and kinship. Cramer speculates that Israel’s occupation is designed precisely to “attack the grace and glue of Palestinian society, which is honor.” He goes on to argue that that very sense of honor is “one reason there is no peace. Any peace deal that does not accord with honor cannot be accepted.”

While he has no illusions about Ariel Sharon (who “more or less invented Israeli army assassinations when he was the military chief in Gaza, more than thirty years ago”), Cramer is extremely critical of the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat, and concludes his book’s second chapter with a long and excruciating account of the torture of a Palestinian laborer in Arafat’s Ramallah compound. By comparison, the Israeli extremists portrayed in the following chapter, “What is a Jewish state?”, come across as not much more than mean-spirited eccentrics. True, the story of a Jewish settler whose livestock were killed and house burned down after he befriended Palestinian neighbors is illustrative of the internal divisions in the country. But a more representative account might have been a Palestinian’s imprisonment and torture by Israeli jailers. (The fact that there are no Israeli Jews in Palestinian prisons, of course, makes it difficult to be even-handed in a traditional way.)

Nevertheless, Cramer’s third chapter contains fascinating historical accounts and political profiles—from the atheist David Ben-Gurion’s decision in 1947 to turn over all matters of family law to Orthodox Jews to prevent them from telling a visiting U.N. commission that they opposed the creation of a Jewish state, to the story of Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the Orthodox Jerusalemite who organized the Zaka, the volunteers who pick up Jewish body parts following acts of carnage from bus bombings to car accidents. The author’s explanation of the popular phrase, “The lord of the manor will die, or his dog,” goes a long way to explain the Israeli tactic of doing nothing and letting events take care of themselves. “You run into this attitude on almost all great Israeli issues—whenever resolution would require Jews fighting with Jews,” explains Cramer.

The opening words of his book’s final chapter, “Why is there no peace?”, simultaneously sum up Cramer’s motivation behind How Israel Lost and lead the Gentile reader to wonder if it was written for his fellow Jews. “I’m about to say something terrible here,” he writes, “just because someone has to.” What’s so terrible? According to Cramer, “Any Jew who’s not an Israeli, and not on psychotropic drugs, could solve this Peace-for-Israel thing in about ten minutes of focused thought.”

It’s not a question of religion, Cramer maintains—of “a war against Jews because they are Jews in the land of Palestine.” He believes it’s up to American Jews to disabuse their Israeli cousins of the notion that “the whole world is against them—no matter what they do.” Only then, Cramer argues, will Israel try for the first time “to make peace on the formula that everybody knows is a winner: Give back the land.”

While some of his accounts of the so-called peace process and of events leading up to the current intifada are questionable, Cramer does not hesitate to acknowledge what the Palestinians have given up, or to deconstruct Barak’s so-called “generous offer” at Camp David—always a valuable exercise. Ultimately, How Israel Lost is an honest account of one writer’s search for the truth about Israel. To his credit, Richard Ben Cramer does not flinch from what he discovers.

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.