My Promised Land

“My Promised Land,” is an episodic, evocative personal history of the modern state of Israel by Ari Shavat, a left wing journalist born in the country. He begins with his great grandfather, an affluent English Jew, visiting Palestine in 1897, and deciding to make his home there. Subsequent chapters tell of the success of orange growing, how the ancient siege of Masada by the Romans was utilized to forge Israeli resolve, the increasing tension and violence between Jew and Arab, and many other things. Fueled by numerous personal interviews, the book presents a nuanced account. Shavat's principal concern is what he refers to as the occupation of territories won by Israel as a result of the 1967 war. He believes this is immoral, illegal and untenable. On the other hand he apparently recognized before most the looming danger of Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons.

Shavat notes repeatedly the decline of the inner strength of the people from the generation who escaped or survived the Holocaust, fought for their very existence in 1948, and built an economy from scratch to the twenty-first century generation. In a particularly appalling chapter he celebrates the existence of a growing sub-culture in Tel Aviv whose existence is predicated on unthinking sexual perversion and fornication. He also suffers from the tendency of his profession to make the story about him, not realizing that the media is the major contributor to the decline that he observes.

In the end one must sympathize with someone whose life is rooted in a land the size and population of the state of Massachusetts, surrounded by enemies whose aim is annihilation. Sadly, as a secularist, he denies the only true hope offered in surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ.