The year of the great Mazeltov
Simon Schama
My Country: The Story of Modern Israel Abba Eban (Weidenfeld and Nicolson E3.75) To Build the Promised Land Gerald Kaufman (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.25) The Middle East has a nasty habit of spoiling birthday parties with bad news. But barring further unlooked-for disasters, 1973 should be the Year of the Great Mazeltov. No doubt Israel's twenty-fifth anniversary will prompt as much gnashing of teeth on the one side as jubilation on the other, and although bursting into printmay well be preferable to bursting into fire, there should, perhaps, be better reason for adding to the groaning shelves of Israeliana than indulging the natural urges to execrate or celebrate. Two years ago there appeared a book called The Israelis: Founders and Sons which needed no such excuses. Its author was a prolific Sabra journalist called Amos Elon who refused to flinch from asking uncomfortably penetrating questions about the character of the Israeli state and its society. Taking as his theme the tensions between the founding generation of romantic idealists and the native-born generation it had schooled in the hardnosed values of pragmatic survival, Elon set about slaughtering some of his country's most cherished ideological sacred cows. In the ensuing mayhem he was excoriated as a saboteur of national morale, but through the dust-storm it was clear that his book had contributed a great deal to a healthy discussion of the most vexing problems facing the young Jewish state.
The same, alas, cannot be said of the two books under review. Of the two, Abba Eban's is easily the more superfluous, being little more than a conventional, if elegant, narrative of the principal diplomatic, political and military events since 1948 inserted between what is virtually a photo album supplied by the Israel Tourist Office. There is very little here that is not already familiar to even the less well-read student of the Middle East and certainly no diverting skeletons emerge from Mr Eban's own cupboard. He is a gilt-edged Israeli whose sonorous oratory and sharp intelligence have earned him the honorary title of 'the voice of Israel with an Oxbridge accent' and the admiration, if not exactly the passionate adoration, of his countrymen. The accent is in fact Anglo-South African via Trinity, Cambridge, and despite the adoption of the matey 'Abba' (Hebrew for ' Daddy ') he remains rather the Aubrey, mediating between the wrinkled brows of one half of the cabinet and the bronzed biceps of the other. With the prospect of Mrs Meir's retirement now not far away, and a subsequent tussle for the succession between Allon, Sapir and Dayan factions in view, Mr Eban's chances of higher things as a compromise candidate have suddenly looked more plausible. Perhaps it Is some presentiment of this future which has led, him to be so guarded in his narrative. True, none of the less savoury episodes in Israel's history: Lavon, Samua, Kalkilya, even Dir Yassin, are deleted or glossed over. But some of the thornier problems are side-stepped by excursions into a sort of fulsome rhetoric which may sound well in Mr Eban's rich baritone but look unconvincing in cold print.
As one would expect, Mr Eban is at his best when recalling his country's, and his own, love-hate affair with the United Nations. Any reader wishing to understand Israel's reluctance to commit its safety to the warranty of the UN could do worse than go to Mr Eban's account of its undignified retreat from commitment in 1948 when the new state looked as though it was about to be strangled at birth by Invading Arab armies, or the still more grisly history of May 1967 when, with the Straits of Tiran blockaded and a hundred thousand Egyptian troops assembled in north Sinai, the Security Council was treated to the Soviet delegate insisting that he saw "no sufficient grounds for such a hasty convening of the Security Council and for the artificially dramatic climate." My Country is best when Israel's history rises to the dramatic heights required by its author's prose. But it remains essentially a personal testimony rather than a dispassionate documentary.
After wandering for what sometimes seems like forty years in the wilderness of Abba Eban's narrative it is a considerable relief to be able to frolic among the shallows of Gerald Kaufman's much less solemn and much more valuable book. The initial omens are not auspicious. The author sees fit to confess that his book is offered as an act of contrition for "having failed to notice the country which was to become an inextricable part of my life." He also records that he arrived, at his Zionism via Leon Uris's "profoundly bad" but " transfixingly readable" book, not perhaps the most recommended route. Fortunately however, his own book is neither profoundly bad nor transfixingly readable but a high-spirited and entertaining account of the social and political development of Israel, warts and all. While it never approaches Elon's book for polemical creativeness, it does succeed in conveying a good deal of the unruly vivaciousness which is part and parcel of Israeli life. Its chapter on politics, for example, is full of gusto compared with Mr Eban's grave chronicle where Cabinet decision begets Cabinet decision. Predictably, the former press adviser to the Labour Prime Minister is most at home cleaving his way through the jungle of stop-go policies affecting the Israeli economy and educational system.
Mr Kaufman's book is not without its idiosyncrasies, not least of which is his glowing affection for the concrete monstrosities of Tel Aviv. He clearly thinks Jerusalem a dull old dump. He has chosen to include a rather pointless gazetteer of the diaspora communities at the expense of saying anything much at all about the one institution which arguably has exercised an overwhelming influence on Israeli social life: the defence forces. His chapter on the rich diet of Israeli culture is not much more than a Who's Who in the Israeli Arts and some of the stickiest questions currently facing the country — the place of the religious establishment in law; the growing mire of industrial contamination; the social rift between European and Oriental Jewish communities—are all relegated to perfunctory treatments in the oddly diffuse concluding chapter. The one statistic that would have shed light on the last of these questions: the occupational distribution of the Sephardim, is about the only one Mr Kaufman omits to supply.
Both these books end on a slightly expectant and tentative note. This is understandable. Under the entry on ' Mazeltov,' Leo Rosten in the Joys of Yiddish cites the injunction that the greeting should be given to a sea-captain on receiving his command rather than on his return to port from a maiden voyage since the latter would imply a suspicion that he might not have made it. The twenty-fifth birthday is unlikely to be a time of unrestrained celebration. That, in any case, would be uncharacteristic of the Israelis. More probably it will be a moment for the mopping of perspiring brows and
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