"Shtarker! This is Kaos!" The history of Israel

I mentioned Margaret Thatcher as a good argument starter. Israel is another cracker. (Both in the Australian slang sense as ‘very good’ and in the sense of explosive.) People in Australia protest outside a Jewish-owned chocolate shop, which is owned by another company that owns another company that sells chocolate to the Israeli army, and chant Hamas phrases calling for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth and wonder why other people get upset. It’s a complex issue.

I thought Irish history both rewarded and was blurred by the long view. Compared to the Jews, the Irish are whippersnappers. And Jewish history too emerges from the mists of time and myth. Israel is condemned for the settlers in Hebron who forced out Arabs from the area, one of the most sacred Jewish sites in an area replete with them. But who condemned or even remembers the Arabs who forced the Jews out from Hebron before that? It wasn’t that long ago – survivors from that exile returned to force the Arabs out in their turn. And so it goes, tit for tat, this for that, an eye for an eye, back as far as you can see, and as far forward too.

Rich Cohen is an energetic vital writer. No prizes for guessing he’s Jewish. His 2010 book Israel is real: An obsessive quest to understand the Jewish nation and its history, the title taken from a tourist t-shirt, is an informal informative history of Israel from Abraham to the present day. It doesn’t excuse or condemn Israel but it does go a long way to explaining it. The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan, during the Yom Kippur war, which he almost lost along with the plot, called Israel the third Temple. Cohen agrees. His central thesis is that of the Temple, that was destroyed twice then transformed into an idea that could be taken anywhere. When Israel was created, the Temple became a physical object again, and again something that could be destroyed. 

The strongest characters in this book are the shtarkers, the Jewish tough guys from antiquity to today. (Some will remember Siegfried’s somewhat Nazi, wholly incompetant sidekick of that name from Get Smart.) And of all the shtarkers, Ariel Sharon is the exemplar, not only of the type, but of the history of modern Israel itself. A dashing commander in the 1948 Arab Israeli War who became the hero of the Yom Kippur War when he split the Egyptian army and against orders crossed the Suez Canal and saved Israel, it was he who as Prime Minister started the settler movement to protect Israel and he who later tried to stop it for the same reason, before being struck down by a stroke. It’s almost a three act play - a tragedy.

Cohen is no blinkered true-believer, nor is he a blinkered anti-Zionist. Israel is real and he tries to understand what this has done to those Jews who live there, and the others as well. He sums up the present impasse in a single sentece: We will stop building when you stop attacking and we will stop attacking when you stop building. Where’s the off-ramp of that roundabout?

Cohen uses anecdote, myth and history to weave an entertaining and thought provoking book. If you are interested in the topic at all, you could do a lot worse than reading this.