Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 40

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

some of these formative issues, the book seems to ignore basic events that would haunt Israel in its post-independence years. This was particularly
true of the Palestinian refugees who were not allowed to return to the nascent and fragile state of Israel. Shapira argues that “in the context of the
time, Israeli policy on the refugee issue was not considered out of the ordinary” (p. 175).
Some of the book’s most interesting, and problematic content is focused around the first decade of the state and the issue of immigration. The first
Knesset, Israel’s parliament was elected in January of 1949. It was supposed to create a constitution, “instead the Knesset would enact a series of
Basic Laws” (p. 182). In lieu of a constitution, Israel has been governed based on these laws ever since. Shapira argues that this was a major
mistake. “A constitution’s importance goes beyond its purely legal aspect. Such a document is a tool for creating civic ethos as a significant
component of the state’s identity” (p. 183). This was “one of [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s greatest mistakes, largely because he never
imagined that the influence of religion and the power of the religious parties would grow” (p. 183). In Shapira’s analysis, the lack of a constitution
opened up a can of worms that allowed the power of the religious to grow over the state’s institutions and early exemptions made for the religious
Orthodox Jews came back to haunt the state later as more and more of them opted out of things such as army service. Once again, the book clearly
sides with the secular European Jewish section of Israeli society in arguing that a history of Israel is necessarily a history of this group, while other
groups in society, such as the religious, are painted as posing a threat to this group or undermining the state by making demands of it. The author
posits that Israel’s transition to democracy was a great achievement, “of all the states created after 1945, Israel is one of the few that has maintained
a democratic regime” (p. 179).
In 1950, large scale immigration of Jews from Europe and the Islamic countries began. Unlike most countries where legal immigrants may move
where they like, Israel’s centralized socialist system believed that immigration must be managed. One director of an immigrant camp recalled “the
immigrants were locked in, surrounded by barbed wire fences and guarded by armed police” (p. 225). The camps, called ma’abara, were nests of
“shacks crowded together around the stinking latrines” (p. 229). Israelis, many of whom had only arrived in the country several years before,
castigated the newcomers as a “motley crowd of human dust lacking language, education, roots, tradition, [or] national dreams” (p. 231). It is hard
to read all this and wonder where the analysis is by the author. Why were immigrants treated like criminals by a state claiming to want to “ingather”
Jewish exiles? Why were they forced into barbed wire camps and then settled in larg H