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1920s. A weaker postwar London government offered much stiffer
resistance to the Jews' claim than to that of the Irish, despite the fact
that the Zionists enjoyed stronger American support and greater
local military strength than had the IRA twenty years before.
Using medical terminology , one could describe O'Brien's book
as a morphological study of the Jewish national epic and Benvenisti's
as an endocrinal analysis of the Israeli drama . An Israeli-born
historian of the Crusaders, educated in the impassioned family and
public atmosphere of socialist pioneering Zionism, a former kibbutz
member and deputy mayor of Jerusalem in charge of Arab affairs,
Benvenisti offers an unparalleled inside view of Israel through a
painful , cruelly honest description of his personal experiences and
moral dilemmas . These experiences are profoundly different from
O'Brien's but no less rich in their insightful appreciation of events.
Conversant as O'Brien is with both the Irish and Jewish situations,
Benvenisti grew up in the intense ideological climate of the Yishuv,
during the prestate Jewish community's obsessive search for roots .
For him , as for so many other young Zionist leaders of the time, the
transformation of the Diaspora's Holy Land - what Benvenisti terms
the "geographia sacra" - into a tangible reality held a central place,
as did the neopagan worship of "moledet," the idealization of the
old/new motherland . The development of these ideas to their logical
but self-defeating ultimate consequences , his allegiances to the
Zionist dream in conflict with his strong personal friendships with
Arab families - these descriptions make much of Benvenisti's
biography fascinating and politically instructive reading.
One could , of course, object that the soul-searching of a mem–
ber of the socialist pioneering elite, now dispossessed of power by a
growing populist nationalism in what Benvenisti calls a "narcissist
society ," is by no means peculiar to Zionism . It is not by chance that
the social group to which Benvenisti , albeit the scion of a long–
established Sephardi family, belongs has been labeled "the Israeli
WASPs ," the term standing (according to the Israeli context) for
"White Ashkenazi (European) Sabra (native-born) of Pioneering
parentage. " This group , far smaller and less homogeneous than its
American counterpart , is certainly a dying species which, under–
standably , feels it is "too painful to admit tha t they have no answer
or solutions for problems confronting them and Israel." Yet , there is
an element of suicidal passion in these Israeli WASPs if they indeed
now view themselves as a people who "hold a passport of a country
which does not exist."
