How do you know the fix is in? Ari Shavit’s revivalist-Zionist book My Promised Land continues to get a ton of attention, even as the mainstream does its utmost to ignore Max Blumenthal’s very different description of Israel in Goliath. Shavit got a full-page ad in the New York Times last week, and at the same time he was interviewed by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post. Quinn clearly knows very little about the issue. She spells his name Savit three times.
I’ve been reading Shavit’s book and must praise it as an intimate portrait of Jewish Israel, with Shavit doing his utmost as a reporter to convey that world to us. But the book is very much Inside the Jewish paradigm, and suffers from the complacency and hermeticism of Tel Aviv. The book contains: endless celebrations of Jewish creativity and high-tech start-ups, the repeated claim that Israel prevented another “Holocaust” by bombing the Iraq reactor in 1981 and then the Syrian facility in 2007, the assertion that Iran is rushing to get its hands on a bomb…. Very inside Israel ideas.
Our narrator affects worldliness, but in fact he lacks the ability to step outside the bubble. And that’s the most telling thing about Shavit’s reception: while Max Blumenthal speaks in a leftwing American idiom we all recognize (of equality and anti-racism), Shavit speaks in an Israeli idiom he believes is sophisticated but isn’t. His writing is clueless when it comes to sex, it’s cringe-making 50-year-old guy stuff that went out in this country a few years ago (I should know).
Sally Quinn got some of this inside-Israel cluelessness in her story:
The result of living with this fear constantly, Shavit says, is “not despair, pessimism or passivity. It’s not whining. We are not addicted to victimhood. We didn’t turn it into our religion or identity.” Instead, he says, “you see creativity everywhere. There is an intensive cultural life in Israel, poetry, theater and intensive economic and scientific creativity as well.
“The quality of life, of human relationships is unique, sensual. Israel is very sexy. There is something in the air. The boys and girls are beautiful. You see it in our reproductivity — even among secular Israeli Jews it is off the charts.” He thinks it is perhaps no accident that they are that way.
P.S. It is a well-known fact (i.e., I believe this, but don’t have the time to document it now) that people in conflict zones have higher birth rates. Yasser Arafat once described the Palestinian womb as a weapon. It strikes me as naive not to factor this in when you are reporting how beautiful the boys and girls are.
Israel is ‘sexy’?
puh- leeze!!! A line worthy of the coffee I just spewed.
The boys and girls are beautiful. You see it in our reproductivity — even among secular Israeli Jews it is off the charts.”
Is Shavit insinuating that Israelis don’t have access to contraceptives?
It’s almost as though he is extolling a *cough* superior race, or something……….
Easily the most self-deluded thing I’ve read in quite a while-
And as someone who reads a lot of Zionists so you get it a lot, so that’s saying quite a bit of the total disconnect Shavit has with his own society.
The most beautiful people tend to be in Sweden, no? I thought this was more or less the concensus view(I’m talking about the Western world, which Israel desperately wants to be part of, culturally speaking).
Also, the high Israeli birth rate is actually a relatively straight-forward story: Israel invests more in IVF treatments per capita than any other country on earth. It is also a world-leader in IVF treatments and spends a very high amount of research dollars in terms of its size of the economy on these issues of fertility.
In addition, the entire ethos of the state, imbued from the beginning, is to keep producing Jewish children or else… HOLOCAUST! It’s drummed into the children from the beginning. The world is against us, remember the Holocaust, and make lots of Jewish babies.
Demographic scaremongering is part of the societal DNA, together with the government’s endless efforts to make women have as many births as possible, including at very late stages in the fertility cycle(mid-40s), this is only a natural outcome.
In other words, the high secular birth rate is mainly a response to two things:
1. Demographic scaremongering, constant and amplified at all times.
2. Massive government investment into fertility clinics, IVF treatments and similar issues, all with the explicit aim to have as many babies as possible.
(Need I mention that the fertiltiy industry in Israel is solely based to produce Jewish children? The non-Jewish 25% are not exactly included. Naturally, Ari Shavit mentions neither of these things. As usual, Palestinians do not matter to him. He even went as far as defending ethnic cleansing as something that “had to happen”.)
Young Beauty and Fertility , sounds vaguely familiar:
“While the Belief and Beauty society’s activities varied widely from clothing design to healthy living, many of the classes were designed to give girls a primer for their future tasks as wives and mothers. Those courses, in particular, were often taught by members of the Frauenschaft. ”
http://www.bdmhistory.com/research/gands.html