Israel vs. Utopia

by Joel Schalit

"An incisive look at the connection between the US and Israel, and their respective roles on the world stage . . . Israel vs. Utopia is a book that could only be written by someone intimate with the ethos of both countries." --Jerusalem Post

Israel is a synonym for many things: the ancestral home of the Jewish people, the hell of the Palestinians, the realization of a centuries-old dream of freedom, and the heart of the War on Terror. No...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933354879
• ISBN13: 9781933354873
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

cogent polemics on intractable situations

The argument over Israel's place in the world has calcified into a more or less dessicated, inflexible discourse, and in large part non-Israeli perspectives on Israel have become projections of people's preëxisting geopolitical predilections (seen most clearly in the bizarre alliance between millenarian Evangelical Christians and hard-nosed Israeli practitioners of realpolitik that Schalit analyzed so cogently in his first book, Jerusalem Calling). The first, and one of the most salutary, virtues of this short, bracing book is that Schalit breaks this discourse down and moves beyond ideology in discussions of Israel, American policy in the Middle East, and the disposition of the West Bank and Gaza. While Schalit's perspective is undeniably (and unapologetically) leftist, his central argument is that deciding how to approach the problems Israel faces right now can only be done if people set aside ideology and grievance (and endless, futile arguments about whether grievances are merited, and how much) and look at what's actually happened and is going on. The book is a curious amalgam of polemic, ideological analysis, and political explanation of recent events in Israel, Europe and the United States, and the only faults I find with it are that one already needs to be conversant with Diaspora politics to make sense of much of the argument, and despite Schalit's clear knowledge of the region and his authoritative tone, the absence of references or a bibliography makes it hard to accept at face value some of his more provocative assertions. That said, the target audience is clearly the Diaspora, who it is safe to assume will already have formed their own judgments on much of the material covered. It takes as its focus several events: George Bush's speech before the Knesset / Barack Obama's speech before the Egyptian parliament and their parallels to Sadat's speech before the Knesset 30 years ago, the Israeli-Lebanese war (and how members of the previously reformist and dovish Israeli left found themselves vehemently prosecuting it), Schalit's participation in a San Francisco food co-op's internal debate about whether to boycott Israeli goods, the ongoing crisis of the Hamas captivity of Gilad Shalit (no relation), and Schalit's own encounters with the Israeli, Palestinian and Lebanese diasporas in San Francisco and Europe. As an Israeli who grew up in the UK and America, Schalit is hardly a disinterested observer, but this works tremendously in his favor, as he uses discussions with his (elite Israeli) family and putatively hostile Palestinians and Lebanese outside the Middle East to move the discourse beyond the increasingly stale anti-imperialist / neocon frame and into something that recognizes the real, if faint, hopes for conciliation that are mostly buried under the tide of pessimism and nihilism that seems to characterize so much coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Joel is particularly good at illuminating the way in which left and r