“God does not exist, and he promised us this land.” *
Book review of What is Modern Israel? by Yakov M. Rabkin
By Yakov M. Rabkin
(Translated from French to English by Fred A. Reed)
Pluto Press, 2016, 228 pp., £17.99
As someone who gives political talks from a Palestinian vantage point to groups traveling through Palestine, I have spoken to thousands of Jews, among others, from around the world. I walked away from reading Professor Yakov M. Rabkin’s What is Modern Israel? with the burning desire to call back every one of those Jewish travelers and sit down with them, one on one over a hot cup of mint tea — so that I could read them each of his chapters aloud, looking up and into their eyes at the end of every chapter to ask somberly, Do you get it now? You’ve been had, collectively. You’ve been lied to, collectively. You’re being used, collectively. Your religion, a rich one, has been hijacked, purposely.
The book starts with an odd note of comparison between modern Israel and the Russian port city of Saint Petersburg. Professor Rabkin cites the words of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) who described Saint Petersburg as the “most abstract and premeditated city in the whole wide world.” In a radio interview, Rabkin recalled Israeli poet and author Benjamin Harshav’s depiction of the city as “artificial” and “inhospitable”; Russia’s greatest authors “saw the city of majestic elegance as an incongruous intruder, both foreign and strange, prophesying a dreadful end in the form…
