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Rating: 
Summary: Scholarly and informative
Review: In spite of the extreme popularity of the subject, there are surprisingly few scholarly works about Zionism. Much of the material that has been produced has paid more attention to political correctness than historical accuracy.
I am glad to say that this book is a serious and scholarly work.
The book starts by explaining the extent to which the Jews of the early nineteenth century had spent centuries as non-belligerents and pacifists. This was due in part to an aversion of war and to an even greater extent on the fact that the Jews were a defeated people who were not permitted to hold weapons. The book then examines how such a humiliated people finally acquired the willingness, ability, and nerve to defend itself and finally even attack its enemies.
Shapira starts with the development of a "defensive ethos" in the Levant, from 1881 to 1921. The next segment of the book tells of the defensive ethos at work from 1921 to 1936. The remainder tells of the trials of the Jews in the Levant from 1936 to 1947 that led at first to use of force by irregulars and finally to military offenses approved of by the representatives of the population at large.
As Shapira explains, at first, this use of force against the Arab pogroms of 1936 was confined to the Irgun, which represented a small minority of the Jews of the Levant, and an even smaller splinter group from the Irgun, namely the Stern Gang. The majority had a policy of "self-restraint." This continued even after the perfidious British White Paper of 1939 shifted the Jewish population to almost total insistence on the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. However, after World War 2, when British policy became even more unbalanced in favor of Arab aggression, the majority started to approve of counterattacks, starting in October, 1945. While the counterattacks by the majority ended in 1946, the stage had been set for military action. In April, 1948, that action was taken, and what became the Israeli army the following month went into action to actively relieve the siege of Jerusalem. As Shapira points out in her introduction, in 1982 Israeli forces even went into action in Lebanon as a matter of "choice." For the first time in many, many centuries, Jews had fought an offensive military action as Jews without believing that they needed to do so at once simply to survive. The transition from a humiliated people that neither was able to fight nor wished to do so to one that was willing and able to fight was finally accomplished.
One interesting point that Shapira makes has to do with the Shoah or Holocaust. The slaughter of millions of European Jews was a disaster for the Jews of the Levant. It was also an embarrassment that so many Jews appeared to go to their deaths "as sheep to the slaughter." Shapira discusses the effect of having the Jews appear so weak and hapless on this occasion, and how this helped to catalyze the transition of the Jews to a people that were willing to fight. But Shapira shows that the establishment of Israel was not a direct result of the Holocaust. "It is possible to imagine," says Shapira, "that if the Holocaust had not occurred, the pressure of many more millions of living Jews would not have been inferior to the moral weight of the martyred dead."
Rating: 
Summary: Fine background
Review: This book differs from many histories of Israel by reaching into 19th century to examine and explain the roots and context for the Jewish nationalism that preceded Israel's 1948 establishment as a state. Shapira's first chapter explains the plight of Europe's oppressed Jews, which led to Theodore Herzl's convocation of the first Zionist meeting in Switzerland in 1896. Although periodic slaughters never reached the level of the Chmielnicki pogroms in 1648 and 1649, which left more than 100,000 Jews dead, as the 20th century began, anti-Semitism in Europe remained a terrible force. The 19th and early 20th century were meanwhile an era of universal nationalism. Peoples around the globe reached into their respective pasts, bolstering identities and calling for national borders. For the Jewish people, nationalism was heightened by a threat to existence that few if other people (except the Turkish Armenians) experienced. Shapira shows admirably that hope and self-preservation, not belligerence, drove the first and second waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to Palestine. From 1881 through 1914, Jewish immigrants joined the families of co-religionists who had lived in Palestine since before the destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD. Some sensed hostility among young Arabs of Jaffa. Others, like David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson, remarked on little about Arab inhabitants except their extreme poverty, illiteracy and the diseases by which they were afflicted. The immigrants had no complex ideology or political structure; They merely wanted to live in Zion, which the Jewish people had for 2,000 years considered their homeland. Funded by Jewish organizations and philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild, they began buying land in quantity. While some Jewish settlers developed a chauvinistic attitude, Shapira also shows that they had no plans to conquer resident Arabs. On the contrary, they adapted local customs and culture--wearing kaffia headdresses, riding horses and carrying weapons. From 1905 on, as pogroms against Jews in Russia intensified, Jewish settlers arrived understanding the need for self-defense. Yet, no discernable confrontation between Arabs and Jews took shape until the Young Turk revolution rocked the Ottoman empire in 1908, bringing Arab nationalism to Syria in particular. Even then, disputes in Palestine remained local and concerned grazing rights and water. Buying land, Jews learned, did not always entitle them to water sources on it. Where Arabs considered grazing pastures public domain, Jews who had purchased land expected it to be theirs' alone. As they had in Europe, Jewish settlers optimistically hoped for peaceful relations with non-Jewish neighbors. As World War I approached, however, moods crystallized. Zionist immigrants burdened their new situation with their previous outlook. As in Europe, they attributed the animosity of others to agitation and incitement, in this case, by Christian and urban Arabs. Here, as in Europe, incitement definitely existed. As the Ottoman grip on Palestine gave way to anarchy, anti-Jewish hatred increased. Jewish land purchasers were constantly beset by sellers' fraud: Claims and counterclaims, violence and counterviolence arose. Worse, legal purchases often displaced fellaheen--tenant farmers. Based on their European experience, when violence arose against the Jews, they assumed the authorities would not protect them. Jewish settlers who had arrived hoping for peace and security in their ancient land discovered that they had exchanged one "existential threat for another." Jewish defensive thinking gelled after the Yom Kippur 1928 and August 1929 riots and lasted until 1936, when the Arab Rebellion--during which Jews were murdered with abandon--stimulated a Jewish offensive strategy. This was followed by the most traumatic 9 years in Jewish history--1939 through 1947, during which the spontaneous response in Palestine was to go to the aid of Europe's Jews. Jews came, rightly, to believe that they could rely only on themselves. This ethos was celebrated by poets like Nathan Alterman and Hannah Senesh. The Nazis murdered the latter, then 26, after she parachuted behind enemy lines to aid her fellow Jews. In Palestine, Jewish self-preservation was directed at the British, whose grotesque 1939 White Paper, Shapira shows, locked Jews out of the National Home that the League of Nations approved for them in 1922. Alyssa A. Lappen
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