The feted scholar who fears for Israel’s soul - The Jewish Chronicle

On a warm evening last month I sat outside a bar in Tel Aviv speaking to two young Israeli men. Benjamin Netanyahu, they told me, needs to take the gloves off and occupy Gaza. “What about the Palestinians?” I asked. One waved his hand dismissively in response. “Who cares?”

This attitude is the central theme of Saul Friedländer’s Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil. Thanks to decades of military occupation in the West Bank, extremist views that have always been present in Israeli society are now central, he argues, leaving democracy at risk.

Starting in January of last year, the Holocaust survivor and celebrated scholar of Nazi Germany resolved to keep a daily record of developments in Israel from a distance. Now 91 years old and settled in California, he is horrified at what his country has become.

The book melds a blow-by-blow account of the horrors the Jewish state has endured in the last year or so and their devastating consequences with richly informed analysis of how we reached this point. Much of the history is recent, and will be familiar to anyone who has followed Israel closely. To see the awfulness set out so clearly, with each event following in such rapid succession, however, remains a shock.

Religious extremism has spread throughout the state, he argues, military reservists refuse to serve, and hardliners develop plans to expel millions of Arabs. Throughout, a drumbeat of Palestinian terror and the Israeli military response form a constant backdrop to the political drama.

What makes Diary of a Crisis surely vital, however, regardless of whether you agree with the full extent of his views, is Friedländer’s centrality to Israeli history.

As a young man, he was brought to the Jewish state by the very extremists who now horrify him. Having survived the Shoah he arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship chartered and loaded with weapons by the Irgun and named after a pseudonym of Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

With only a fuzzy idea of Middle Eastern geography, Friedländer was then committed to Jewish militarism. In the decades that followed, however, he rejected such views and began to support a two-state solution.

Like some Israeli Forrest Gump, he also repeatedly found himself stumbling into history. In the Seventies, he was summoned to meet Golda Meir, a “chain-smoking, Milwaukee-raised Zionist of a generation that knew no nuances and no compromises.” She told him the Palestinians had never existed and so when he heard Finance Minister Bazeal Smotrich repeat the same lie in 2023 he was unsurprised.

For Friedländer, the central sin of Israeli history is the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land. As its advocates become ever-more powerful, he believes, the country he still loves is on its way to becoming an, “authoritarian, apartheid theocracy, something like a mixture of the old South Africa and contemporary Iran”.

In his furious contempt for Bibi and his wife, Sarah, meanwhile, I am reminded of nothing so much as The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen’s novelistic dissection of Israel’s first family as borish “yahoos”.

Friedländer refers to “Jewish colonialism” in Palestine, describes the country’s regime in the West Bank as apartheid, and compares Israelis to Nazis. The arguments set out here are inflammatory and handled bluntly by the nonagenarian survivor.

Yet for all this, remarkably Friedländer remains attached to the Jewish state. Remembering his parents, who tried to flee Europe as the Nazis advanced but were eventually murdered in Auschwitz, he writes that the only “incontrovertible” argument for Zionism is the number of Jews who saved themselves by making aliyah before the Holocaust.

As anti-Israel sentiment spreads around the world following October 7 he finds himself “astonished” and torn. Friedländer frets about suffering in Gaza, but writes that action against Hamas is necessary.

While this diary ends in December of last year, the war in Gaza is ongoing. Whether Israeli democracy will survive remains to be seen.

Diary of A Crisis, by Saul Friedlander

Verso, £18.99

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