Dawn of the Promised Land: The Creation of Israel

The most valuable aspect of Canadian journalist Wicks's book about the founding of the Jewish state is the first-person accounts of what it was like to emigrate to mandate Palestine. Wicks's interviewees tell in uninterrupted monologues their experiences of travel by ship or over land, the work they did when they arrived, their living conditions, and how they participated in the nascent army. These tales of triumph over adversity are spliced into a disjointed narrative of international and Zionist politics. Neither new information nor a fresh perspective is added to this history, which Wicks introduces with the 1917 Balfour declaration and concludes with the 1948 war, and which includes the illegal immigration movement and the development of the Jewish Defense Force. Complicated truths are sacrificed throughout by the narrative need to tell a neat success story, for example, that the kibbutz ""remains a major way of life in Israel to this day."" Wicks subtly perpetuates a hierarchy in which German Jews were the most progressive population in the land and Sephardic Jews and Arabs could only benefit from their interventions. Arabs living close to Jews, for instance, ""quickly realised that their lives need not remain rooted in past traditions."" This is an unexamined and sentimental account of a story that has been told better in many other books. 8 pages b&w photos. (Sept.)