In Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land, a book-length critique of My Promised Land, forensic scholar Norman Finkelstein includes a table that juxtaposes Shavit’s various descriptions of Palestinians and Jews. What it reveals is the systematicity with which he associates Palestinians with filth, disease, and cultural and technological backwardness. By contrast, Shavit goes to excessive lengths to underscore his Jewish characters’ taste for European high culture, to the degree that it constitutes something of a leitmotif. Jewish-Israeli contributions to agronomy and medicine, among other civilization-enhancing values, are repeatedly underscored.

Given their pervasiveness, one cannot escape the feeling that these dehumanizing tropes serve a strategic function in the book’s overarching polemic. And indeed, the reader’s acceptance of Shavit’s most provocative contention—that the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was not only tragic but also morally justified on the grounds that it brought the State of Israel into existence—is emotionally and rhetorically premised on this prior matrix of orientalist characterizations. As Finkelstein puts it: “The tacit message is that Palestinians, if left to their own devices, would have produced just another destitute, dreary, and despotic Arab state, while the world would have been deprived of Israel’s high-tech industries, cutting-edge inventions, and flourishing cultural landscape.”

To read the rest of the review, visit The Cairo Review of Global Affairs