By Martin van Creveld
The definitive one-volume background of Israel by way of its such a lot distinctive historian From its Zionist beginnings on the finish of the 19th century during the previous sixty, tumultuous years, the country of Israel has been, as van Creveld argues, “the maximum luck tale within the complete 20th century.” during this crisp quantity, he skillfully relates the unbelievable tale of a nationless those that, given a scorching and arid patch of land and dealing with each conceivable hindrance, based a rustic that's now the envy of surrounding states. whereas such a lot reviews on Israel specialise in the political, this encompassing heritage weaves jointly the nation’s monetary, social, cultural and spiritual narratives whereas additionally delivering diplomatic suggestions to aid Israel in attaining peace. with no query, this can be the simplest one-volume background of Israel and its humans.
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Example text
Most were not members of the assimilated middle class, to which he himself belonged, but the so-called Ostjuden, eastern European Jews, who had recently arrived in the Austrian capital and were desperately trying to make their way in it. In fact, “the programmatic encouragement of the settlement in Palestine with Jewish agricultural workers, laborers, and those pursuing other trades” (a resolution adopted by the First Zionist Congress) had started twenty years earlier. The signal was given by the Russian pogroms of 1881–1883, which in turn were sparked off by the assassination of Tsar Alexander III.
It even attracted immigrants from these countries. It also paid more than its share of taxes into the Ottoman treasury. ”9 Nevertheless, poverty was extreme. The country had neither industry, nor industrial workers, nor capital to speak of. The cities were filthy, crowded, and swarming with an ill-clad, barefooted, Lumpenproletariat trying to live hand to mouth while constantly pressing foreigners, all of whom were considered wealthy, for baksheesh (alms). Some villages had barely changed since Biblical times, consisting mostly of one- or two-room hovels made of mud bricks dried in the sun and packed closely together to provide for mutual defense.
On one hand was the movement of Jews out of the ghettoes that started around the time of the French Revolution and gathered steam throughout the nineteenth century; on the other, the rise, from about 1860 on, of modern, race-based, anti-Semitism. The first encouraged Jews to integrate themselves into the surrounding gentile society, which they were assisted in doing by the widespread tendency toward civil emancipation in the West. The second frustrated their efforts and often made a mockery of them; the harder they tried, the less accepted they were.