I didn’t collect stamps or coins like normal folks. Through a half-century’s haunting of used book stores and library book sales, I’ve accumulated over a thousand non-fiction books on our Jewish homeland of Israel, ancient and modern.
Beyond the joy of collecting and reading and re-reading my favorites, I have this obsession that if we “Zionists” could just get our fellow grassroots US Jews who lack interest in Israel to read a couple stirring accounts of what Krauthammer rightly called the miraculous event of our time, our people’s historic homeland’s sovereign rebirth, they’d become Zionists too.
And all of us sometimes fall prey to the malevolent myths perpetrated by those who don’t mean Jews well – from “King David was as real as King Arthur” to “Israel’s a colonial settler state oppressing ‘Palestinian’ natives. Reading good Israel books is the antidote.
Two places to get these mostly “used” Israel books are Amazon and AbeBooks.com.
In 1939 Britain, Trustee of the Palestine Mandate to rebuild there the “Jewish national home” with “close settlement of Jews on the land,” reneged by slamming Palestine’s gates to us Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. Palestine’s Jews – in acts of stirring courage by them and survivors themselves – responded with sailing survivors in rickety ships into the teeth of the British blockade. Few accounts of 20th century defiance of imperial injustice are more moving.
The underground Irgun and LEHI fought in their own ways against British efforts to stifle Jewish immigration to the land of Israel, including bombing the British offices wing of the King David Hotel, the Acre Fortress prisoner escape, assassinations and more. The Altalena tragedy during the 1948 War culminated their separate existence.
Israel successfully threw back the instant Arab invasion of 1948, but that war was suspended by UN-imposed ceasefire with Jordan in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria. When Jordan renewed fighting in 1967, Israel ousted it from all areas west of the River, restoring Jewish control to our people’s entire historic homeland. Among the most gripping of Jewish history books are those on the 1967 Six Day War.
