A Lost Utopia

The village of Tantura (1933) | American Colony (Jerusalem) / G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress / Public Domain

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: 

They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached and where David and Solomon ruled? For nearly four thousand years, the land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people. It’s always been our home; it will always be our home. 

His retort implied that the state of Israel’s existence is inevitable. 

That myth is demolished in Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History (Other Press, 2025), first published in Swedish in 1996 and recently updated by the author for this new English translation. In a powerful account of his growing disenchantment with his parent’s conception of Israel as a utopia for Jews, Rosenberg presents Zionism as a flawed vision with a tragic aspect: Far from being inevitable, the modern state of Israel, as he recounts its history, evolved in brutal policies that belied the utopian hopes on which the new nation had been founded in 1948.

The Swedish-born son of Holocaust survivors, Rosenberg is perhaps best known for his 2012 account of his father’s life and his own childhood in A Brief Stop on the Road to Auschwitz, a book quickly translated into English, as well as many other languages. Readers familiar with that harrowing memoir may initially be surprised by the research-driven prose of Israel. In A Brief Stop, historical passages supplement the narrator’s fragmented understanding of his father’s private life, but in Israel, the emphasis is reversed. Scenes from Rosenberg’s private life are only sparingly used to punctuate an overarching historical narrative. 

Yet when the author permits himself a personal parenthesis, his memory is sharp, his language richly evocative. Take for example, a sentence describing his life on a kibbutz in the early sixties, only a few years before Likud’s ascent: 

I still remember the early, dewy mornings as sleep was slowly wrenched from our bodies, and the smell of soil rose to our nostrils, and the creaking of the tractor drawn-platform rocked us to the fields and plantations in the twilight of dawn, and the sensuality of idealistic self-torture slowly warmed our cheeks and hands. 

Here agricultural life within the commune appears in all its sensuous glory, an idyll filled with purpose: “My first Israel was a boy’s fantasy, a scout’s dream, an endless summer camp.” 

In the Israel of Rosenberg’s youth (he moved there from Sweden in 1962 at age 13), the founders of the state still ran it, and “there was a unique continuity between …ideology and practice, between vision and reality.” Labor Zionist ideologues and settler pioneers still occupied the political echelons, and their ideals formed the country into which newcomers like Rosenberg and his family were being initiated. 

“There were no myths,” he writes, “only truths and lies.” The country’s ideology had a way of “shedding light on what should be seen and shrouding in darkness what should be hidden and forgotten.” In his two and half years living in Israel, he never spoke to any Palestinians, who “were not part of our lives except as a threat.” 

In accordance with Labor Zionism’s principles, Israeli Jews were expected to dress simply, avoid ostentation, prize the collective over the individual, to embrace equality. Rosenberg had these values instilled at school, in his participation in youth brigades, while volunteering on a kibbutz. Pilgrimages to important historical sites served to bond the youth to the landscape. On the hike to Masada, he learned of the Sicarii, the 900 Jews who, in 70 CE, had committed collective suicide there rather than surrender to the Romans besieging them—a story which became a symbol of Jewish continuity in the Holy Land. So effective was Rosenberg’s Zionist bildung that even when his family aborted their Israeli experiment and returned to Sweden, he left with the private hope to go back to Israel as soon as possible.  

Rosenberg takes care to avoid making a monolith of Zionism, showing that as far back as the nineteenth century, factions debated its means and ends. Over the course of the twentieth century, this division became all the more acute. The Cultural Zionists sought to establish a Jewish state in the hopes of forming a cultural and spiritual center that would sustain the whole of the world’s Jews, regardless of where they resided. For the Revisionist Zionists, the formation of an ethnic nation-state was an end in itself. Having emerged from the ethnically complex societies of Eastern Europe, theirs was a nationalism “based on honor, cohesion, and strength, and eventually on expansion and racism.” Attaining their own nation-state would allow the Jews to become “a wolf among wolves, always suspicious, always ready to strike, always commanding the respect of its neighbors … the mystical embodiment of a preexisting Jewish nation.”

Rosenberg’s personal disillusionment came in 1967. At the time a student in college, he had joined a leftist organization in Stockholm. The so-called Six-Day War that June had abruptly ended with Israel in control of the Golan Heights, previously part of Syria; the West Bank including East Jerusalem, previously part of Jordan; and the Sinai peninsula, including the Gaza Strip, previously part of Egypt. 

His leftist comrades had sided with the Arab states, in keeping with the position of the world revolutionary avant-garde in Beijing. When Rosenberg set out to refute their views, his research led him to a dramatic change of heart. He learned of demolished Palestinian neighborhoods, destroyed villages, and the burgeoning refugee camps in the West Bank. Returning to Israel, he had his first meetings with Palestinians. “New histories,” he writes, “were put into my hands, old truths were questioned, and hitherto unknown perspectives became visible.” 

Rosenberg highlights how the codification of conquest into law became a major tool for the Zionist project. Ambiguous—and thus politically convenient—references to “security concerns” became the specious justifications for ideological goals. The government that formed between 1967 and 1973, sometimes referred to as “the era of the Israeli empire,” differed from the previous one in that it had no qualms about asserting the sovereign power of the Israeli state over the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Military-minded technocrats eclipsed the “ideological puritans” of Labor Zionism, social and cultural taboos faded, and new leaders bought expensive properties and opened illegal bank accounts abroad. Huge amounts of capital were spent on colonizing the West Bank, on establishing cities and ports in North Sinai, on a war along the Suez Canal. Israel’s colonial goals were now in full view. 

Jump ahead half a century: Israel’s Prime Minister is embroiled in a corruption trial, and his government has passed legislation hamstringing the country’s judiciary. The Minister of National Security has previously been convicted of racist incitement and supporting terrorism. The Minister of Finance, as reported on in these pages, systematically withholds the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And the defense ministers have overseen a genocide that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians. These are the heirs of Israel’s nationalist ideology—the neo-fascist progeny of Zionism’s most aggressive strain.  

In addition to his discussion of Israel’s latest atrocities in Gaza, Rosenberg uses a new final chapter of Israel to account for a past one—forgotten and suppressed for over 75 years: Tantura. In May 1948, Israeli soldiers massacred 200 of the Palestinian village’s inhabitants in Israel’s so-called War of Independence. A settlement formed in the ruins. The newcomers used stones from the Palestinian homes to build their own. Any traces of the previous community were expunged from the landscape. In its place, the settlers built a seaside resort. 

The story of Tantura bears an unsettling resemblance to Daniella Weiss’s proposal to claim Gaza’s beachfront for Jewish settlers, or Donald Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” (The AI-generated video posted to the president’s Truth Social account, featuring Trump and Netanyahu sunbathing in Gaza, remains one of the more bizarre moments of the current presidency—and an early indication of the image generator’s techno-fascist aesthetic.)

While I had initially found it odd that Rosenberg had chosen to look backward in the final chapter of this latest version of Israel, I see now that his retrospection illuminates the present, showing his readers that the horrors of present day Gaza are neither a historical novelty, nor an unforeseeable development in what has become a tragic history.