Dawn of the Promised Land: The Creation of Israel

This is a collection of oral histories of those who travelled from all over the world to make a new life and nation in Israel. Ben Wicks is the author of "No Time to Wave Goodbye".

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his introduction, Wicks posits that his book "is the story of a people which through their incredible courage overcame obstacles that most of us would find insurmountable. In doing so, they carved out a home." Now, 50 years later, Wicks has compiled personal accounts of the first Israelis who chose to leave the lands of their birth and years of persecution to forge a homeland in what was then Palestine. He examines the period from the growth of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century to the founding of Israel in 1948. There are hundreds of poignant reminiscences, including those of a wealthy Jewish family from Odessa who left everything behind except what they could carry; those of an Italian couple without visas who entered Palestine illegally as tourists; and those of a family who was smuggled into Haifa by boat. Includes a foreword by Shimon Peres and eight pages of black-and-white photographs. George Cohen