On the trip home I read your book from cover to cover. It is easily the most important thing I have read on Israel in years, perhaps ever. Why? because it gets to the structural underpinnings of the tragic "dead end" of Israeli life. My admiration for you book is only matched by my disappointment in knowing that it has not been given the attention it deserves.

January 2008

In 1947, when the Truman administration was considering its stance towards the Palestine mandate that Britain was abandoning, the State Departments senior intelligence official, William Eddy, warned that partition "would only intensify support for Zionist expansion and would represent an endorsement of a theocratic sovereign state characteristic of the Dark Ages. For those familiar with the Jewish community in Palestine and its ideological roots, the first prediction might have seemed reasonable enough, but the second an outlandish prospect for the secular socialist idealistic society that had taken root. Both evocative memoir and sober analysis, Ofra Yeshua-Lyths penetrating study reveals that Eddys grim prediction is not the fantasy it might once have seemed. She reviews the painful course by which the chains of religious orthodoxy from which the early Zionists sought to escape have become hanging cords, as Israeli Jews accept life in a homemade trap constructed from the dedication to expansionism and religious-nationalist domination that shatters aspirations for democracy and enlightenment. These might yet become more than mocking words, she suggests, but not without a willingness to face honestly the internal contradiction in the concept of a democratic Jewish state.

July 2007

The foremost strength of the book is how it critiques not simply the religious establishment but how that establishment and its values have crept into the consciousness of the political-Zionist so-called "Liberal Left". These days, in an era where radicalized criticism of Islamic "religious fundamentalism" has become a mainstream intellectual trend, it is enlightening to meet an author and a work that exposes the political reality to the effect religious fundamentalism was introduced to the Middle East by political Zionism and that the State of Israel is a primary fundamentalist religious actor in the Middle East equations.

June 2007

This is a daring book, written in a country where the consensus is oppressive because the political correctness here requires not only proper language but also a proper defense of an improper, oppressive religion by a population which is the most non-religious one on earth. This is shameless hypocrisy. Behind it stands a secular religion, and secular religion is politically a most dangerous 20th-century disease.

Dear Ofra,

It was totally exciting for me to read your book. What you have to say resonates completely with thoughts and feelings I have but didn't know how to thread together, which you do!

Amazingly already in the first paragraph you describe a scene I experienced in 2004. I went with a few women friends to an end of a road in a village outside Biet-Lehem to lay on the ground and watch for shooting Stars. I didn't get to see many meteors that evening but I was thinking to myself that only in the Palestinian territories is it possible to be in the dark of night and see stars. Every Israeli habitation is always flooded by light.

I think that any discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which does not include a discussion on the origin, agenda, activities, mobilization and implication of the national religious (fundamentalist) movement in Israel is seriously flawed.

Hi Ofra,

… I want to restate how much I enjoyed your book. I admire how you critique your own culture and society while still being very much absorbed in what is great about it, and how it can become greater. I don't know if it's easy for an average Israeli, often understandably on the defensive in different ways, physically or ideologically, to be as self-reflective as you have been.

As I've been watching the news these past few weeks, I've been thinking about the ideas in your book and how relevant and important they are. I hope you find your audience outside of Israel to be more receptive…
Your book occupies two distinct, though intertwined areas; that of personal experience, and that of critique. Specially, your critique seems to centre on power` that is, a small but powerful segment of society that places a virtual stronghold on the larger parts and certainly any efforts at peace and progressive change. However, what I think is the biggest strength of the book is how it critiques not simply the religious establishment but how that establishment and its values have crept into the consciousness of the average Israeli. To quote Virginia Woolf, the religious establishment is constantly "demanding sympathy" from the larger segments of the population, and you are asking the large, Secular masses to evaluate their values, to evaluate the myths they have been told, to look at the roots of Zionism, and how a very pure ideal, an honest desire has been corrupted.

I have to say your chapter on Herzl kept coming back to me, it certainly is not the most dramatic, but I find something quite captivating about early Zionism, and you presented that chapter with a certain fluidity I enjoyed very much. I also found the conclusion at the end of chapter two excellent. You state your ideas so clearly there, and provide a great foundation through which the reader can follow your line of thought. There is a wonderfully humorous element throughout, but you always come back to a well thought out, theoretical basis for your arguments.

Those are just a few instances among many; I found your personal reflection on your grandmothers also fascinating, as well as your anecdotes of your days as a journalist. Chapter nine was moving a wonderful combination of criticism, humour and warmth. I also found your use of quotes at the beginning of each chapter excellent…. I think you have something quite promising on your hands, and I hope it is recognized.

Yours truly,
Jenny
January 2007