Book Review: ‘Diary of a Crisis,’ by Saul Friedländer - The New York …

DIARY OF A CRISIS: Israel in Turmoil, by Saul Friedländer

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” Virginia Woolf asked — in her diary — in 1919, before attempting an answer: “Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” The immediacy of writing without much time for reflection ensured a welcome mode of unthinking, Woolf observed. A diary, she had written a few months earlier, “sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.”

The historian Saul Friedländer began keeping a diary of his own in January 2023 to chronicle his adopted country’s political upheaval as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government encroached on the country’s judicial independence. His near-daily entries are often no more than a couple of paragraphs long and they begin just as Israel’s justice minister, Yariv Levin, unveils a plan to pass a series of laws that would effectively neuter the Israeli Supreme Court, hand Netanyahu’s government unchecked power and turn Israel into what political scientists call a hollow democracy.

Friedländer, who is in his 90s, was born to a Jewish family that emigrated from Prague to Paris during World War II. He arrived in Israel in 1948, just as the state was being formally founded. Though he has spent the past several decades living in the United States, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles and writing a definitive, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Holocaust, Israel remains his spiritual home. It is a place he loves and — as a liberal peacenik invested in a future of two states — increasingly despairs of. “Where did all the liberals disappear to?” he wonders. “Why couldn’t their brand of humane Judaism thrive in the Jewish state? Why the accelerating rush toward fanaticism?”

The journal he was writing now appears under the name “Diary of a Crisis,” as if there were only one to contend with, an irony compounded when Oct. 7 comes and splits his story in two. The first half of his book, full of snippy tsk-tsks, is given over to that rush toward fanaticism. Friedländer describes Netanyahu as a “wily Mafia type ready to burn down his own house to save his skin.” Levin is a “poisonous snake with glasses.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, is an “evil clown.”

His tone as he dissects the latest headlines is indignant, mournful, angry. He argues that the government’s “messianic drive” must be opposed “by all legal means.” As he draws this part of his journal to a close in July 2023, the first of the government’s proposed bills to hobble the Supreme Court is signed into law, placing the future of Israeli democracy in the balance. Still, he takes heart in the country’s newfound pro-democracy movement — the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting the government’s actions — and ends with a tinge of hope.

All of that is dashed, however, when Friedländer picks up his writing again. It is Oct. 7. A Hamas-led force has just breached the security fence separating Israel from Gaza, embarking on a massacre at the site of a music festival and in nearby kibbutzim that will be the most brutal assault on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. “Unbelievable! The country is under attack!” begins his entry from that day, as the book morphs from a rather straightforward synthesis of the news to something more anguished and raw. It’s an attack of the sort Friedländer himself seems to have predicted, writing seven months earlier: “Israel’s enemies are aware of the internal rift and are ready to exploit it. That couldn’t be clearer.”

As the days turn to weeks, and then to months, he also summons a sense of moral outrage for the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. For some in his life, that is not enough. He mentions in passing a friendship that became strained, apparently because of his perceived identification with “the oppressor,” as he puts it, but does not go into further detail.

What is a diary for if not to mull over crumbling friendships and ideological spats? The form should liberate its writer to grapple with demons, to plunder what Woolf calls the “loose, drifting material of life.” Friedländer himself draws on various diaries with astonishing granularity in his books on Nazi Germany. But here, the diary’s astringent, fragmentary format seems only to box him in.

Too many issues raised by the specter of Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza remain underexamined. “Why this hatred?” he writes about growing instances of antisemitism worldwide, before lidding the question. “I won’t start answering here: It demands more than a few sentences, and a lot of thought.”

That is an understandable sentiment for a historian used to sifting through dust. Who, though, but a pre-eminent scholar of Jewish history — one who grew up in the shadows of its collectively defining trauma — is better equipped to give the matter serious thought and report back his findings? His conclusions may be murky, or self-contradictory, and they may not be flattering, but that is precisely the sort of intellectual exercise we turn to the cleareyed Friedländer for.

“Palestine as a hope, and Israel as a reality, are the justification for the existence of a Jewish state on the land of Israel,” Friedländer writes in “Diary of a Crisis” after describing the story of his parents, who never made it there. (Both were killed in Auschwitz.) It is the only convincing justification, he adds, “on condition that we show justice to the people we dispossessed and share the land with them.”

Friedländer continues to espouse the need for a Palestinian state, with even greater urgency after Oct. 7. But he fears there will not be enough moderates on both sides to make it a reality. He does not offer a way out of the morass of war, nor should he be expected to. The book’s closing line paraphrases Charles de Gaulle: “I addressed the complicated Middle East with ideas that were (too) simple.” Friedländer writes modestly of his wish to see the diary through to a conclusion of the war and the release of the hostages, but the entries end before the winter. The book heads to press. Months later, his book is out, and there is still no end in sight. A question from one of his entries reverberates across our bleeding region: “What happened to us?”

DIARY OF A CRISIS: Israel in Turmoil | By Saul Friedländer | Verso | 285 pp. | $24.95