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The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 Paperback – March 6, 2007

by Gershom Gorenberg (Author)

4.4 62 ratings

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"Remarkably insightful . . . A groundbreaking revision that deserves to reframe the entire debate . . . It soars."―The New York Times Book Review

In The Accidental Empire, Gershom Gorenberg examines the strange birth of the settler movement in the ten years following the Six-Day War and finds that it was as much the child of Labor Party socialism as of religious extremism. The giants of Israeli history―Dayan, Meir, Eshkol, Allon―all played major roles in this drama, as did more contemporary figures like Sharon, Rabin, and Peres. Gorenberg also shows how three American presidents turned a blind eye to what was happening in the territories, and reveals their strategic reasons for doing so.

Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Gorenberg calls into question much of what we think we know about this issue that continues to haunt the Middle East.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publication date

March 6, 2007
Dimensions

6 x 1.08 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0805082417
ISBN-13

978-0805082418
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A thoroughly documented, pathbreaking analysis of Israel's disastrous settlement project in the occupied territories; it reads like a chapter in Barbara Tuchman's well-known book, The March of Folly.” ―Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All and The Israelis: Founders and Sons

“The Accidental Empire is an extraordinary book. It offers insight and understanding into a period that has never been well understood. After the 1967 war, few in Israel recognized the inherent problems of building Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line, for they were torn between reason and spiritual attachment to the land. As Gershom Gorenberg shows in this wonderfully written history, the building of settlements took on a life of its own-too easy to do, too hard to stop, and too easy to simply let happen.” ―Dennis Ross, former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, and author of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace

“A groundbreaking investigation into the origins of one of the most contentious issues in Arab-Israeli relations-and in the Middle East-and a valuable reference for journalists, students, and scholars interested in the region.” ―Michael B. Oren, author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Gershom Gorenberg has given us a meticulously researched, dispassionate and highly readable history of how Israel slipped into the settlement of occupied lands. The Accidental Empire is an invaluable guide to one of the Middle East's most complex issues and will puncture illusions on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” ―Jackson Diehl, columnist, The Washington Post

“The Accidental Empire casts a stark light on Israel's settlement of the lands it gained in the Six-Day War. Gershom Gorenberg contends that the Israeli left, as well as the Orthodox right, backed a policy that, though born of a felt need for security, encumbered the quest for peace-and that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger also failed to foresee the long-term costs. This tragic tale suggests how a fearful nation helped foster the very threats it sought to escape.” ―David Greenberg, Rutgers University, author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image

About the Author

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount and co-author of Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin. The Jerusalem correspondent for the Forward, he has also written for The Jerusalem Report, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The American Prospect. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Holt Paperbacks; First Edition (March 6, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805082417
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805082418
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.08 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #199,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #158 in Religious Groups & Communities Studies
- #298 in Israel & Palestine History (Books)
- #574 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 62 ratings

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Gershom Gorenberg

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Gershom Gorenberg is a historian and journalist who has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for over 35 years.

His latest book, "War of Shadows," began with a conversation in Jerusalem that set off years of searching through archives, attics, streets in Cairo, Rome, London - endless days and nights of seeing facts unravel and new ones take shape in place of them, of following one lead to another to find someone who remembered the mysterious woman at Bletchley Park who discovered Rommel's source in British headquarters - an obsessive hunt that led to the real story of how the Nazis came within an inch of conquering the Middle East.

Gorenberg was previously the author of three critically acclaimed books - The Unmaking of Israel, The Accidental Empire, and The End of Days – and coauthor of Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Gorenberg is a columnist for The Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He will return to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2021 to teach the workshop he created on writing history.

He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, journalist Myra Noveck. They have three children – Yehonatan, Yasmin and Shir-Raz.

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Ichabod

Thorough and credible

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2024

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After reading several texts on varying viewpoints, I found this to be among the most thoroughly detailed. I recommend it for all who seek more than the surface of news journalism.

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Christopher M. Whitman Jr.

If you like Tom Segev style writing you will like this book

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2011

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Gorenberg adopts a Tom Segev style approach to writing, meaning he uses a lot of diary inputs from the people involved. He also uses the Israeli archives for quotes and information which I personally like more. The book is a little slow and is about creating the foundation for the rest of the book. He discusses the process of creating the settlements, the attention given to them, and the manipulation of the system for Israeli government goals. He did a lot of great research but only on specific topics. He fails to utilize other writings to be able to formulate the background to the June 1967 war. This is where I think his relying on Israeli diaries is a little bit of disinformation. No one really doubts that the every day Israeli was afraid of 1967 before it handed and thought the worse. But this was not a view held by anyone serious in the government, they knew Israel would win handily and that they planned the war for months in advance. This is my main complaint, but the rest of the book is very good. The title is a little iffy since he seems to prove it was more systematic and planned but I think what he meant was more involving the maintaining of the land, not the settlement enterprise in itself. That is my assumption from the way he words it in the book. A good read if you want a different approach to the settlement issue.

8 people found this helpful

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Matthew Smith

An outstanding work

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2008

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This is an excellent work on this subject. Gorenberg has given readers a valuable look into how Israel's spectacular victory in June 1967 has become one of the most entangled quagmires in the world. His research and scholarship have laid open the events of June 67 and the eventual occupation like never before with a level of detail rarely matched. His book is a clinical account of the circumstances and the political players who drifted towards the situation that eventually reigned.

The most fascinating aspect of this account and history of this occupation is how it came about. It was not the inevitable consequence of a determined leadership guiding a resolute population, but was instead the bungling of a ruling political party in its last gasps and a fractured population riven with ethnic, religious and political strife. The governments of Eshkol, Meir and Rabin were almost completely ineffectual, and hamstrung by their own inertia so that instead of guiding occupation policy their governments were guided by the policies of occupation and settlement. After 67 Israel was in a unique position in its very short history, they had the power. Instead of the little besieged nation fighting for its existence, Israel had become a warrior nation of mythic proportions, and Israel needed a strong determined leadership to shore up its gains and present a decisive negotiating partner on the international stage. Instead Israel's labor leaders let Israel drift with no real policy, while allowing fringe groups to dictate settlement policy to the government.

I was extremely impressed by the author's attention paid to those settlers. He gives readers an excellent glimpse into the minds of these vastly different people. He offers their letters and correspondences to give readers an insight into what settler life was like for the different ranges of settlers from the religious to the secular leftists. He not only offers the viewpoints and perspective of the leaders of these movements, but also the grassroots level people. This top down perspective gives his audience a feel for the complexity and diversity of Israeli society, and also the almost impossible tightrope political leaders were forced to walk to keep this society together (or the more cynical viewpoint to keep their ruling coalitions together so they could hang on to power).

The author does not limit his focus to Israel though. Instead the author gives us a macro look detailing the outlooks and policies pursued by successive U.S. administrations, and writing somewhat of the Palestinian perspective as well. These different international perspectives are essential to understand what the Israeli political leaders faced and what options they had. It also goes a long way in showing the inherent difficulty in dealing with a superpower that has an election every four years that can drastically change policies directed towards those politicians and their country.

The fact that this offer tackled such a complex and sordid topic, and did so with such a tremendous level of research and courage is astounding. The author has done the world a service in producing this work, and giving us a very unique and detailed look into this extremely important 10 years (67-77). If you are interested at all in Israeli history or the Middle East then this book has to be on your shelf. I highly recommend this book.

6 people found this helpful

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Douglas Thorpe

Adds much to a better understanding of the historical context of the current strife in the West Bank and Gaza

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2006

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It is essential in reading this book, and perhaps more significantly in reading reviews of this book, to separate the views of religious expansionists from those of the secular government and of by far the highest portion of the population of Israel throughout its existence regarding the settlements. It is also important to compare the strong emotional, almost messianic, attachment to the land of Samaria and Judea felt and espoused by the settlers with the need of the government to "create facts" on the land that supposedly distinguished its own internal legal opinions, and those of most of the rest of the world, regarding the "legality" of the settlements. Whatever personal views you may have on these and other core issues raised by Gorenberg's thoroughly researched, well documented and extensively footnoted work, his dispassionate, well written report of the events is an invaluable reference work that helps define the significance of the settlements as contributing to Middle East unrest. Moreover, Gorenberg's fascinating report of the inner workings of the Eshkol, Meir and Rabin cabinets, and the arrogant disregard of official government policy by cabinet members who represented a small but powerful portion of the population, provide insight into the intrigues that seemingly drive many national decisions in Israel because of the need to form coalition governments that direct the policies of the country.

11 people found this helpful

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Norman Shaw

Very detailed commentary with many citations to back up the ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2016

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Very detailed commentary with many citations to back up the facts as presented in the book. It is clear that there is no one political party that can claim the settlements are theirs.

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Havel Boris

A Rearly Discussed but Relevant Topic

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2011

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The Accidental Empire seeks to explain how Israeli settlements were created. The author uses a great deal of relevant sources, inclusding some archive sources. It is a well-written and easy to read book.
I would, however, object its heavy ideological anti-Zionist leftist bias, present at almost every page. A main premise of this work is that Jewish presence in the West Bank is unjust/unjustifiable, and that settlements are an expression of imperialism. At the same time, the author, to his credit, does not omit historical, strategic, military and other aspects of Jewish connection to the land, which speak to the contrary of the mentioned premise.
This book explores an issue rarely discussed in the historical studies of Israel and the Middle East. Its historical value is undiniable, but it should be red with caution, avoiding ideological traps.

9 people found this helpful

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