Timing is everything, as Bradley Burston learned on the morning of October 7.
Only a month before, he had dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s’ on The End of Israel, a book based on years of his cogent columns for Haaretz about the potentially fatal divide within Israel over the government’s judicial reform plans.
However, a week before the book’s publication date of October 15, the events of October 7 injected a new, far more ominous meaning to the title.
A more ominous meaning to The End of Israel
“It was immediately clear that a book like that would be at best, irrelevant, and worst, offensive, especially concerning the title,” said Burston last week from his home in Jaffa.
“So I decided to redo the whole thing, focusing on how the eras of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had made Israel vulnerable to an attack like October 7. I had to bring in a lot of different past columns that dealt with that – and managed to keep a few articles that had been in the original book, but the content and direction ended up being entirely different.”
The process took only a couple of months, and the revised book was published on December 10.
“A journalist’s turnaround time,” said the 72-year-old Burston with a chuckle but with no small sense of pride.
Burston has long been one of the most articulate, hardworking, and compassionate voices from the English-speaking Israeli Left – an ardent Zionist who moved in 1976 to Israel from his native California in his 20s as an idealist.
First, as a reporter for The Jerusalem Post in the 1980s (where he served as Gaza Strip correspondent during the founding of Hamas and the first Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s), then with Reuters in the ’90s, and beginning in 2000 as a founding editor of the Haaretz English online edition, which featured his column, “A Special Place in Hell,” on which the book is based, Burston has gently but persuasively made the case for a two-state solution that would ensure Israel’s security and provide the Palestinians with their national aspirations. Today, in retirement, the passion to make Israel better has not diminished an iota.
“What’s interesting to me is that some of the issues that I wrote about many years ago have not changed substantially. For instance, the debate over who could lead the Palestinian people in a way that some Israeli government could reasonably accept,” said Burston.
“There’s a column in the book that was written in 2010, and the headline is ‘Free Barghouti Now’ [referring to Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian touted as a potential future leader who is currently serving life sentences for murder], and I was looking at Haaretz today, and they’re talking about how there aren’t many leaders who could lead the Palestinians but one of them is Marwan Barghouti. And I was thinking – it’s not exactly the more things change, it’s the idea that many of these issues were current a long, long time ago and have just been festering.”
BURSTON ATTRIBUTES that festering to the policies of Netanyahu, who is the writer’s foil throughout the book. Rather than accusing him of maliciousness, Burston said that Netanyahu is much more intent on keeping things in a status quo that will limp along indefinitely.
“It’s a mistake or simplistic to think that Netanyahu has some kind of grand overarching design... But one of the recurring themes in the book is his exploitation of the idea that when there’s war or terrorism, then you can’t make peace. And then, when there’s relative peace and calm, there’s no reason to make peace. There’s no urgency,” he said.
“The result is that his ideology is ‘Do as little as possible for as long as possible to change the relative status quo.’ And hope for the best.
“In fact, it would have worked, had he not been compelled to stay in office forever. Because what could have happened if he rode off into the sunset a few years ago... He would very unlikely be held directly responsible for October 7, which was the worst thing that’s taken place here – certainly in 50 years, and maybe in 75.”
According to Burston, over the last year since forming his coalition with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu has boxed himself into a number of situations that he himself may not have preferred or initiated.
“But the reality of his coalition, coupled with his wishful thinking that Hamas could be mollified or bought off and therefore contained, and his desire to sideline the Palestinian issue altogether, created an impossible situation,” he said.
According to Burston, Netanyahu squandered opportunities to move toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even when he had the support in his government to do so.
“There were times, especially during the Obama years, when Netanyahu could have joined the pantheon of leaders like Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Sharon, and Middle East leaders like Sadat, who all abandoned their original hardline ideology and moved toward compromise,” he said.
“But, of course, those examples suggested that you had to be all in – to the extent that in order to be an Israeli leader willing to take chances for peace, you had to come to the table with the knowledge that there are going to be people literally gunning for you, and still say, ‘This is the most important thing – it’s worth my life.’ And he didn’t do that.
“In 2012, he had 94 seats in his coalition, and he really could have done anything he wanted and could have moved in any direction. That was the classic test of the idea that if there’s relative calm, you don’t have to do anything. You can continue with doing as little as possible for as long as possible.”
That stasis directly impacted the events of October 7, with Burston positing that Netanyahu knew that a perfect storm was brewing.
“He was specifically warned, and the warnings got worse as the year went on,” he said. “After October 7, Bibi tried to fob it off, saying ‘I wasn’t warned, military intelligence didn’t tell me.’ But the truth is there were public statements made throughout the year, some by recently retired generals warning of that perfect storm brewing. And it turned out that there was.”
BURSTON SAID that his book’s title doesn’t refer to a literal end of Israel and a dispersal of the Jews back to Babylonia, but rather, like the famed REM song, it’s an end of Israel “as we know it.”
“There’s going to be – at least I hope – a country once the war ends. But the title of the book was important for me because it also has that other meaning – what is the end goal of having a Jewish state?
“So many elements of Israel need to be restored in a myriad of ways – security-wise and unity-wise, it seems to me things have been damaged severely.
“And Netanyahu and his unfortunate allies have been doing everything they can to be divisive – that’s not a good thing during a war, and it’s not a good thing when there’s not a war,” said Burston.
“What’s left of what is great about Israel is the incredible bonds between people, friends, and families. But almost everything else I felt when I first got here that was truly miraculous and wonderful has been attacked and eroded. And that’s going to be true if Bibi is here for another 10 years or if he’s gone tomorrow.”
Still, Burston, who was part of a group that established Kibbutz Gezer, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and served many years in the IDF as a combat medic, is still as hard-core Zionist as he was when he was fresh off the boat.
“This country has given me a tremendous amount, and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for. It’s also given me my family (including children and grandchildren), which to me is the root of happiness.”
Full disclosure: The writer played drums behind Burston’s guitar for two years in their garage rock band, The Nightcallers.
- THE END OF ISRAEL: DISPATCHES FROM A PATH TO CATASTROPHE
- By Bradley Burston
- Fryman Press, Berkeley
- 371 pages; $19