Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil

Searching reflections on the crisis in Israel and Gaza by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Holocaust

Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedländer began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question--the ＂elephant in the room,＂ according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary after Hamas’s 7 October assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions.

Friedländer weaves together profound reflections on a national history in which he has been an active participant. He describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, ＂There is no Palestinian people.＂ For Friedländer, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He argues that despite the continuing bloodshed, a two-state solution remains the only long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.

Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the Nazi occupation of 1940-44. He left for Israel in 1948. A recipient of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honour, he is the author of the standard two-volume history of the Holocaust, Years of Persecution and Years of Extermination, which won a Pulitzer in 2008. His recent books include Proustian Uncertainties and a memoir, Where Memory Leads. He lives in California.