Josep Pla facing the highly complex mirror of Israel

Given the current situation, it makes perfect sense to revisit the chronicles and articles that Josep Pla wrote about Israel for Destinationwhich he later turned into the book Israel in 1957Furthermore, after the Hamas attacks of October 2023 and the war of extermination against the Palestinians waged by the Netanyahu government ever since, presenting Pla's book today is no easy task. The journalist Andreu Barnils wrote the prologue, and it has been well done: he provides historical perspective and compares past and present—before, Israel was David, he says, and now it is Goliath—; he strives to be guided by a coherent but not didactic ethical compass; he criticizes the exaggerated paternalism with which Europeans approach the Arab-Israeli conflict and judge Jews and Muslims; he combines general reflection with personal experiences...

Although he only spent about four weeks in the summer of 1957, the impression the reader gets is that Josep Pla got to know Israel well, and that he was able to recount it with his usual grace and vivacity, although, as Xavier Pla rightly pointed out in his biography, A furtive heartHere we find more of a reporter's approach than a literary one. However, this doesn't mean there aren't paragraphs that are top-notch literature, for example, when he describes the blues of the Mediterranean Sea or the cypress trees of Haifa.

It is true that, as a whole, the book feels cluttered and disjointed, and it is clear that it was pieced together more from a barrage of disparate materials than from a well-thought-out overall structure. It is also true that it is repetitive. However, Pla's approach to that Israel founded nine years earlier, and then fresh from a victorious military operation against Egypt for control of the Sinai Peninsula, remains fascinating for two reasons: for the vision it offers of a national experiment unique in world history—a vision of the Arab world that inspires admiration—and for everything it reveals about him as a Catalan nationalist who had to write in Spanish during Franco's regime.

Pla's Zionist enthusiasm

Let's begin with the enthusiasm that Zionism generates in him. From the moment he boards the Theodor Herzl, the ship given by Germany as reparations for the Jewish Revolution, which sails from Marseille to Haifa loaded with Jews of all kinds and conditions, until he leaves the country, Pla is amazed by all sorts of things: by the "superhuman effort" of the Jewish people to preserve their identity as pioneering Zionists, by their ability to nationally amalgamate Jews from all backgrounds, by how they take the old anti-Semitic prejudice that Jews only know how to do easy tasks (trading, lending money) and turn it on its head by becoming farmers and technological and military experts...

Two aspects particularly fascinate Pla: the revival of Hebrew, then a language "more dead than Latin," and the sophisticated hydraulic engineering mechanisms used to "conquer" the desert and bring water throughout the country. Related to this, we find the book's weakest—and most outrageous—point: Pla ignores, or outright dismisses, everything that existed before the creation of Israel. "Beersheba was an Arab village, devoured by the sun, filth, and total disorder. Now it is a town of more than 30,000 inhabitants, with a perfectly urbanized center..." That Pla, who was among the first to criticize the devastation of the Costa Brava, wrote this makes it all the more scandalous. However, it should be added that the chapter dedicated to Palestinian refugees, based on UNRWA reports, is sympathetic and insightful in its explanation of how they have been abandoned by everyone and used for nefarious purposes.

Regarding Pla's writings, two aspects seem crucial to me. One is how he addresses the religious question: he celebrates the secular spirit of Israel, says it's fortunate that pious Jews are a minority, associates religion with filth and backwardness... We must consider the effect these opinions would have had on readers in Francoist Spain. The other crucial aspect, of course, is language. Pla writes: "When Jews speak and write their language, their personality will be much more concrete and authentic." He was forced to write this, originally, in Castilian Spanish. He knew perfectly well that peoples who lose their language become vague and false. Josep Pla went to Israel to report on this as a reporter, and in the end, he came across as a Catalan nationalist.