A very personal narrative of the history of the country. The title says it all it is both a victim of and a beneficiary of circumstance

The best non-fiction work I have read in a while. Part memoir, part history, part editorial, had a personal angle for me because of the parallels in our family history. His grandfather and my great grandfather we both at the first Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland in 1897. My mom was born in the Palestine of secular/liberal/socialist Zionism of a family that had left the pograms of 1890s Lithuania (and arrived via South Africa). From there, our families diverged, but I was brought up on the early myths of liberal Zionism (the worst of which represented by the line "A land without a people for a people without a land") and came to be aware of the horror of the colonialist/nationalist/anti-liberal and even terrorist side of the founding of Israel as a teenager and adult.

Ari Shavat is able to capture the history of Israel and all the contradictions one has to reconcile: the destruction of European Jewry, the idealism and wonder of what (a least the tradition I knew of) Jews escaping the diaspora and the killing fields of Europe created in Israel, but also the Palestinian Nakba and the reality that the founding of Israel was compromised at its core by the destruction and transfer of a people from their homes, as well as the ongoing occupation and discrimination within Israel as well against its non-Jewish population which is destroying any deal of Israel as a normal, free democratic state. His ability to be both proud of Israel and a Zionist and deeply conscious of its flaws and empathetic to its victims is impressive. He destroys the idea that there is a simple good/evil or pro/anti story here.

The one chapter that rubbed me the wrong way was his reporting on the threat of a Nuclear Iran. Unlike other chapters, I think he overweighted his editorial point of view and did not present with fairness the others. But this is a small complaint in a great book.

It didn't have a good way to wind down--he tries to find a angle for hope for Israel, but I don't think he achieves it.

I'd recommend it highly and suggest reading alongside Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh

A stunning book, and a great awakening of sorts for me personally. Shavit tells the story of Israel, beginning with Herzl and the first Zionists who dreamt of salvation from Europe’s pogroms and of a return to their homeland of two millennia earlier, and ending with the modern practical, moral, and existential questions like how to handle the perpetual occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the Iranian nuclear threat. The whole story is fascinating, and really well told, using interviews and personal stories mixed with context and a point of view (which I generally agreed with). I can’t wait to consume more and more about Israel’s history and its future before Sara’s and my trip there later this year.

An outstanding collection of essays and reflections that start with Shavit's great-grandfather arriving in 1897 and end with the aftermath of the 2013 elections.

Tremendously readable and unblinking look at the triumphs and disasters of Zionism's first century. Shavit is as sharp on the failures of the Left as he is on the excesses of the Right. Hard to imagine this changing anyone's mind, but it's bloody good all the same.

I disliked this book in so many ways:
1) It's a proctologist's view of Israel
2) the writing is overwrought and repetitive
3) I think the history is wrong in many places
4) How much can one author write about himself?
5) I disagree with the author's leftist politics (although, to his credit, he never pretends otherwise)

This one was really hard for me to place. I was unfamiliar with Mr. Shavit and not sure about some parts of this book. What really stands out for me here are the stories. The stories are amazing! This man can really retell a story and can use the stories of his subjects to provide amazing illumination of history and politics. If the book had been all contextualized stories I'd have given it a 5. The long parts of soul-searching, slightly navel-gazing commentary were harder for me. I didn't always agree and sometimes just had a hard time with these sections. Now I must say I am a safe Midwestern American who has never lived in a particularly dangerous place. But these sections did seem endless, and at the end, a little incoherent to me. Mr. Shavit seems to me to not quite always have worked out what he means. At one point he covers the party, sex and drugs young-people scene in Tel Aviv, seemingly quite approvingly, talking about their freedom. Then he talks about high tech companies and their creativity. Then he seems later in the commentary to want to get rid of both--he derides that the young are not kibbutzniks and wants to tamp down capitalism. He seems to think the way Israel treats Palestinians is a bad thing at times, and then at the end seems to think they must be got rid of anyway. And he seems to think that religious Israelis are not real Israelis; he despairingly lists statistics like what percentage of school students are Muslim and what percentage are Orthodox and laments that they aren't Israeli enough. ??? To him apparently "Israeli" means only liberal secular Jews and no one else. But all in all, I learned a tremendous amount from this book. In all, the author seems to deal with the difficulties of the state of Israel in an intelligent, compassionate and pretty balanced way, all things considered. This was a valuable read for helping to understand what is going on in the Middle East today.

“There was hope for peace, but there will be no peace here. Not soon. There was hope for quiet, but there will be no quiet here. Not in this generation. The foundations of the home we founded are somewhat shaky, and repeating earthquakes rattle it. So what we really have in this land is an ongoing adventure. An odyssey. The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living lustfully, living to the extreme. If a Vesuvius-like volcano were to erupt tonight and end our Pompeii, this is what it will petrify: a living people. People that have come from death and were surrounded by death but who nevertheless put up a spectacular spectacle of life. People who danced the dance of life to the very end.”

I have been living with this book for more than two months. I started with the audio, but the CDs did not want to play in my car player. So I switched to the book. One way or another I felt like I was having a conversation with Shavit and that I was learning how one man sees Israel. That is the significant fact for me about this volume. This story is being told by Shavit and it is his version of events. Although this contains history, it also contains opinion. Not all or even most Israelis would see their country as Shavit sees it.

I appreciate his version. Shavit did help me see Israel as history and as current events. We walked through the history of Shavit’s country decade by decade with each decade getting its due. Other non-fiction books I have read have concentrated on the highlights – the battles for independence, for survival. I knew nothing about what happened in Israel as the country absorbed all the emigrants that moved there or about the Israeli nuclear developments. Although I know that some of the history told here is skewed by the teller, that is true of any history.

I am really glad to have read a book about Israel by someone who has lived there his entire life. In my opinion, this is a great part of this book. Shavit is an Israeli and very proud of that fact. He is willing to admit that his country has made mistakes – something that some Americans struggle with. I don’t agree with everything Shavit says, but I feel that my opinions are worth more because I read this work. I may not see Israel clearly, but my vision is improving.

I have to mention one note of concern. My head says that Shavit’s personal behavior should not have affected his journalism. However, his behavior did affect my reading of this book. In the acknowledgements, Shavit says the book would not have been written without his wife who he calls his love and inspiration. I had to take these words with a large grain of salt. Shavit is one of the many men who have abused women over the years. (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/world/middleeast/israel-ari-shavit-sexual-harassment.html) I learned of these accusations as I read this book.

When I got to the acknowledgements, I found his words to his wife hard to take. I admit, I don’t know anything about Shavit’s marriage. I just know how I would feel if my husband was accused of behaving as Shavit did. I also wondered about what other things we don’t know about Shavit’s conduct. I am hoping that his journalistic ethics are better than his sexual ethics.

I feel mixed after finishing Shavit's condensed, structured history of Israel. On the one hand, he boils down the significant stages of the past 70 years into easily digestible chunks but, on the other hand, leaves us hanging and unsatiated on what he feels might be paths out of the Arab/Jewish quagmire.

The book was a quick, easy and often engrossing read and I did learn a short-hand for trying to understand how Israel got to be the complex, diverse, dynamic country that it is today. But it also left me no less concerned about its future.

I highly recommend it for those who are looking for a summary, nuanced recap of Israeli history since the early pilgrim days.

What I wanted was what I got -- a well balanced booked that explained the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from the beginning to its current sorry state of affairs. Shavit, a journalist who has lived his whole life in Israel and been active in the peace movement, shares his perceptions along with the those of many people who have been influential in the development of the country. He knows most of the major players on the right and left and lets them speak for themselves in interviews. I, for one, didn't know much about the Zionist political movement which brought secular Jews to Isreal as early as the late 1800's with the goal of setting up a socialist, agrarian community. Now I want to know more. One book on my list is A Peace to End All Peace, which explores the roles played by England, France, Germany and Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) in the Middle East prior to WWI and beyond.