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.

In principle, there's nothing surprising about a blood-and-soil history of Israel from a former Leftist who has now magically found space in his heart for militarism as he ages, and considers his former confederates unbearably naive. (He likes to set them up for interviews, where he gets to tell them how naive and silly they are, and they nod in agreement, or simply decline to reply.

What makes this book an extraordinary accomplishment is that it is a Zionist history of Israel, with all the Jewish amour propre that implies, that steadfastly refuses to ignore the non-Jewish Palestinians. It's depressingly fatalistic, because having recognised the humanity and suffering of his Arab opponents, he sees their suffering as inevitable, a logical consequence of the impossible situation that history has foisted upon them. But the refusal to look away or dismiss the moral gravity of the Palestinian expulsion and refugee experience is a foundation on which, one hopes, more imaginative Israelis might build.

A poorly written soapbox disguised as history.