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.