Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

Israel lost 2,656 soldiers, with another 7,250 wounded. It was a figure dramatically lower than the Arab losses, but it was more than three times what Israel had lost in 1967—when it had tripled its size in a lightning war of six days. In this war, which had dragged on for much longer, Israel ended up essentially where it had started. There had cle

In the meantime, the leadership of the Yishuv sought to establish as many facts on the ground as it could to expand whatever future borders the Jewish state would have. On October 6, 1946 (immediately upon the conclusion of the Yom Kippur fast), the Jewish Agency worked feverishly to establish—over the course of a single night—eleven new settlement

WHILE ISRAEL HAD PEACE (even if a “cool” peace) with Egypt, new threats continued to emerge. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was threatening to “drown” the Jewish state “with rivers of blood.”22 Toward that end, Iraq—with the active assistance of the French—was building a nuclear reactor.

ZIONISM HAD BECOME a series of unresolved debates. Some (Herzl) sought a state while others (Ahad

Begin’s identification with the settler movement had begun years earlier. In 1974, Gush Emunim members had sought permission to build one of the first settlements, Elon Moreh. As was the case in the beginnings of many settlements (including that in Hebron), when permission was refused, settlers went anyway. Eventually, after numerous requests, the

Ha’am) insisted that statehood would lead to spiritual bankruptcy, so the Jews should seek only a spiritual center. Some (Bialik) thought religion was the cancer that had destroyed the Jew (though Bialik retained a love for Jewish religious texts), while others (religious Zionists) saw in religion the only hope for sustaining the Jewish people. Som

DURING THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, some seven hundred thousand Arabs had left Israel and

Shortly thereafter, the Nobel Committee decided to award the Peace Prize to both Begin and Sadat.

IN DECEMBER 1973, to add even more pain to a country still in agony, just months after the war, David Ben-Gurion died. He had been ailing for some time, but given the trauma that Israel had just endured, the death of the country’s founder and father figure was another painful blow.

Not assigned to either the Jewish or Arab states in the United Nations partition plan, Jerusalem was supposed to be governed by an international protectorate, but it was commonly understood that that was not likely to happen. The UN had no power, the major international power brokers had no interest in enforcing the resolution, and both the Arabs a