Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

ON DECEMBER 9, 1987, an Israeli truck driver accidentally ran over four Arab workers in the Gaza Strip. The long-simmering Arab street in both the West Bank and Gaza exploded with fury and into violence. Hundreds, then thousands, of young people began seeking confrontations with Israeli soldiers, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at both soldier

As the violence continued, President Clinton attempted one last-ditch effort to resuscitate the peace process. In late December 2000, Clinton presented his proposal, “The Clinton Parameters,” which proposed that the new Palestinian state would include 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (though the parameters did not mention Gaza, Clinton clarified i

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

MONTHS AFTER THE KAHAN Commission report, Menachem Begin—in poor health, depressed by the war, and profoundly alone in the wake of his wife’s death—resigned and retreated to his home. For the next decade, until his death in 1992, he did not exit his apartment except for memorial ceremonies for his wife and medical appointments. Yitzhak Shamir, who

For two thousand years, Jews had prayed there, albeit in small numbers. Now, because Israel had lost the Old City of Jerusalem in the War of Independence, and because Hebron and other traditionally sacred Jewish sites were also in enemy hands, the Jewish state ironically had sovereignty over no traditionally Jewish sacred places.

Palestinian terrorists changed that, however, with two attacks in Jerusalem, one in Tel Aviv, and another in Ashkelon, killing almost sixty Israelis in the heart of Israel’s cities within nine days. Israelis were outraged and frightened, and Peres was voted out of office a mere seven months after he had assumed Rabin’s place.

In May 1991, in a daring mission known as Operation Solomon, Israeli pilots landed lumbering converted C-130 jets on narrow airstrips in Ethiopia in the midst of the civil war. Planes were stripped of their seats to allow for the maximum number of passengers, and in some cases, more than eleven hundred people were jammed onto a single plane. Many o

Per capita (and adjusted for inflation), the tiny state spent on the National Water Carrier roughly six times the amount that the United States had expended to build the Panama Canal, and “far more than other iconic U.S. public works like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge.”

which Zionists from Europe would bring with them, were about to clash with the tribal, clannish, local system of the Palestinian Arabs.