Suddenly, because of circumstances not of their own choosing, the Israelites would have to reimagine what it meant to be part of their people. On more than one occasion in the millennia that followed, that would be the very challenge…

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WHILE THE SIX-DAY WAR divided Israelis, it united the vanquished Arab Palestinian community. Israel’s victory had dealt a fatal blow to Nasser’s pan-Arabist movement. It was now clear how little Nasser or any of the other Arab leaders had done for the Palestinians (those who had fled the war in 1948 and their descendants) about whom they ostensibly

as if there were no White Paper; we will fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”

EVEN AS SOME ISRAELIS were growing more interested in their religious roots, much of Israeli society was at the very same time worried about other religious phenomena in the Jewish state. The chief rabbinate, an institution that the Ottomans and British had established and shaped, was becoming ever more reviled. As the Haredim had become increasing

THE WAR HAD BEEN exceedingly brief—it had lasted a mere 132 hours. And Israel’s victory had been decisive. The Egyptians lost between 10,000 and 15,000 men, 5,000 more were missing, and thousands were injured. Jordan lost 700 soldiers, with an additional 6,000 missing or wounded. On the northern front, 450 Syrians died and almost 2,000 were missing

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way t

IF PAN-ARABISM WAS DYING, however, Palestinian nationalism was awakening. Ever since Israel’s independence and the Palestinian

The Palestinians were making political moves and, as had been the case with the Zionists, were also finding a literary voice. They did so most notably in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian born in the western Galilee whose family fled their village of al-Birwa during the War of Independence. Drawing upon both centuries of Arab verse and t

When he was seventeen, Gruen learned of the Uganda Plan discussions at the Sixth Zionist Congress and was livid that the movement would even consider giving up on the notion of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.