Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

Whatever economic progress it might have made, the Yishuv was deeply worried by the phenomenon of continued Arab violence. Jews who had believed that they could live in peace with Arabs were now increasingly dubious. To make it clear that the Jewish population would not give up on its dream of statehood, even in the face of violence, the Yishuv est

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Yet Herzl’s vision of a sovereign state had meaning, increasing numbers of Israelis believed, only if those new Jews rooted themselves and their humanity in the tradition they had inherited. Herzl without Ahad Ha’am was merely political sovereignty—and that, Israelis began to sense, was simply not enough. Theodor Herzl. Ahad Ha’am. Two radically di

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WHATEVER CHALLENGES THE HAREDI world might have represented to Israel’s democracy or economic sustainability, religion in the Jewish state also had other, more radical splinter groups. In the decades following Oslo, a small group of nationalist extremists began to establish outposts in the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, the biblical name by which

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may seem ironic that so soon after Israel offered the Palestinians nearly everything they and the international community wanted—a Palestinian state with Arab Jerusalem as its capital, return of the entire Gaza Strip and almost the entire West Bank, a fair and practical resolution of the refugee issue, and an end to Jewish settlements—it is now a p

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