I've read quite a few histories of Israel and biographies of the founders of the state but I still found this book to cover the material in new and interesting ways. Shapiro not only looks at the politics and the conflict but also the changing society and how the emerging Israeli culture adapted through the years. I very much appreciated the last chapter which covered the more recent aliyah (immigration) of Russian Jews and how Israel has reinvented itself from a nation of socialist agricultural workers to an urban hitech society. Shapira also looks at the changes in literature, focusing on particular Israeli writers and how their work reflects the society of the time.

On controversial issues in Israel's history Shapira discusses the variety of narratives that have emerged over time and why this has happened. One of the issues for Israeli society has been the constant need to absorb large numbers of immigrants, first the Holocaust survivors, then the Jews from Muslim countries and finally the Russian and Ethiopian Jews of the last couple of decades. Each aliyah could have been done better in retrospect but then each one,apart from the most recent 1990s Post-Soviet Russian one, came at an enormous economic cost to the state. I didn't realise how important the 1961 Eichmann Trial was to Israeli society and I want to read more about this. The British Mandate had severely limited Jewish immigration since the 1930s, and Holocaust survivors were finally able to enter Israel just as the surrounding Arab nations declared war on the new state in 1948 and many went straight to fight in the War of Independence. 'During the trial, the Israeli public was exposed to the details of the Holocaust nightmare for the first time, as well as to the heroism and ingenuity of those who survived.'
http://www.aish.com/ho/i/The_Eichmann_Trial_50_Years_Later.html

Shapira also covers the Arab-Israel conflict and the adoption of the liberal left in recent times of the Palestinian narrative at the expense of that of the Jewish one. With the second intifada the leftist activists have lost much of their support, evidenced by voting patterns towards a more conservative government that makes the country's security a priority.

As expected for an academic book the bibliography is quite extensive, excellent footnotes and an index. I wish I owned a hard copy of this book as I'm not a skilled user of digital books and prefer to use bookmarks rather than highlight text, flick through the real book rather than the 'go to' feature which only works if you know where you want to 'go to'. For me the only advantage of a digital textbook is the price.

From wikipedia: Anita Shapira (Hebrew: אניטה שפירא‎, born 1940) is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, a Ruben Merenfeld Professor of the Study of Zionism and head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She received the Israel Prize in 2008.

The book is part of the Schusterman Series in Israel Studies: http://www.brandeis.edu/israelcenter/pdfs/SeriesFlyer2013.pdf ( )