Beyond The Promised Land: Jews And Arabs On The Hard Road To A New Israel
by By Frankel, Glenn
Category: Political Science , General

After a century of enmity between Jew and Arab, nearly three decades of occupation, and six years of a bloody intifada, Israeli leaders are doing the unthinkable - shaking hands with their Arab adversaries.In Beyond the Promised Land, Pulitzer Prize-winner Glenn Frankel unlocks these last seven turbulent years of civil unrest, political upheaval, and diplomatic crisis, in which many of the long-standing assumptions, beliefs, and practices that lay at the very heart of Israeli society were shaken, challenged, and ultimately swept aside or remade. Beginning with the Palestinian intifada, a wholly unexpected explosion of popular rage and great expectations that shattered the low-cost, low-pain status quo in which Israel and its Palestinian subjects had been frozen for twenty years, Frankel charts the rise of new political forces inside Israel, and the roles that the arrival of nearly half a million Jewish immigrants, the death of socialism, the eclipse of Arab military power, and the ascendancy of the United States all played in the remaking of the Jewish state.Frankel tells this tale through the stories of the people swept up in the change. Some characters, such as prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin and Russian activist Natan Sharansky, are major actors whose names and faces are well known. Others, like religious party leader Arye Deri, army general Amram Mitzna, and Likud politician Dan Meridor, are known to most Israelis but are far less familiar to the outside world. And still others, like former kibbutznik Haim Goren and Palestinian academic Jad Isaac, are barely known outside their own small communities.