The Land of Hope and Fear
Israel's battle for its inner soul
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A correspondent who has spent thirty years in Israel presents a rich, wide-ranging portrait of the Israeli people at a critical juncture in their country’s history.
Despite Israel’s determined staying power in a hostile environment, its military might, and the innovation it fosters in businesses globally, the country is more divided than ever. The old guard — socialist secular elites and idealists — are a dying breed, and the state’s democratic foundations are being challenged. A dynamic and exuberant country of nine million, Israel now largely comprises native-born Hebrew speakers, and yet any permanent sense of security and normalcy is elusive.
In The Land of Hope and Fear, we meet Israelis — Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, liberals and zealots — plagued by perennial conflict and existential threats. Its citizens remain deeply polarised politically, socially, and ideologically, even as they undergo generational change and redefine what it is to be an Israeli. Who are these people, and to what do they aspire?
In moving narratives and with on-the-ground reporting, Isabel Kershner reveals the core of what holds Israel together and the forces that threaten its future through the lens of real people, laying bare the question, Who is an Israeli?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this masterful study, New York Times correspondent Kershner (Barrier) enriches her analysis of the forces roiling modern Israel through incisive conversations with individual Israelis. Shifting the focus from Israel's territorial conflicts with its Arab neighbors to domestic issues, Kershner reveals how the unequal treatment of Jewish immigrants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and other parts of the world, coupled with the failure of the Oslo Peace Accords, fostered deep-seated resentments against the political establishment and contributed to the rise of the right wing in Israel. Elsewhere, she documents grievances against the ultra-Orthodox community, who sometimes receive privileged treatment from politicians despite their opposition to obligatory military service and other polices; talks with members of Israel's Arab minority about "the self-contradiction of being an Arab citizen of the Jewish state"; and contends that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has willfully inflamed ethnic tensions for political gains. Striking an ominous note, Kershner warns that Israel's "demographic trajectory," which has it on track to become "one of the most crowded countries on earth," will strain the country's already faltering infrastructure and exacerbate "the rise of the political fringes and the threats to liberal democracy." Nuanced and persuasive, this is a valuable dispatch from a country in turmoil.
