Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1 What's Going On?
1 Jews and Israel: Where Do We Start? 12
2 The Zionist Idea: Organizing, Immigrating, Building (1860s-1917) 23
3 Wait, There Were People Here: What About the Palestinians? 35
4 The British Are Coming: World War I, the Balfour Declaration, and the Establishment of the British Mandate (1917-39) 40
5 Israel and the Nakba: Independence and Catastrophe (1947-49) 55
6 The Dispossessed 65
7 The Fifties: State Building and Suez 76
8 The Big Bang: The 1967 War and the Reality It Created 85
9 Roller Coaster: From the Yom Kippur War to the First Intifada (1968-87) 105
10 Shaking It Off: The First Intifada 131
11 Israel Is Waiting for Rabin 146
12 As the Clever Hopes Expire: The End of Oslo 171
13 The Bulldozers Last Surprise 188
14 The Democracy Recession 199
Part 2 Why Is It So Hard To Talk About Israel?
15 The Map Is Not the Territory 213
16 Israel's Arab Citizens: Shared Society or Segregation? 220
17 A Love Story? Israel and the American Jewish Community 232
18 The Settlements 252
19 What We Talk About When We Talk About BDS 270
20 The A-Word 283
21 The Other A-Word 287
22 Red Cows in the Heartland: Israel and Armageddon 292
23 The Case for Hope 298
A Lexicon of the Conflict 309
Acknowledgments 326
Bibliography 329
Notes 335
Index 370