Israel (2012)

A mainstream Israeli history of how the state was built, by Anita Shapira, a professor emerita at Tel Aviv University and the biographer of the Labour Zionist leader Berl Katznelson. It runs from the nineteenth-century beginnings of Zionism to the start of the second intifada in 2000, and it is strongest on the society, economy and Hebrew culture the founders created. Choose it to hear the Zionist story from a careful scholar rather than a polemicist. Its gaps are part of the lesson: reviewers noted that it says little about Israel's Arab citizens and passes quickly over the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948, so read it beside Khalidi or Nusseibeh.