My Promised Land (2013)

An Israeli journalist's attempt to hold pride and guilt about his country in the same book. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, asks why Israel was created, what it has achieved and what went wrong, weaving in his own family's arrival and his army service. Its best-known chapter, first excerpted in The New Yorker, describes the forced expulsion of Lydda's Palestinian population in 1948, told by an Israeli who remains committed to Zionism. Some critics, among them the historian Martin Kramer, disputed parts of that account, and the argument is itself a window on how Israelis reckon with 1948. It won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction.