They shall reap the whirlwind: how religious zealots in the Israeli government are supporting a new generation of extremist settlers who hate the Israeli government.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: The Unmaking of Israel - Book review

The Unmaking of Israel

by Gershom Gorenberg

Harper, 336 pp.

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Gershom Gorenberg begins his powerful and persuasive new book, The Unmaking of Israel, with a long-forgotten tale from the period immediately following Israel's independence: In June 1948, Menachem Begin, the leader of the radical Irgun militia--which had carried out terrorist attacks on the British in Palestine and advocated seizure of "the entire Jewish homeland" on both sides of the Jordan River--resisted demands to hand over the group's weapons to the new Israeli army. Begin and his Irgun fighters wanted to maintain their autonomy in the new country, a state of affairs that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion believed would almost certainly lead to anarchy and civil war. "The Irgun saw itself as representing the purest Zionism, unwilling to concede any part of the Land of Israel," Gorenberg writes. "The mainstream saw the Irgun as separatists and terrorists." It was a battle over the future of the inchoate state, and it ended with violence: the Israel Defense Forces shelled the Altalena, a converted warship bringing guns and ammo to the separatists, killing a dozen men and forcing the rebels to surrender.

Ben-Gurion's notion of the Israeli state has been wrestling with Begin's more uncompromising vision ever since. And as Gorenberg argues, it has been losing ground. An American Orthodox Jew who made aliyah to Israel some thirty years ago, Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire, an account of Israel's reluctant colonization of the West Bank and Gaza in first two decades after the Six-Day War in 1967. In his latest book, he takes the narrative one step further, examining how the relentless expansion of Israel's West Bank settlements in recent years has not only warped the values of Ben-Gurion's secular, inclusive, and democratic state, but also altered Israel's approach to Arabs within its pre-1967 borders. Gorenberg's book is partly a polemic, filled with righteous anger. But it's also a finely documented piece of reporting in which he shows how the collusion of three powerful forces--the civilian government, the military, and the growing ultra-Orthodox movement--has solidified the hold on the occupied territories and made the prospect of withdrawal fraught with danger. Israel is moving backward, he writes, "returning to the moment of a fragile state facing an armed faction dedicated to fantasies of power and expansion."

Gorenberg begins with...