Modern Israel: Triumph and Tragedy ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Mira Sucharov Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Yossi Klein Halevy Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, New York: Harper Perennial, 2013, 624 pp., $17.99/£9.99, Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (4 Nov. 2014), ISBN-10: 0060545771, ISBN-13: 978-0060545772 Shlomo Sand How I Stopped Being a Jew, London: Verso, 2014, 112 pp., $16.95/£9.99, Verso; 1 edition (October 7, 2014), ISBN-10: 1781686149, ISBN-13: 978-1781686140 Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013, 480 pp., $17.00/£14.99, Spiegel & Grau; Reissue edition (February 3, 2015), ISBN-10: 0385521715, ISBN-13: 978-0385521710 Leslie Stein Israel Since the Six-Day War, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014, 456 pp., $29.95/£25.00, Polity Press; 1 edition (4 July 2014), ISBN-10: 074564726X, ISBN-13: 978-0745647265 International Politics Reviews (2015) 3, 3–9. doi:10.1057/ipr.2015.5 With the subject of Israel occupying such a large place in the scholarly and journalistic imagination, there is no dearth of writing on the politics and history of that tiny country. Four recent books cover the gamut from conven- tional political history, to personal essay, to intimate eth- nographic look at Israelis over the last half decade. In so doing, the books reviewed in this essay – by Yossi Klein Halevy, Shlomo Sand, Ari Shavit and Leslie Stein – raise questions and provide some tentative answers, about the issues of contemporary Jewish identity, the cause of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the political narratives of Israelis and prospects for peace. There are also some implicit issues raised – whether the authors were aware of it, including what the role is and should be of scholarly subjectivity, and whether identity can be defined objectively. The shortest yet most provocative book is Shlomo Sand’s How I Stopped Being a Jew. Sand tells us that he no longer wants to be considered Jewish, if he ever did. So why can’t he simply shed his identity? He notes that it’s not so simple: as an Israeli, unless he were to convert to a different religion, which, he explains, he has no interest in doing, the state simply won’t let him. Israel retains ethni- city data on all its citizens and residents. Until 2005, Israeli identity cards included a nationality/ethnicity category; since then, some card bearers have asterisks in place of INTERNATIONAL POLITICS REVIEWS | IPR VOLUME 3 | MAY 2015 | 3 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved REVIEW ARTICLE