Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

Israeli-born actress, producer, and activist Noa Tishby presents a personal and historical account of Israel, weaving her family's multi-generational story into a broader narrative about the country's founding, conflicts, and place in the world.

Tishby opens by establishing her credibility. She grew up in a Tel Aviv family deeply embedded in Israel's creation: her grandmother Fania Artzi co-founded the country's first kibbutz (a collective farm), her great-grandfather Nachum Tishby led the pre-state Office of Industry and Trade, and her grandfather Hanan Yavor served as Israel's first ambassador to several West African nations. Tishby served in the Israel Defense Forces, became a television star on the hit show Ramat Aviv Gimmel, and later moved to Los Angeles, where she sold the Israeli TV show In Treatment to HBO. After encountering widespread ignorance about Israel among Americans, she co-founded Act for Israel in 2011 to counter misinformation online. A Rosh Hashanah dinner during which she could not explain the Jewish new year to her boyfriend prompted the reexamination of identity that motivated the book.

Tishby provides a condensed history of the land spanning over 2,500 years. Israel, she notes, is smaller than New Jersey and surrounded by twenty-one mostly Arab countries. Drawing on biblical texts and archaeological evidence such as the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription from approximately 1200 BC mentioning "Israel," she argues that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land. She catalogs the succession of foreign conquerors, from the Assyrians and Babylonians through the Romans, the Muslim Caliphate, the Ottomans, and the British, stressing that no sovereign state called Palestine has ever existed there.

To contextualize the modern Middle East, Tishby recounts how three conflicting World War I-era agreements sowed regional instability: the Hussain-McMahon Correspondence promising Arab independence, the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the region between Britain and France, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. At the postwar Paris Peace Conference, European powers ignored both Arab and Jewish aspirations, carving the former Ottoman Empire into states based on colonial interests.

The origins of Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination in the ancestral homeland, form the next major thread. Tishby traces centuries of Jewish persecution in Europe, including organized pogroms, forced conscription of Jewish boys, and the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fabricated by the tsar's secret police in 1903. Theodor Herzl, a secular Hungarian writer, was radicalized by the 1894 Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish military officer in France was falsely convicted of espionage. Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896 and organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, where delegates agreed on principles including building a home for the Jewish people based on equality, encouraging migration, and reviving the Hebrew language.

Tishby uses her family to illustrate the pioneers' efforts. Her grandmother Fania emigrated from Russia to Jaffa in 1925 and became one of the first new members of Degania kibbutz. Her great-grandfather Nachum escaped hard labor in Siberia and emigrated to Jerusalem in 1922 to build the foundations of Israel's industry. Tishby contends the land was largely barren and sparsely populated when the pioneers arrived, and that their development of legally purchased land attracted Arab migration from neighboring countries.

After the Holocaust killed nearly 6 million Jews, the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition the land into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish leadership accepted; every Arab country rejected the plan. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the de facto leader of the pre-state Jewish community, declared independence, establishing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state guaranteeing equality regardless of religion, race, or sex. The next day, armies from Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and other Arab nations invaded. Despite being outgunned, Israel prevailed by July 1949. The local Arabs did not establish their own state; instead, Egypt took the Gaza Strip and Jordan took the West Bank, territories the UN had allocated for a Palestinian state.

Between 700,000 and 750,000 Arabs were displaced during the war: some left at the urging of Arab leaders, some fled the violence, and some were pushed out by Israeli forces. Tishby acknowledges atrocities such as the massacre at Deir Yassin but argues these do not constitute systematic ethnic cleansing, noting that 150,000 Arabs stayed and became citizens. She traces the term "Nakba" (catastrophe) to a 1948 pamphlet by Syrian professor Constantin Zureiq, who used it to describe a self-inflicted Arab disaster; Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rebranded the term in 1998 as a day of mourning. She critiques UNRWA, the UN agency created exclusively for Palestinian refugees, for allowing refugee status to be inherited across generations, inflating the count from 700,000 to 5.6 million.

Subsequent wars and peace efforts include the Six Day War (1967), in which Israel captured the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank; the Yom Kippur War (1973); the Camp David Accords with Egypt (1978); the Oslo Accords (1993–98); and the Abraham Accord (2020). Tishby identifies three persistent obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace: security concerns from terrorism, the Palestinian demand that millions of refugees "return" to Israel, and the refusal to include "no further demands" language in agreements. She reveals a personal connection: Her mother's first husband, fighter pilot Isaac "Aki" Artzi, Fania's son, was killed in 1967. Tishby grew up unaware that Fania was not her biological grandmother, a wound she connects to the generational trauma of war.

Tishby examines the settlement issue. After the Six Day War, Israel built settlements in the West Bank as security buffers, and the religious-nationalist movement Gush Emunim later expanded them for ideological reasons. She frames Arafat's refusal of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's comprehensive peace offer at the 2000 Camp David Summit, combined with his coordination of terrorist attacks, as the event that destroyed the Israeli peace camp and accelerated settlement growth.

She distinguishes three Palestinian populations facing different realities. Arab Israeli citizens hold full legal rights and serve in parliament and the judiciary; Tishby rejects the apartheid label. Palestinians in the West Bank live under partial Palestinian Authority control and Israeli military presence. Palestinians in Gaza live under Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist movement, which seized power in 2007. Hamas's charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law (Islamic legal code).

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement receives sharp criticism. Tishby argues it seeks to eliminate Israel rather than promote peace, tracing anti-Israel boycotts to the Arab League's 1945 campaign against Jewish businesses, three years before Israel existed. She contends BDS harms Palestinians most, citing the relocation of a SodaStream factory that eliminated hundreds of Palestinian jobs paying triple the local average.

Tishby examines Israel's internal tensions, including the failed "Melting Pot Policy" that dismissed Mizrahi (North African and Middle Eastern Jewish) culture and the growing influence of the Charedim (ultra-Orthodox Jews), whose exemption from military service and limited secular education create economic dependency. She highlights Israel's global contributions in technology, humanitarian aid, and television. She also documents the UN's disproportionate targeting of Israel, noting that from 2015 to 2019 the General Assembly adopted more resolutions against Israel than against Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Russia combined, and argues that anti-Zionism, the denial of Israel's right to exist, is inseparable from antisemitism.

The book closes with Tishby's young son Ari climbing into bed beside her and asking what the book is about. Upon hearing "Israel," he exclaims with joy and asks if it is for him. Tishby confirms it is, framing the book as a legacy for the next generation.