This is the first in-depth account of the later years of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israel’s first Prime Minister and founding father. One of the first to sign Israel’s declaration of independence and a leading figure in Zionism, Ben-Gurion stepped down from office in 1963 and retired from political life in 1970, deeply disappointed about the path on which the state had embarked and the process that brought about the end of his political career. He moved to a kibbutz in the Negev desert...

Menachem Begin, father of Israel's right wing and sixth prime minister of the nation, was known for his unflinchingly hawkish ideology. And yet, in 1979 he signed a groundbreaking peace treaty with Egypt for which he and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Such a contradiction was typical in Begin's life: no other Israeli played as many different, sometimes conflicting, roles as Begin, and no other figure inspired such sharply opposing responses. Begin was ...

Yossi Beilin was a seminal figure during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As deputy foreign minister in the second Rabin government, he was responsible for leading the Oslo process, which was the most important attempt to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This book is the first to tell the story of the left wing and the peace process based on the private archive of Beilin himself. The thousands of documents – shared exclusively with the author - reveal a far more ...