Fortress Israel | Granta

  • Published: 02/05/2013
  • ISBN: 9781846272752
  • 129x20mm
  • 576 pages

Fortress Israel

Patrick Tyler

‘Israel, six decades after its founding, remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse.’

Born of idealism, under David Ben Gurion and his protégés Dayan, Sharon and Peres, Israel came to prioritize security at all costs, and to seize land and water whenever opportunity arose. The security state erected around the nation is the most agile, relentless, intelligent and skilful in the region. And it is very little understood. Patrick Tyler believes that the way to understand it is to understand the men and women who have created, sustained and directed it. Less an anatomy of institutions and administrations than a searching biographical study of the outsize personalities who headed its operations and in consequence steered Israel’s course since its foundation, this book is a landmark in the revelation of the inner workings and innermost desires of the Israeli nation-state.

Mandatory reading... The definitive historical and analytical account of the role that Israel's military and the strategic thinking of its national security establishment have played both in Israel itself and in the wider Middle East... very well written and reported

Peter Bergen, author, Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden

Readable, informative [and] timely

Economist

Tyler knows [his] subject inside out... A heartfelt and uncompromising book

Literary Review

The Author

Patrick Tyler has spent 30 years as a journalist, dividing his time between Washington, and tours in the Middle East, China, Russia and Europe. He worked for the Washington Post for 12 years, thenfor the New York Times for 14 years, leaving it in 2005 to write books full-time. He was succesively Moscow Bureau Chief, Beijing Bureau Chief and London Bureau Chief. As chief correspondent for the New York Times he reported from Baghdad in the lead up to the first Gulf War and covered the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 2003. His book A Great Wall, Six Presidents and China won the 1999 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on international relations and the Helen Bernstein Prize awarded by the New York Public Library.

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From the Same Author

A World Of Trouble

Patrick Tyler

Drawing on three decades of first-hand experience both close to the circle of power in Washington and on the ground in the Middle East, Patrick Tyler will show how the region has emerged as the focus of American national interests, a battleground and occupation zone for 150,000 American troops, and a fount of global terrorism. A World of Trouble begins with the rise of the new secular nationalism among the Arabs and Nixon’s entry into the Middle East, and takes in the fluctuating oil market, relations with the Saudi royal family, the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran, the Iran-Iraq war, the spread of Islamic fervour through the region and the waves of violence that have followed. At each point, Tyler examines the motivation behind US policy decisions, from attempts to limit Soviet expansion to the slippery compromises made in pursuit of oil.