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by Marc Schulman (Author)
In 1993, Israelis dared to imagine peace. Thirty years later, they woke to the deadliest day in their history. This is the story of what happened in between.
From the handshake on the White House lawn to the sirens of October 7 and the wars that followed, Between Hope and Fear tells the story of modern Israel's most consequential era: three decades in which the country buried a prime minister, fought two intifadas and a dozen wars, absorbed a million immigrants, and somehow built one of the most dynamic economies on earth while rockets fell on its cities.
Marc Schulman, a historian who spent ten years as a Newsweek columnist and now writes the Tel Aviv Diary newsletter and appears regularly on i24News, chronicles each year as it was lived from his home in Tel Aviv: the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the suicide bombings and the security barrier, the disengagement from Gaza, the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, the startup-nation boom, the judicial crisis that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, and then October 7, 2023, with the massacre, the hostages, the war on seven fronts, and the confrontation with Iran that followed.
Alongside the year-by-year narrative of politics, wars, and a society under strain runs a second story: the explosive rise of Israel's high-tech economy, built floor by floor while the ground shook.
Written from inside the story, in a city where the author counted the seconds between siren and interception, this is neither polemic nor eulogy. It is the account of a nation that lived, year by year, between hope and fear.
Readers of Ari Shavit's My Promised Land and Daniel Gordis's Israel will find here the chapter those books could not yet contain: how the country of the Oslo handshake became the country of October 7.
