“How can a staunch Zionist who was raised on one of Israel’s earliest settlements and trained as a kill-or-be-killed elite commando spearhead a campaign for peace with his enemies? The answer, in Ami Ayalon’s captivating narrative, is an eye-opener for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
— Sari Nusseibeh, co-author with Anthony David of Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
A 2020 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST
“Ayalon’s book is…a personal, intellectual and philosophical journey into his life’s different realms, interspersed with encounters with people through whom he sets out to decipher the collective DNA of Israel, Zionism and Judaism.”
— Yossi Melman, author of Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, writing in Haaretz
“Ami wrote this book, this memoir, to try in his words to ‘reimagine’ Israel and its past in the hope that it could yet shape a different future. He wants Israelis to learn the lessons he has; he wants them to see that Palestinians are also a people with an identity and with needs. He wants his fellow Israelis to accept that while the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in a land of their history, it is not an exclusive, absolute right. That is why he believes in two states for two peoples — Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the nation-state of the Palestinian people.”
— Dennis Ross, former special assistant to President Barack Obama
