Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

The Rise and Fall of Israel's Settlement Movement

The thwarted utopianism of the kibbutz movement and the religious-nationalist settlement movement is the subject of âLike Dreamers,â one of the two or three finest books about Israel I have ever read.

October 14, 2013 at 4:25 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Moments after Hanan Porat and his fellow Israeli paratroopers had crossed the Suez Canal as spearheads of a furious Israeli counterattack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he was severely wounded in an Egyptian mortar bombardment. The Egyptians and Syrians had surprised Israel on Yom Kippur, with an atrocious loss of life, and crushed the country's post-Six Day War belief in its own invincibility.

As Porat lay recovering in his hospital bed, his chest ravaged by shrapnel wounds, he thanked God that he wasn't in the burn unit. And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi writes in his new book, "Like Dreamers," the next phase of Porat's life mission was revealed.