Patrick Kingsley reports:

We found Shai Melamud just before dusk, standing on his patio near Israel’s northern border, opposite a slope scorched black by recent rocket fire from Lebanon.

Mr. Melamud, 86, was born 13 years before the state of Israel. He grew up in these hills, the son of early Zionists who helped build one of the area’s first Jewish collective farms, or kibbutzim.

Over dinner, he remembered the Arab village that once stood on the now-empty hill to the north, whose residents fled during the 1948 war that established Israel. He remembered crossing the ridge to Lebanon on his father’s horse, back when Israel was only an idea in his father’s head. And he wondered what his father would make of the country today.

“If he took a look,” Mr. Melamud said, “he’d say a single sentence: ‘This wasn’t the child we prayed for.’ And then he’d return to his grave.”

Mr. Melamud’s kibbutz, Kfar Giladi, was the first stop of a recent journey I made with a photojournalist, Laetitia Vancon, from Israel’s far north to its southern tip. Israel is a small country, just 260 miles long. You can drive it in six hours. But we took 10 days, seeking to understand the child that Mr. Melamud’s father hadn’t prayed for.

We found a country still wrestling with contradictions left unresolved at its birth, and with the consequences of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. We found a people facing complex questions about what it means to be Israeli, or a Palestinian citizen of Israel. And we found a battle of narratives — waged not only between Jews and Arabs, but also among Jews themselves. [Continue reading…]