Whose Promised Land? A Journey Into a Divided Israel

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.