Yet Shavit insists upon a high degree of moral complication. Even if “denial was a life-or-death imperative” in dire or inflamed circumstances — which nation-­state or national movement will cast the first stone? — denial must be brought to an end and the whole nasty tangle must be exposed. But the morally compromised nature of power must not confer moral glamour upon powerlessness. The problem of means and ends will not be solved by suicide. This is all very tricky. The fact that liberty and sovereignty are often won with violence cannot justify anything that any state or any movement might do in the name of liberty and sovereignty. But surely there is also no justice in dying with clean hands instead of living with dirty hands. Palestinians should be able to understand this. Israelis should be able to understand this about Palestinians.

The author of “My Promised Land” is a dreamer with an addiction to reality. He holds out for affirmation without illusion. Shavit’s book is an extended test of his own capacity to maintain his principles in full view of the brutality that surrounds them. “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear,” his book begins. And a few pages later: “For as long as I can remember, I remember occupation.” I admire him for never desisting from this duality of “existential fear” and “moral outrage.” No satisfactory account of the Israeli situation can be given without this double-mindedness, not least because the present-day debate about Israel consists largely of an argument between those who wish to ignore one of the terms and those who wish to ignore the other.

In such a debate Shavit is splendidly unobliging — as, for example, in this comment about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: “If Israel does not retreat from the West Bank, it will be politically and morally doomed, but if it does retreat, it might face an Iranian-backed and Islamic Brotherhood-inspired West Bank regime whose missiles could endanger Israel’s security.” It is a formulation that will be unhelpful for activists and diplomats and editorialists, but all of it is true.

If the Palestinians cannot be adequately and respectfully grasped when they are regarded solely from the standpoint of the Israelis, the same is true of the Israelis when they are regarded solely from the standpoint of the Palestinians. I do not wish to leave the impression that “My Promised Land” is another book about Israel and the Palestinians. It holds much more. Shavit treats the full plenitude of his country, its history, its culture, its religion, its politics. (I wish he had told more about its language: The creation of modern Hebrew is an even greater astonishment than the creation of modern Israel.)

Shavit chooses 16 dates in the annals of Zionism and Israel, from 1897 to 2013, and not the canonical dates, through which to tell the national story. He reports on ­places and people, he scours archives. In his hands the national story is also a personal story, not only because he traces the roles of family and friends at various turning points in the saga, but also because he is always checking and double-checking his own hold on his country’s realities.

Yet this is not, thankfully, a memoir; it is an inquiry enhanced by intimacy. Shavit explores his society with the thoroughness of a man who feels implicated in its fate, and he is unsparing about the fraying of the Israeli republic in recent years. “In less than 30 years,” he memorably observes, “Israel has experienced seven different internal revolts: the settlers’ revolt, the peace revolt, the liberal-judicial revolt, the Oriental revolt, the ultra-­Orthodox revolt, the hedonist-individualistic revolt and the Palestinian Israelis’ revolt.” He worries, perhaps a little excessively, that his country is coming apart: “This start-up nation must restart itself.”

There is certainly no extenuating the economic and social inequalities he describes, or the utter derangement of the settlement policies in territories that Israel has an urgent and prudent interest in evacuating. But Shavit’s admonition that “the old discourse of duty and commitment was replaced by a new discourse of protest and hedonism,” his exhortation that “the immediate challenge is the challenge of regaining national potency,” is grimmer and more draconian than the spirited and capacious voice in which his book is otherwise written. And the rhetoric of “national potency” has unattractive associations. The turbulent and crackling place described in “My Promised Land” will not be healed by a rappel a l’ordre.

“What this nation has to offer,” Shavit concludes, “is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge.” The blessing of not being Luxembourg, then. It is a mixed blessing, to be sure — but what other kind of blessing is there? By the measure of the Jewish past, and by the measure of the Levantine present, mixed is quite a lot.