Shortly after I moved to Jerusalem last spring, I made history as the first woman to play in a 30-year-old poker game, joining a group of graying, good-natured guys who had long ago immigrated from South Africa, England and the United States. It was just before Jerusalem Day, which celebrates Israel’s capture of the east side of the city — and the rest of the West Bank — from Jordan in 1967.

Close to midnight, a skullcap-wearer who lives in a Gush Etzion settlement that most Israelis consider a Jerusalem suburb, but much of the world condemns as illegal, wondered aloud why people don’t make a bigger deal of the holiday, arguing that Israel’s triumph over five Arab armies in six days was a far greater miracle than, say, the Purim story in which Queen Esther saved the Jews of ancient Persia from a murderous plot. Another player, who is secular, responded that the 1967 victory was the worst thing that ever happened to Israel because the settlements it spawned — home now to half a million Jews — made resolving the conflict with the Palestinians all but impossible.

Either way, the June 6, 1967, Battle of Jerusalem is widely seen as the seminal event of modern Israeli history. The David Rubinger photograph of paratroopers reclaiming the Western Wall is among the most iconic Israeli images: the soldiers’ “expressions are a combination of exhaustion, tenderness and awe,” writes Yossi Klein Halevi, who uses the classic photo on the cover of “Like Dreamers,” which he describes as “a story about the fate of Israel’s utopian dreams, the vast hopes imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees.”

Halevi expertly employs a traditional journalistic form: he isolates seven paratroopers from that “mythic moment” and reconstructs their lives, before and since, to render a complicated history intimate, human, relatable. His meticulous, sensitive, detailed reporting — the book is the work of more than a decade — is incredibly effective at making the small big. Over and over again, anecdotes about one religious settler or one secular kibbutznik resonate as powerful metaphors for the state’s challenges. The personal stories Halevi tells about the establishment of settlements like Kfar Etzion, Ofra and Sebastia change them from political bargaining chips into three-dimensional realities. Caricatures are replaced with nuanced understanding of what was gained and lost as a communitarian farming society transformed itself into an entrepreneurial high-tech haven.