"Like Dreamers," by Yossi Klein Halevi 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. The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation By Yossi Klein Halevi Harper. $35. 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. Because Israel is - and, even more so, was - a tiny place where there often seem to be far fewer than six degrees of separation, the ways these former soldiers" experiences intertwine with better-­known names and historical events turn the book from a riveting narrative into a primer on Israel's problematic reality. It also underlines a central point of Dan Senor and Saul Singer's "Start-Up Nation" (2009) about the powerful, lifelong connections made in the Israeli Army: despite their disparate lives and differing ideologies, Halevi's carefully chosen characters reunite repeatedly, on the battlefield and off. In one scene, Yisrael Harel, the editor of a leading settlers" magazine, takes Arik Achmon, an airline executive who lived in increasingly bourgeois Tel Aviv, on a private tour of what he is building in the West Bank. "Despite himself, he was impressed," Halevi writes of Achmon. You and I, Arik thought, represent opposite visions of Israel. . . . Here in this romantic landscape, thought Arik, was rising the greatest mistake in the history of Israel. Halevi, the Brooklyn-born son of a Holocaust survivor who first visited Israel after the 1967 war and moved there in 1982, has his own fraught history: "Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist," published in 1995, tells of his onetime devotion to the Jewish militant Meir Kahane. A second memoir, in 2001, "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden," recounts his spiritual exploration of mosques and monasteries as a religious Jew. A resident of what many see as occupied East Jerusalem, Halevi, like so many Israelis, supports a two-state solution yet is dubious about its prospects. I have interviewed him several times, and recently he told me that he would hesitate at any agreement in which even one Palestinian refugee from 1948 was allowed to return. Because he sees everything between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as a Jewish homeland, giving up the West Bank would be a supremely painful concession; Halevi needs the Palestinians to also yield something they believe is rightfully theirs. Jodi Rudoren is the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times.