RUTHFULLY YOURS

How did a country smaller than El Salvador with a population of eight million and few natural resources become a military superpower within a few decades?

In The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), authors Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot explain this remarkable phenomenon. Calling on their experience as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans and seasoned national security analysts, they present an intriguing and engrossing account of Israel’s defensecapabilities development. From a country lacking bullets and aircraft, Israel transformed itself into one of the most effective militaries in the world and the sixth-largest arms exporter globally. Today, Western powers, including the U.S., France, the UK, Russia and China, all come to Israel to learn and establish joint ventures.

The Jewish State has several characteristics and realities that have contributed to its military prowess and technological leadership, the authors explain. From inception on, Israel has been surrounded by enemies intent on its destruction. The country was built by Jewish refugees forced from Arab countries that their families had inhabited since before the birth of Christ, and by Holocaust survivors, many smuggled past the British into the Jewish homeland. Defense of the ancient homeland was, from the beginning, a survival mission with little room for error and miscalculation. Creativity sprang from the adversity of a relentless enemy close at hand.

Constantly on the front lines of conflict, Israel was forced to break new ground and pursue unproven technologies that other countries may not have considered. The authors say this explains why Israel, among the world’s nations, invests the highest percentage of gross domestic product on research and development: 4.5% with 30% of the total for military projects. Additionally, Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit and ability to innovate is demonstrated by the fact that the tiny country has the third-largest number of companies, behind the U.S. and China, listed on the NASDAQ exchange.

Further, Katz and Bohot explain, going it alone has been a necessity for Israel. Added to problematic regional politics with hostile, oil-rich Arab neighbors is the inability to consistently depend on support from reluctant allies dependent on Gulf oil. The fledgling state responded with inventiveness and innovation to develop its weapons and defense capabilities in this hostile environment.

Even readers who didn’t manage to plow to the end of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 “The Bonfire of the Vanities” remember the novel’s crackerjack opening, in which a Manhattan yuppie and his mistress driving from the airport strike and kill a young black man and then flee the scene. Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, operating on the sound theory that good premises don’t need fixing, begins “Waking Lions” (Little, Brown, 341 pages, $26) with another hit and run. While speeding through the Negev Desert on his way home from work, neurosurgeon Eitan Green kills an Eritrean immigrant. He thinks there are no witnesses and drives away. But the next morning the dead man’s wife, Sirkit, knocks on his door bearing the wallet he left behind.

The drama that plays out between “the extorted and the extorter” takes an unexpected shape. Instead of demanding money for her silence, Sirkit forces Eitan to spend his nights working at a makeshift clinic for undocumented African migrants. To keep the exhausting arrangement secret Eitan concocts an elaborate set of lies to tell his wife, Liat, who happens to be a police detective investigating—you guessed it—his hit and run.

Ms. Gundar-Goshen turns floodlights on Israel’s unseen corners. Liat gradually exposes a drug trafficking ring involving the head of a kibbutz, local Bedouins and Sirkit’s husband. Eitan, meanwhile, is confronted by otherwise invisible masses of ailing, destitute Eritreans and Sudanese. Compelled to tend to them against his will yet increasingly ensnared by the extremity of their need, his connection to this shadow population is a compound of guilt, resentment and compassion: “Just as the smell of blood drove sharks mad, the smell of weakness made him furious. Or maybe it was the opposite, and it wasn’t that he had the power to destroy them that made him angry at them but the clever way they destroyed him. The way their wretchedness oppressed him, accused him.”

“Waking Lions,” in a propulsive translation from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, yokes a crime story to thorny ethical issues in ways reminiscent of Donna Tartt and Richard Price. Its motor doesn’t always purr—the sections in the middle unpacking Eitan and Liat’s troubled marriage are laborious. But it’s a rare book that can trouble your conscience while holding you in a fine state of suspense.