I was expecting to be debating and rolling my eyes at this quite a bit, after reading Segev's introduction about his enduring admiration for the first Israelis. I think that part might have been intentionally vague in order to let this book get published, because as the book continues, his condemnations of the very first settlers, the state of Israel's politicians, and of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine generally, very much ring out. Segev is scathing about Ben-Gurion especially, which is extremely refreshing after reading Benny Morris's account of the same events.

Impressively, it did leave me with a large amount of sympathy for the Israelis I think Segev was alluding to - the thousands of immigrants from the diaspora lured under false pretenses to a state that was in no way ready to take them. The Yemeni Jews forced to cut their sidelocks by the European immigrants who believed the Israeli culture must also be European, the Ethiopian Jews who were thrown out of their new houses by the IDF when the housing shortage became apparent, everyone who sent letters home saying Israel was not what they were promised it would be, only to have those letters confiscated and never received. 

There were a couple times I'd question the wording of something, mostly just when Segev quotes an account from the time then continues to use its questionable use of terms for that paragraph without presenting them in quotation marks (which would show they're now inaccurate at best), but it's extremely minor. Overall I thought it was the best Israeli perspective you could want, and I can see why the Institute for Palestine Studies republished it.