In his Substack My Israel Story, Gil Press traces the history of Israel and the Jewish experience through an unusually intimate archive: his own family. A former senior marketing and research executive at DEC and EMC and a longtime contributor to Forbes, Press now turns to personal history to illuminate national history, spanning nearly two centuries of migration, settlement, conflict, and cultural renewal in the Land of Israel. His work blends archival rigor with inherited memory, drawing on letters, newspapers, and firsthand documents that, in his view, offer a different kind of historical clarity than conventional narratives.
“This is a very personal take on life in Israel over the last 175 years,” he explains, framing the project as both a family record and a historical intervention.
History Through One Family
Press anchors his narrative to a lineage deeply rooted in the region’s early Jewish presence. “My father’s great-grandfather arrived in Jerusalem in 1850, and his maternal grandfather was one of the founders of Rishon LeZion, the first Zionist settlement, established in 1882,” he says. His maternal grandfather later became the first settler in the Haifa Bay dunes in 1924, establishing a model farm meant to demonstrate that “after centuries of neglect, Jews could make the Land of Israel again the Land of Plenty.”
What distinguishes his approach is the archive of lived experience, such as letters, clippings, and personal documents exchanged across generations and geographies. One example he highlights is correspondence during the 1948 war between a grandfather in besieged Jerusalem and his sons in Haifa and Tel Aviv, all enduring what he describes as “the horrible 1948 war of the small Jewish community with five well-equipped invading Arab armies, plus thousands of local irregulars and international volunteers.”
For Press, these materials make history immediate. “The personal and family angle may make their experiences more meaningful and direct,” he says, than traditional historiography.
The Long Arc of Conflict
Viewing the conflict through this longer familial and historical lens leads Press to challenge widely held assumptions about its origins. He argues that tensions predate modern statehood and were shaped by shifting political and social hierarchies under Ottoman and British rule.
His grandfather, born in Jerusalem in 1874, lived under a system in which “Jews were at the bottom of society.” Press argues that the British period disrupted this hierarchy, creating resentment as Jews gained equal status and introduced modern institutions. He emphasizes that “successful modern farming methods—and other aspects of modern life, such as vastly improved healthcare—benefited the local Arabs but also contributed to their rising envy-induced enmity.”
He also critiques contemporary frameworks for interpreting the conflict, particularly the language of colonialism. “Bringing democracy to a tiny fraction of the Middle East is widely known today as ‘settler colonialism,’” he says. “It’s more than a misconception; it’s an outright blood libel.”
The Persistence of Hope
Despite the violence chronicled throughout his family history, Press highlights a recurring thread of resilience and hope. Even after traumatic events, many individuals continue to envision coexistence.
“Peaceful people always hope for peace,” he notes, while acknowledging the psychological strain of prolonged conflict. He points to survivors of recent violence who still advocate political solutions on both sides, even after profound personal loss.
Yet he also warns of the tension between hope and reality: “Trying to stay sane when you reside in a country under constant threat could lead many people to delusion.”
The Role of Culture in Nation-Building
For Press, Israel’s story is not only political or military but deeply cultural. He emphasizes the revival of Hebrew and early cultural institutions as foundational to national identity.
His great-grandfather Haim Press, editor of one of Jerusalem’s earliest Hebrew newspapers, described Hebrew as the “bolt that joins us [the Jews] together from one end of the earth to another.” Culture, Press argues, was not decorative but constitutive of nation-building—libraries, education, and publishing were as central as political institutions.
Israel as an Ongoing Experiment
Looking at the present, Press sees continuity rather than rupture. The innovative spirit of modern Israel, he argues, is rooted in earlier waves of experimentation in agriculture, communal life, and culture.
“The success of ‘Startup Nation’ testifies to the continuation, even acceleration, of that experimental spirit,” he says. From early pioneers to modern entrepreneurs, he sees a consistent thread of “entrepreneurship, risk-taking, creativity, and boundless imagination.”
For Press, Israel remains not a finished project but an evolving one that is shaped as much by inherited memory as by future ambition.
