It's as good as a personal narrative by a non-historian could be. It's good for entertainment, not so much for history. The author is a writer and a reporter, not a historian.

Shavit paints a rosy picture without nuance, often. He writes about how Zionists at the start, for example, did not believe that Palestinians existed and thus considered them irrelevant, and Palestine as a "no mans land". This was not the case. While the supposed rallying cry Shavit alludes to was "a land without a people for a people without a land", the Zionist cause was acutely aware of the native population. Herzl wrote various ideas of how to move those that could be moved by providing them with jobs elsewhere, and how to coexist with those that remained. Indeed, the rallying cry Shavit alludes to never really gained traction in mainstream media, and the claims that Zionists used the phrase are more ubiquitous than actual uses. Shavit thus misrepresents Zionism from the get-go, assuming that everyone always insisted all Arabs must leave.

And he talks about things like colonialism removed from historical context. James Gelvin explains how the meaning of the word evolved in his book on the conflict, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, which still isn't one of my favorite books (too short to be good on details too). It wasn't exploitation as we associate with it today, it was the idea of bringing to the natives a civilized form of living, integrating them into the global economy, and imbuing them with Western and liberal values. And he treats the cause as if it sought to coerce others to force Zionism on the land. Rather, the real goal was political and diplomatic under Herzl especially: he beseeched the Ottoman sultan to allow him to establish a semiautonomous entity there, and sought support from others to persuade the sultan. It wasn't some forceful push.

The book continues in this fashion, as you mentioned in Lydda's example which Martin Kramer attacks. He fails to differentiate Religious Zionism in the form of the settler movement from Religious Zionism that argued no Israel should be established at all, pre-1948 especially. He says that UNSCOP believes Jews and Arabs cannot coexist, though ignoring that UNSCOP mandated that the Jewish state in its partition plan have a large minority of Arabs, up to 40% of its population. He claims there was no movement for peace by the Zionists post-1936, but altogether ignores Jewish reaction to the Peel Commission plan being mildly positive (accepting it in principle for future discussion), the acceptance of the partition plan and cooperation with UNSCOP, etc. in this calculation.

The book is political, it's narrative-based, and that's fine. Don't count it as solid history, and do your own research in history books if you're curious on the topic. Information is given in the way it usually is by journalists and the like: only enough to reinforce their point of view. Which is great for a story, but not for education.