 Having attended the naval academy in Acre as a boy, Shats commanded a swift boat on the Dead Sea before going to work for a shipping company.He is held to be an expert on maritime lore in general and the brief, checkered history of seafaring Israel in particular.He is regarded as Israel's token postmodernist, having first come to public attention in 1989 with an anonymous short story "Figs" that had the judges of the first Haaretz short story competition convinced that its author was a young Palestinian woman.