Rating: 5/5, excellent
This 1,000 page tome is a fantastic in-depth history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It took me about four years to read and a couple of months to review, but I think it was worth the effort.
It’s fairly unbiased compared to other books I’ve looked into on Israel. It leans slightly pro-Israel, but it’s also very critical when warranted.
If it has any bias, I would say it comes off as a little anti-religious (the most passionate parts are anti-fundamentalist) and a little elitist/classist at times (I got the sense at certain parts, like when he’s talking about the Yishuv or the Fellahin, that he doesn’t have that much sympathy for the poor or uneducated). The liberal secular academic lean doesn’t bother me because it aligns with my own perspective.
Howard Sachar was an American Jew and a college history professor at George Washington University. He had a 4.9/5 difficulty rating on RateMyProfessors.com. He passed away in 2018.
Sachar is deeply critical of the fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish religious and racist anti-Arab elements in Israeli society and politics.
I really appreciate that he doesn’t try to portray one side as good and the other as bad, rather he demonstrates how over time, both have victimized the other.
He challenges the Palestinian narrative that Jews came and simply kicked the Palestinians out in 1948 by describing in detail how Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, called for a boycott of the UN hearings, which led to the UN drawing up a partition plan that favored the Zionists because the Zionists made a detailed case to the UN (I included the full quotation further down the page if you search for “Mufti”).
Palestinian leadership was then faced with the decision to either accept the partition plan or go to war, and they chose the latter. Contrary to Israeli sources after the war, the Palestinian population never fled to surrounding Arab countries because the governments of those countries told them to evacuate out of the way of their advancing armies. Sachar says they left because their leaders, who their society was reliant on, left first, as well as due to panic spread by their own press and leaders in the wake of the Deir Yassin massacre (citation lower down if you search for “Deir Yassin”).
I checked Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine to see what he says, and he doesn’t say whether more Palestinians fled or were expelled by Israeli forces. His general narrative is that they were expelled, though he does say “or fled” (75) in a few places because because a lot did flee, but we don’t know the proportion.
I was looking around for better resources on 1948, and found The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris, which has more details on what happened in particular villages, so I’ll update once I receive that and flip through it a bit. Benny Morris is one of the New Historians. He started out more pro-Palestinian and then pivoted more Zionist after the Second Intifada.
Sachar says that Palestinians were not allowed to resettle in Israel/Palestine because the Israeli government had to find space for an influx of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Most Jews were kicked out of the surrounding Arab countries because the governments of those countries viewed them as being loyal to Israel instead. Also, Nazis had distributed antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world via radio during WWII. The populations were roughly equal: 700,000 Palestinians leaving and 900,000 Jews arriving. He doesn’t seem to think this is morally okay. I got the sense that he was explaining, not excusing the Israeli government’s appropriation of the land from Palestinian refugees to house the huge wave of Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jewish immigrants.
On the other hand, he points out how from the late 1800s when Eastern European Jewish immigration to Palestine really picked up, they didn’t make much effort to integrate with the Arab inhabitants. He describes instances of Jews beating Arabs and Arabs beating Jews. Racism, the language barrier, and differing cultures were frequent points of conflict. Zionist philanthropy from sources like the Rothschilds enabled Jewish agricultural settlements to become reliant on Arab labor, which set up an owner/worker relationship that built resentment in the Arab workers.
Early Zionist settlements hoped to be self-sufficient communist entities, but they usually ended in starvation or return to Europe. It wasn’t until they secured foreign capitalist investment that the Zionist settlements started to become viable and establish themselves. Sachar doesn’t mythologize the early settlers as much as other sources do, which is good. He’s a stickler for the truth, pointing out what’s right and what’s wrong with all parties involved.
I really appreciate how Sachar goes into detail about economic forces and how they shape when countries decide to go to war. I also liked the chapters covering literature and how writers both influence and are influenced by the times they live in.
Israel was fairly communist at the beginning and then became more capitalist as time went on, especially in the 1980s with privatization. Israel’s economic alignment influences how the world relates to Israel – capitalist countries such as the U.S. hold Israel in high regard now that it leans capitalist, while anti-capitalist leftists now despise Israel (there’s the anti-colonial aspect too, but capitalism and colonialism tend to go hand in hand).
I’m going to make some notes on a couple of the chapters in order that I think are salient to the current discourse about Israel, as well as a couple of things in the book that made an impression on me or surprised me:
Chapter 2: The Beginning of the Return
This chapter shows how much the early Zionists (1800s -1890s) had to struggle and endure deprivation while attempting to farm the land. Israel wasn’t a “land without a people” but it did used to be a lot less developed before large-scale Jewish settlement.
Chapter 3: Herzl and the Rise of Political Zionism
This covers a lot of the friction within the global Jewish community over the creation of Israel. A lot of Jews wanted to focus on integrating into their resident countries and thought having a state of their own would make them look unpatriotic. At first, Israel was broadly communist economically and politically, so international conservative and moderate Jews wanted to distance themselves from it. Israel was originally seen as a little naïve, idealistic leftist project that the international community didn’t expect to achieve political and economic viability.
This runs counter to the way a lot of big Jewish organizations today portray Israel as having unanimous Jewish support. There’s a joke that goes “two Jews, three opinions” and I would say that applies in my experience talking to other Jews about Israel. I would say Jews are mostly Zionist in that most support the existence of Israel, but there have been a handful of anti-Zionist Jews in most gatherings I’ve been to and I think it is silencing their perspectives when people stress that most Jews are Zionists to imply that it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist or say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Jewish opinion on Israel has never been unanimous. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I’ve agreed with 100% about Israel.
It’s also interesting how other locations were considered for the Jewish state, including parts of Uganda and Guyana, showing how the actual land wasn’t quite as important as finding a safe place Jews could live away from antisemitism, under their own governance that wouldn’t turn against them as other countries had done (but even that isn’t perfect, as a Jewish government could oppress Jews if they don’t practice the official type of Judaism).
Chapter 9: Britain Repudiates the Jewish National Home
I see pro-Palestinian people on social media sometimes say that Palestinians were hospitable towards Jews before the establishment of the Jewish state. Maybe on an individual level, but on a collective level the Arab residents of Palestine pressured the British mandate government to limit Jewish immigration as much as possible during World War II while Jews were being killed by the Nazis in Europe.
On the other hand, many other countries also limited Jewish immigration during the Holocaust, including the United States.
Chapter 12: The Birth of Israel
The strong anti-Zionist influence of Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (the Mufti of Jerusalem) led to the Arab Higher Committee gaining recognition by the UN General Assembly and the AHC’s decision to boycott the UNSCOP hearings:
“With this recognition, and the threat of the revived paramilitary armies behind it, the Husseini faction adopted an increasingly uncompromising stance. From mid-June of 1947 on, when the UNSCOP group arrived in the Holy Land, the Mufti’s followers staged anti-Zionist demonstrations in the larger Palestine cities. Jamil al-Husseini warned also that this unrest was merely the overture to a large-scale Arab revolt, unless the United Nations gave ‘full justice’. It was in the interval, then, that the Higher Committee decided to boycott the UNSCOP hearings. The decision was probably a tactical blunder. Although the United Nations group managed to interview Arabs unofficially during its five-week stay in Palestine, and sample their views, this informal poll hardly compared to the elaborate and documented testimony offered by the Zionists.” (p. 281)
The British made and broke promises to both sides. I see some people say that the British favored the Jews, but Sachar says:
“The single most notable feature of mandatory noncooperation by late 1947 was Britain’s undisguised partiality for the Arab military effort. The embargo on Jewish immigration and Jewish weapons acquisition was stringently maintained. The Jews were denied the right to organize a militia. Haganah members were disarmed wherever they were found. All the while, Britain continued to sell weapons to Iraq and Transjordan under its treaty relations with those states.” (297)
In 1947 the British were worried about their access to oil, so they wanted to please the Arab countries they were doing business with. They were also angry at the Jews for the attacks on their personnel by the Irgun and Lehi. Many of them were also antisemitic. For these reasons, the British weren’t exactly cozy with the Zionists during that time.
Chapter 13: The War of Independence
Summary: During the 1948 war, the Arab population left the area because their leaders left and because their press sensationalized the Deir Yassin massacre, which decreased morale.
Text: “Elsewhere in Palestine, too, the Arab exodus gained momentum, reaching nearly 175,000 during the last weeks of the mandate. There were various reasons for this flight, but none of them could be traced to an alleged appeal for evacuation by the Arab governments themselves, ostensibly to make way for the impending invasion of Arab armies. This was a frequently repeated Israeli claim after the war. Yet no such order for evacuation was ever found in any release of the Arab League or in any military communiques of the period. Rather, the evidence in the Arab press and radio of the time was to the contrary. By and large, except for towns like Haifa, already captured by the Jews, the Arab League ordered the Palestinians to stay where they were, and stringent punitive measures were reported against Arab youths of military age who fled the country. Even Jewish broadcasts (in Hebrew) mentioned these Arab orders to remain. Azzam Pasha, Abdullah, and the various ‘national committees’ appealed repeatedly to the Arabs not to leave their homes. The Ramallah commander of the Arab Legion threatened to confiscate the property and blow up the houses of those Arabs who left without permission. At one point the Lebanese government decided to close its frontiers to all Palestinians, except for women, children, and old people.
The most obvious reason for the mass exodus was the collapse of Palestine Arab political institutions that ensued upon the flight of the Arab leadership—at the very moment when that leadership was most needed. The departure of mukhtars, judges, and cadis from Haifa and the New City of Jerusalem, from Jaffa, Safed, and elsewhere, dealt a grave blow to the Arab population. The semifeudal character of Arab society rendered the illiterate fellah almost entirely dependent on the landlord and cadi, and once this elite was gone, the Arab peasant was terrified by the likelihood of remaining in an institutional and cultural void. Jewish victories obviously intensified the fear and accelerated departure. In many cases, too—in the battle to open the highway to Jerusalem, for example—Jews captured Arab villages, expelled the inhabitants, and blew up houses to prevent them from being used as strongholds against them. In other instances, Qawukji’s men used Arab villages for their bases, provoking immediate Jewish retaliation.
The most savage of these reprisal actions took place on April 9, 1948, in the village of Deir Yassin, a community guarding the entrance to Jerusalem. The Etzel and Lech’i initiated the operation, and the ruthlessness these groups had earlier demonstrated against the British was now applied in even fuller measure against the Arabs. The village was captured, and more than two hundred Arab men, women, and children were slain, their bodies afterward mutilated and thrown into a well. Although the deed was immediately repudiated by the Jewish government, which arrested the Etzel officers responsible, the consequences of the massacre were far-reaching. News of the outrage rapidly circulated throughout Palestine, and characteristically was embellished and soon dramatically exaggerated by the Arab population. The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible, for they knew well how their own guerrillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors. Later, too, the villagers were to recall the words of Azzam Pasha on the eve of the Arab invasion, describing the coming fate of the Jews: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.’ It was not unnatural for the Palestine Arabs to expect the same treatment from the Jews. Arab leaders similarly gave wide publicity to authentic or rumored acts of atrocity committed by the Zionist enemy, with utter indifference to the impact these accounts would have on Arab civilian morale. In April and May, entire Arab communities were fleeing in terror even before Jewish forces overran their homes.”
Chapter 16: The Search for Peace and Security
In the section “The Arab Refugees: The Fate of Abandoned Property”, Sachar explains how the early Israeli state was able to appropriate and sell to Jewish immigrants land that was designated abandoned by Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war.
He writes that the first Abandoned Areas Ordinance passed by the Provisional Government in 1948 “defined an ‘abandoned area’ as any place conquered by the Israeli armed forces or deserted by all or part of its inhabitants.”
A number of other regulations passed that disallowed the return of Arabs to property marked by the Custodian of Abandoned Property as “absentee”. The Jewish Agency encouraged Jewish immigrants to occupy abandoned dwellings and agricultural fields. Sachar writes “By 1951 nearly all abandoned Arab property had been coopted.”
“The Jewish squatters, in turn, tens of thousands of whom were themselves victims of confiscatory measures in Moslem lands, left no doubt that any suggestion of relinquishing this shelter to Arab returnees would be met with force if necessary. They would not allow themselves to be expropriated twice.’
The government had no intention of forcing them out. In September 1951 the Knesset passed a new bill to legalize the occupation of Arab holdings… The Custodian was authorized thenceforth not simply to control, operate, or lease the vacant property but in fact to sell it [through a series of legal steps]…
In response to queries from the PCC, Israel gave assurance that the funds received from the sale of the absentee Arab land would be credited to the refugees for future disposal. On the other hand, there could be no question of compensation until the opening of final peace talks with the Arab governments… And even then, Foreign Minister Sharett emphasized, compensation would be applied exclusively to a fund to resettle the refugees elsewhere, not to repatriate them… Sharett added, finally, that his government’s ability to pay compensation was necessarily limited by the economic impact of continuing Arab boycott and blockade.”
Chapter 19: A Decade of Political and Diplomatic Achievement
I thought it was interesting how Israel’s secret service (the Mossad) basically kidnapped Adolf Eichmann (one of the men responsible for the Holocaust) from Argentina and Argentina’s government protested the extrajudicial arrest. This was an instance of Israel contradicting the stereotype of Jews being weak. On the other hand, due process is important, I can kind of see where Argentina’s government was coming from. Considering how much pain Eichmann caused, though, and how healing (but also triggering) it must have been for the world’s Jews to see him interrogated on TV, it’s hard to say that Israel was in the wrong for that one.
Chapter 21: The Six-Day War
I tend to skim through the parts about military campaigns, but I was shocked that the Egyptian government didn’t warn its allies (Jordan especially) of their grave losses to the Israeli air preemptive attack.
“Throughout the first day of the Sinai offensive, the Israeli government refrained from issuing announcements on the magnitude of its victories. The cloak of silence represented official policy. The only military communiques that went out over the airwaves were broadcast by Cairo; and during the first twenty-four hours these releases spoke of unprecedented Egyptian breakthroughs, of Israeli’s army and air force destroyed, of Egyptian mechanized columns driving on Tel Aviv. The ‘news’ was accepted unquestioningly elsewhere in the Arab world, and it influenced the precipitous decisions of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq to enter the fighting.”
Nasser himself wasn’t aware of the decimation of his air force immediately. He wasn’t officially informed until 4pm on June 5th. He and King Hussein of Jordan said that the Egyptian air force was defeated because the United States and England were assisting Israel but they weren’t actually involved. This led to protests against those countries across the Arab world.
Chapter 25: Aftermath of an Earthquake
In the 1976 Entebbe Raid, 248 civilians travelling on a plane from Israel to France were taken hostage by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in an attempt to get 40 Palestinian militants released from Israeli prisons. Rather than bargaining for the release of hostages, Israel’s military launched a successful rescue mission (Operation Thunderbolt), bringing home 132 hostages (148 were released because they were not Jewish/Israeli and 3 were killed).
Chapter 26: The Likud Era Begins
Israel made a big turn to the political right with Menachem Begin’s election to prime minister and Likud’s defeat of Labor in the Knesset in 1977. Sachar says it was driven by a few factors, including Labor’s underwhelming campaign compared to Likud, frustration with Dayan and Meir’s failure to prepare for Egypt and Syria’s attacks in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and a centrist third party (the DMC) attracting protest votes away from the left.
But most importantly:
“Fueling the non-Europeans’ repudiation of Labor, for one thing, was plain and simple resentment of the Ashkenazic elite. Despite an absolute rise in the Orientals’ real income by 1977, even the emergence of a substantial bourgeoisie within their ranks, their share of white-collar jobs did not exceed half that of Ashkenazic Jews. Neither did their representation in the national government, the Histadrut [Israel’s national trade union center], the political parties, the armed forces, and the universities. During the Ben-Gurion era, Labor had offered the Oriental communities enough welfare and patronage to ensure a majority of their votes. Yet, by the 1970s, Ashkenazic ‘paternalism’ and ‘tokenism’ no longer evoked their loyalty. Moreover, non-Europeans’ social resentments were exacerbated by a deeply rooted suspicion of Arabs. It was the Orientals’ forebears, after all, who had suffered immemorially under Moslem rule. Renewed contact with these former persecutors after the Six-Day War simply awakened old grievances. Indeed, ensconced vocationally a rung above the thousands of commuting West Bank and Gaza Arab laborers, Oriental Jews tended to develop a ‘poor-white’ mentality, and thus to generate a vested interest in the economic as well as the territorial status quo. More than other elements in Israel’s population, therefore, the non-Ashkenazim resonated to Begin’s charismatic authoritarianism and florid nationalist invective. The 1977 election accordingly was their long awaited moment of vindication against the European establishment.”
It’s crazy how similar Israeli politics are to American politics in some ways. Some of the same factors behind support for the right wing in the U.S. also underlie support for the right wing in Israel. This totally blew my mind when I first read it.
Chapter 28: Romantic Nationalism and Realpolitik
On June 13th, 2025, Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, but did you know Israel also bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in 1981? They say history repeats itself…
I’m not sure whether Iran had the capability to build nuclear weapons or if they were using the nuclear facilities for peaceful purposes. Sachar seems to think they had nuclear weapons capability.
The international community largely condemned the attack, as did the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel’s attack alienated France, a former ally, who had been supplying the materials to Iran insisting it was for peaceful purposes. The attack on June 7th came at a critical moment in negotiations between Israel and Egypt, as Sadat and Begin had recently met on June 4th at Sharm es-Sheikh, embarrassing Sadat before the Arab world.
Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, was assassinated in 1981 by an Islamic fundamentalist who “despised his materialism and pro-Westernism.” The Arab world seemed to view him as a traitor, while Israelis saw him as an important pillar of the peace process (and his assassination was seen as a bad sign for the peace process). In 1978, he had signed a peace treaty with Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter. He had also opened Egypt to Western economic investment, turning away from the USSR.
Chapter 30: Israel in Lebanon
I’m going to skip this one because I talked about Sabra and Shatila in my Wrestling with Zion review. It was hard to read about it again because the events covered were so disturbing.
I like this quote from Sachar at the end of the chapter, though:
“In the end, however, it was Begin’s most egregious failure of perspective that he applied his inflammatory rhetoric not only to the nation’s latent chauvinism and to it’s more-than-latent ethnic tensions, but to an interpretation of the Jewish experience that approached paranoia. In his diplomacy with foreign leaders no less than in his military adventurism, the prime minister adverted endlessly to the trauma of the Holocaust. The memory of that horror unquestionably was locked in Begin’s heart. But its tactical application to current issues was shrill, and ultimately fatiguing. Whether it was the authorization to bombard an Iraqi nuclear reactor or a Lebanese village, the denunciation of Yasser Arafat or of Shimon Peres, the martyrological parallels delivered repeatedly to Anwar al-Sadat or to Jimmy Carter—Begin’s indiscriminate invocation of the Holocaust may have been his most flagrant transgression. By word and deed, he politicized, and thereby trivialized, the single bitterest chapter in Jewish history.”
“Shrill, and ultimately fatiguing”—that is a great description of how it feels to American Jews who are critical of Israel when advocates for Israel overuse references to the Holocaust for political ends. It’s fatiguing and shrill because we also carry that trauma and it hurts to hear it brought up again and again, especially if it’s done to justify actions committed by Israel that we oppose. Although it’s done in service to Israel, it results in alienating many Jewish Americans from Israel.
Chapter 31: A Crisis of Israeli Spirit, of Diaspora Loyalty
Page 923 is where I think Sachar looks down on Orthodox communities a bit. He says the early Orthodox communities in Israel were not productive and all they did was suffer heat, cold, illness, and Arab oppression, but they were the majority of the Jewish population in Palestine and if it were not for them “there would have been no Jewish foothold in the Holy Land at all.” It seems a little dismissive of the spiritual in favor of capitalist success.
The part about the protests over the Ramot highway being built through Kiryat Sanz (p. 925) shows how Orthodox communities in Israel have been able to force the government to cater to their religious beliefs. They opposed the highway being built because it would have too much traffic on the Sabbath, so they protested by throwing rocks at cars passing through. The fighting went back and forth between secular people who wanted to build the Ramot thoroughfare and the Orthodox in Kiryat Sanz who wanted to stop the construction.
The conflict also spread to New York:
“In April 1981, an estimated nine thousand of New York City’s Satmar Chasidim staged a three-hour protest before the Israeli consulate. Among their placards were some bearing the familiar slogans “Zionism—Enemy of the Jewish People,” “Free the Religious Hostages,” “Nazi Germany 1939—Zionist Israel 1981.” Nearly a thousand policemen were needed to keep order, but the crowd succeeded in disrupting rush-hour traffic in mid-town Manhattan. In Jerusalem itself, the crisis was not resolved until Mayor Kollek finally agreed that a new, permanent access road to Ramot would be built (at great expense and strategic inconvenience) to circumvent the Bible Belt entirely.”
I was surprised by both how violent and how vociferously anti-Zionist the Orthodox communities can be. I often see Zionists saying that it’s antisemitic to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, but apparently Orthodox Jews did it in 1981 to protest the Israeli government being too secular (Israeli settlers in Gaza also did it when they were evicted by the IDF in 2005).
It’s important to note that Haredi Jews are generally opposed to Zionism for religious reasons (Jews aren’t supposed to return to Israel until the messiah comes) or because they believe the government is too secular, not out of concern for Palestinians. The exception is the Neturei Karta, a small sect with a few thousand members. By contrast, Satmar Hasidim, the largest Haredi group (which is anti-Zionist for religious reasons), has a few hundred thousand members.
There is a lot of conflict in Israel between those who want Israel’s government to be religious and those who want Israel’s government to be secular. One of the biggest issues of our time was the military draft exemption for male Haredi yeshiva students. It was a big source of resentment from secular Israelis that they didn’t have to serve in the IDF. The exemption was recently allowed to expire in June 2024, partially because Israel needed more soldiers for the war in Gaza.
Chapter 35: A Deterioration of the Rabin-Peres Legacy
On November 4th, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords.
It is sad that two of the most important leaders who fought for peace got assassinated (Anwar Sadat of Egypt was killed by an Islamic fundamentalist).
Simon Peres was prime minister after Rabin’s assassination.
In February and March of 1996, Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed 59 Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks.
Arafat and the PA collaborated with Israel in cracking down on Hamas to prevent further attacks:
“Lately sworn in as president of the new Palestine Authority, Arafat was acutely aware that Hamas suicide attacks might erode Peres’s political base, and thereby deprive him, Arafat, of his most reliable partner in the ongoing Oslo peace track. To minimize this danger, he ordered his security forces to reign in Hamas. On March 5, 1996, dozens of the Islamist organization’s quite formidable social institutions, its schools, philanthropic societies, hospitals, and mosques, were transferred to the PA’s administrative control. In Gaza alone, some two thousand Hamas militants were placed in ‘detention’.”
In April 1996, Hezbollah in Lebanon shot rockets into Israel and Simon Peres responded with Operation Grapes of Wrath, an artillery bombardment. During Operation Grapes of Wrath, “an errant Israeli artillery salvo fell on a UN-guarded enclave adjacent to the town of Qana, where hundreds of Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees had taken refuge. Before the Israeli artillerists corrected their aim, 102 people, many of them women and children, lay dead or dying.”
The UN said that Israel deliberately targeted the compound, but Israel denies their report. Sachar doesn’t mention the UN report. There’s a detailed report by David R. Williams about why it was caused by a lack of military standardization of instruments. Robert Fisk quoted an Israeli newspaper called Kol Ha’ir that ran an article of testimony by anonymous Israeli soldiers saying that they were told to do it on purpose.
I don’t know what’s true… all the sources seem a bit biased. Sachar seems a little pro-Israel, the UN tends to lean anti-Israel, David R. Williams seems right-leaning, Robert Fisk is left-leaning, and I’m not able to independently evaluate.
The Qana incident affected Simon Peres’s run for reelection because Arab Israelis boycotted the vote, which helped the radical right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu to narrowly win the prime ministry in 1996.
Netanyahu picked up the Oslo Accords only reluctantly. He said he would follow them, but delayed and added conditions. He and Sharon immediately made improving the economy and infrastructure of settlements in the West Bank a priority and said to the Likud central committee: “There will never be a Palestinian state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.” From the river to the sea, as the Palestinians say.
Then Netanyahu opened the Hasmonean Tunnel close to the holiest site in Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat called for mass demonstrations, and violence erupted. President Clinton called Netanyahu and Arafat to Washington. Dennis Ross and King Hussein shuttled back and forth between Israel and Palestine and worked out an agreement for Israel to partially pull out of Hebron. It wasn’t as much as was discussed before, but it was a step forward on a process that had stalled.
Netanyahu reneged by half on military withdrawals and started constructing a settlement between Jerusalem and the West Bank that would make it difficult for Palestinians to pass through. Arafat responded by relaxing his mitigations of Hamas terrorist activities, and those activities resumed.
Clinton called them to Washington again and he and King Hussein got Netanyahu to concede a bit more troop withdrawal and administrative control and they both agreed to start immediately on final-status issues (this was called the Wye Accord).
From Sachar’s description, it sounds like Netanyahu was being unreasonable, Arafat was shocked at Netanyahu’s proposals, Clinton was frustrated with Netanyahu, and King Hussein was trying his best to help them come to an agreement.
Chapter 36: Ehud Barak’s Two Years
The PA struggled with issues of corruption.
“No sooner was the ink dry on the memorandum than the prime minister found ways to delay its implementation, claiming (not always factitiously) that Arafat was reneging on his commitment to ensure peace and order in Palestine. And, in the end, the Wye Accord languished.”
Clinton stopped meeting with Netanyahu.
Ehud Barak of the Labor Party got elected prime minister in 1999. Clinton was surprised that Barak wanted to make an agreement over the Golan Heights with Syria first before continuing the Wye Accords. Talks with Syria in the United States failed, and upon returning to Israel, Barak withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon because Israel was losing too many soldiers there. In November 1999, Barak had agreed to work out final status negotiations with Arafat in February of 2000, but by July, Barak had spent most of his time negotiating with the Syrians.
Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David II. Barak agreed to evacuate the Gaza Strip and 92% of the West Bank, but wouldn’t give up some settlements near the Green Line (and some further away like Ariel) that bisected parts of Palestine. Arafat rejected it, saying that he wouldn’t accept Israeli control of the far-flung settlements. Barak and Arafat ultimately couldn’t agree on right of return for Palestinians or how to manage Jerusalem. Arafat set up private talks in Jerusalem between his and Barak’s representatives in August and September 2000. They started divvying up individual neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and things were starting to go okay.
Then on September 28th, 2000, Ariel Sharon decided to visit the Temple Mount/Haram es-Sharif. I compared what Sachar says about Sharon’s visit to what Rashid Khalidi says here. Sachar says Sharon was careful not to provoke, but Khalidi says he gave a provocative speech. Either way, Palestinians rioted at the Haram es-Sharif and Israeli police repressed the violent protests with state violence. This was the beginning of the Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada. Clinton called Barak and Arafat to Paris and got Barak to ease travel curfews and Arafat to scale down the random sniping and rioting.
Clinton met with Barak and Arafat again on December 23, 2000 at the White House and Clinton presented his final plan to them, take it or leave it, because he was going to leave office soon. They were called The Clinton Parameters. Barak accepted it, but Arafat asked so many questions and required so many details “that their cumulative effect was a deal breaker” (1042).
On January 21st, 2001, they dispatched their representatives to Taba, Egypt. On January 23rd, there was another terrorist attack killing 2 people and Barak withdrew his representative. Even then, they kept in contact, but Barak wasn’t able to get Arafat to agree to a deal.
After seeing how many times Clinton met with Barak, his successor Netanyahu, and Arafat, I feel bad for Clinton that Arafat couldn’t agree to his final deal. Sachar says the agreement would have left Palestine 94-96% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a safe corridor between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have required the demilitarization of Palestine except for a police force and militia for internal security. It would have only guaranteed Palestinian right of return to the West Bank and Gaza and left it up to Israel whether Israel would admit Palestinian refugees into its territory.
Well, that’s Sachar’s narrative, at least…
In Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, he writes:
“Camp David ended in disaster, with Barak avoiding substantive meetings with Arafat and instead putting forward a secret proposal through the Americans, while refusing any modifications. With this extraordinary procedure, the US in effect formally endorsed the Israeli position. Barak’s unmodifiable proposal—which was never published, only reconstructed by participants after the event—was unacceptable to the Palestinians in several crucial respects. These included permanent Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley and of Palestine’s airspace, and therefore of access to the outside world (which meant the projected Palestinian ‘state’ would not be truly sovereign), Israel’s continued control over West Bank water resources, as well as its annexation of areas that would have divided the West Bank into several isolated blocs. Not surprisingly, the greatest gulf between the two sides was over the disposition of Jerusalem. Israel demanded exclusive sovereignty, including over the entire Haram al-Sharif and most of the rest of the Old City, which was a central element in the ultimate breakdown of the talks.”
Khalidi’s account differs from Sachar’s in a number of respects. For one, he says the plan was really Barak’s and not Clinton’s. Second, he says the plan included “permanent Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley”. Sachar says, “Israel would reserve the right to redeploy its army to the Jordan River in the event of a serious external threat to the Jewish state,” and that the army could remain in the valley for a maximum of six years. About airspace, Sachar says: “While the Palestinians would exercise sovereignty over their airspace, they would be obliged to ‘accommodate’ Israeli air force training and operational needs.” Sachar calls the annexations in the West Bank “minimalist” and says that the plan included a safe passage zone between Gaza and the West Bank.
Khalidi cites a book by Clayton Swisher called The Truth About Camp David, which is comprised of interviews by Swisher of many of the people involved. Sachar cites a lot of sources, but he cites them by chapter and not line-by-line, so it’s hard to tell which quotation came from which source. Sachar does cite Dennis Ross’s book, which Khalidi calls “self-serving and meretricious.” Sachar also cites Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Arab Refugee Problem Revisited and Hanieh Akram’s “The Camp David Papers”.
Hanieh Akram wrote:
“It was in these committees that the provocative Israeli maps were presented showing Israeli annexations ranging from 10 to 13.5 percent of the West Bank. The Palestinian side refused to deal with them. In brief, the focus was the three huge settlement blocs in the north, center, and south of the West Bank. These were fattened, their area expanded, and they were connected to each other and to Israel by large areas of Palestinian land in such a way as to control Palestinian water resources in the West Bank. Clearly, the Israelis came to Camp David not in search of a language of dialogue with a neighbor and partner but to cement the gains from the 1967 War, to restructure and legalize the occupation.”
That’s a pretty big disparity from Sachar saying the Clinton Parameters left Palestine 94-96% of the West Bank and only a “minimal” chunk by the border. He said the map showed more land to Israel, so maybe some of the land shown on the map was not counted in the percentages given for some reason?
It sounds like the very content of the Clinton Parameters is hotly contested. The Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF), an Israeli policy think tank, has a version of the Clinton Parameters. It lines up with Sachar’s version, but it is an Israeli source.
Mitchell Plitnick wrote in “The Myth that Stays with Us: Camp David 2000”:
“Arafat realized that the Palestinian people were not, in fact, at all prepared to make the kind of compromises that a peace with Israel would require. He had not done anything to make them ready for compromise on the refugee issue, if indeed such a compromise can be accepted. For his part, other circumstances, especially the settlement expansion, repeated closures of the Territories, and other Israeli actions that are simply routine parts of the occupation made it quite impossible for him to try to broach the topic of compromise on the refugee question in public.”
It sounds like the right of return was one of the deal breaker issues for Arafat and the Palestinians. I like how Mitchell Plitnick put it later in the article, that the refugee issue is where “the irresistible force of Palestinian nationalism collides head-on with the immovable object of Zionism.” If Palestinians are given right of return, wouldn’t that effectively be giving Israel back to them, thereby compromising the whole idea of a two-state solution? A Jewish state can’t stay Jewish and democratic without a Jewish majority.
Continuing on with summarizing Sachar:
Barak called elections early. Netanyahu wasn’t able to run. Sharon ran in 2001 and won, which came as a surprise to some because he was considered too unpredictable and far-right.
Sachar writes:
“By no means did the election signify a rejection of peace. In the last week of the campaign, polls revealed that majority of the voters simply had concluded that the government should be ‘less conciliatory’ in the face of Yasser Arafat’s duplicity and terrorism. Barak was seen as a waffler, pretending to be firm, and then retreating. In his stead, the ‘bulldozer,’ a man who only nineteen years earlier had been almost universally execrated as the ‘butcher of Sabra and Shatila,’ and whose political future had been written off, was awarded an overwhelming national mandate to lead the government and people of Israel toward a peace, ostensibly, of realism and security.”
It is kind of surprising that Ariel Sharon won the prime ministry after his visit to the Temple Mount preceded the Second Intifada.
Chapter 37: The Bulldozer as Prime Minister
Under Sharon, Palestinian terrorist attacks increased as well as Israeli reprisals.
On May 31, 2001, Feisal al-Husseini died of a heart attack. Sachar says al-Husseini died at his Orient House in Jerusalem, but other sources say he died in Kuwait on a PLO peace mission. It’s an odd error from Sachar. This book was originally published in 1976, so this part was added on later.
That same night, a Hamas-affiliated militant blew himself up at the entrance to the Dolphinarium discotheque, killing 22 young Israelis, mostly Russian immigrants.
David Rudge wrote for the Jerusalem Post:
“The Islamic Jihad originally claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, which was greeted with jubilation in Ramallah and parts of Gaza, where people danced in the streets and fired guns in the air.”
Returning to Sachar:
“In Tel Aviv the next morning, thousands of Israeli right-wingers demonstrated in the streets, mindlessly setting cars on fire, tearing up paving stones, and—in a mirror image of the mourners at Husseini’s funeral—calling for ‘death to the Arabs.’”
Sachar wrote earlier that Palestinians were “vowing revenge against Israel for having ‘martyred’ an Arab national hero.” That doesn’t quite sound like the same thing to me, but Sachar didn’t quote them directly, so I don’t know what they actually said.
Sharon responded by blocking off all Palestinian access to Israel and Jordan. Even more terrorist attacks followed: at a pizzeria (19 killed), at a café in Haifa (20+ Israelis and Israeli Arabs killed), as well as at a number of other locations.
On October 17th, 2001, Rechavam Ze’evi, a secular far right-wing politician and personal friend of Sharon’s, was murdered in a hotel room by two Palestinian gunmen. Sharon and Peres believed that Yasser Arafat had approved the assassination. Sharon put any plans for further withdrawals from the West Bank on hold (he didn’t have many, but it went from little to zero) and sent tanks and armored troop carriers to conduct periodic raids in Zone A in large Palestinian towns like Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, etc.
George W. Bush was a born-again Christian, so he met with Sharon but refused to meet with Arafat. Sharon planned to visit Bush to ensure goodwill, but terrorist attacks kept occurring, so he had to stay in Israel. Instead of the usual call for mutual restraint, Bush put out a statement saying that Israel had a right to defend itself. Bush made a “Road Map” for peace, which was made public in June 2003. It said the PA and Arafat did not look like good partners for peace and recommended the creation of a “responsible Palestine entity.”
Terrorist attacks increased. “In March [2002] alone, Israel underwent the most terrifying sequence of suicide bombings in its history, with explosions going off almost every other day, leaving 126 civilians killed and 411 wounded… One of the explosions killed 11 Israelis at Jerusalem’s Moment Café, a popular gathering place for members of the Peace Now movement.” On March 27th, a Hamas suicide bomber attacked a 250-guest Passover seder in the Park Hotel in Netania, killing 30 and injuring 140.
Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield, which was essentially a military reoccupation of the West Bank. 54 heavily armed Palestinian resisters (page 1054) were killed in major Palestinian cities during the reoccupation. Israeli intelligence officers surrounded and investigated the PA’s offices and found explosives, weapons, and documents proving that “Arafat evidently had renumerated the suicide bombers’ families from his personal slush fund.”
With the PA hamstrung by Israel, Hamas started taking over civil services.
Meanwhile, Labor withdrew from government, forcing Sharon to call for an early election. Sharon got re-elected, mostly because his cracking down on terrorism was having an effect and Labor’s ideas for making peace were considered too weak and conciliatory by the public.
Sharon started building the West Bank fence in 2002. A separation barrier between Israel and Palestine had been suggested by Yitzhak Rabin but he wasn’t able to begin pursuing it before he was assassinated.
In theory, the idea of a two-state solution with a strong border makes sense—it would allow Israel to maintain a Jewish demographic majority while allowing for Palestinian self-determination. The problem with it in practice is that Israel and Palestine are economically interdependent—Palestinian workers come to Israel for jobs and Israeli businesses (especially those in construction and agriculture) rely on Palestinian labor. The border wall became a humanitarian issue with Palestinians waiting in grueling long lines because Palestinian workers still needed to cross over to Israel to get to work.
Actually, Palestinian economic dependence on Israel is not as bad as it’s usually shown in the media. According to Middle East Eye, 150,000 Palestinians worked in Israel in 2023. There are about 500,000 employed people in Palestine according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and most work in internal trade. If you take those statistics into account, about 30% of Palestinians work in Israel, which is still a lot, but it sounds like the majority of Palestinians work in Palestine.
I’ve been looking around for info on whether the Egyptian or Jordanian markets are accessible to Palestinian workers residing in Palestine, but I haven’t been able to find anything concrete.
Sharon met with Bush in 2004 and Bush said, “the barrier erected by Israel should be a security rather than a political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent, and should not prejudice any final-status issues including borders.”
Sachar avoids mentioning Rachel Corrie by name: “The protesters demonstrated in front of Israeli tanks and attempted to walk through Israeli military cordons. One of them was inadvertently killed by an Israeli bulldozer.” (1062) It’s a weird omission because anyone familiar with the conflict probably knows who she is because she’s famous. It is kind of messed up that we know the name of a white girl that died but not the names of many Palestinians who did, but that’s the world we live in. Rachel Corrie utilized her white privilege to draw attention to a cause she believed in. It would have been better if she had lived, but that’s the way things went. Maybe the author didn’t think she was important enough to mention by name, but then why mention her by deed?
I think Sachar did the same thing with Baruch Goldstein earlier in the book, but then he mentioned him by name later, so that part comes up in the index.
On July 1, 2003, Sharon and Abbas (a moderate who Arafat appointed), signed the Road Map, a new plan for peace formulated by the Quartet (which included the UN secretary-general, the EU Foreign and Security Policy Commission, Russia, and the United States).
Chapter 38: The Bulldozer as Statesman
Sharon immediately disregarded the Road Map and built and expanded more settlements. Yossi Beilin (Labor) met with Yasser Abed Rabbo (the PA’s former information minister) privately in Geneva. They revealed their plan (the Geneva Accord) in fall 2003, which was based largely on Clinton’s final proposal. It envisioned a 98.5% withdrawal from the West Bank, but was vague on Palestinian right of return. Ariel Sharon rebuked it because he was worried about the consequences of committing to a full instead of a staged withdrawal.
However, Sharon was starting to worry about Israel’s ability to hold on to control of the West Bank and Gaza due to Israelis being outnumbered by Palestinians in the territories. He said publicly that the occupation could not continue indefinitely, which upset the right wing, but he was just being pragmatic. The occupation was becoming increasingly unpopular within the military, and over 100 senior reserve officers refused to serve in the territories.
The Katif Bloc of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip started receiving rocket fire around 2003 and the army was losing too many soldiers there to justify keeping the settlements. Israeli public opinion and the United States approved of Israel pulling out of Gaza, which pushed Ariel Sharon to go ahead with it. A few Likud members of the Knesset resigned over the decision, including Benjamin Netanyahu.
Arafat fell ill and died on November 11th, 2004. Abbas had resigned as prime minister in 2003 because he had wanted to crack down on Hamas terrorist attacks but Arafat called for demonstrations against him. Abbas was elected prime minister on January 9th, 2005. He met with Bush in Washington and was given $50 million in U.S. aid to the PA.
Israel completed the Gaza evacuation on September 12th, 2005. The Katif Bloc settlers protested, some wearing yellow Star of David badges in reference to Jews during the Holocaust, but left peacefully. Sharon also enforced withdrawal from four settlements in the West Bank.
Abbas was still unsatisfied that the IDF was in Rafah (at the border between Gaza and Egypt). The Israeli Defense Minister had told Sharon that it was vital that Israel prevent arms from getting into Gaza from the Sinai. The Quartet agreed that Abbas should be allowed to have his own security monitor it.
Condoleezza Rice flew in and helped make an agreement between Sharon and Abbas. The PA would monitor the Gaza side, Egypt would monitor the Sinai side, and Israel would monitor the Gaza side from a control station two and a half miles away, overseen by the EU. Sharon also formally agreed to allow the Gaza seaport and airport to reopen (this never came to fruition, though).
Chapter 40: A Mottled Landscape
This section on the prevalence of “illegalism” in a section on crime in Israeli society is interesting:
“Israel’s very existence traced back to its people’s disregard of the law. In the late nineteenth century, when the Ottoman regime imposed restrictions on Jewish land purchase, and, later, when the British mandatory government repudiated the Balfour Declaration, the Yishuv in turn developed an overarching contempt for ‘legalism.’ Steadily, relentlessly, ‘illegal’ activity became the moral norm, countenancing ‘illegal’ immigration, ‘illegal’ defense, ‘illegal’ settlement, ‘illegal’ weapons and money shipments.” (1101)
On December 18th, 2005, Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke and wasn’t able to return to public life. Ehud Olmert took up the prime ministry after him.
In 2006, Hamas won a majority in Palestinian parliament over Fatah. Mahmoud Abbas remained on as president, but without much power. Ismail Haniyeh became the new prime minister. Haniyeh’s legislative agenda was “reaffirm his government’s commitment to nonrecognition of Israel, to spurn all negotiations with Israel, to refrain from interdicting or punishing acts of guerrilla violence against Israel—in short, to adhere relentlessly to Hamas’s charter of sustaining war against Israel until the Jewish state ceased to exist.”
“In response, the Israeli government leadership, supported by the Bush administration in the United States, reciprocated Hamas’s policy of non-recognition.”
Chapter 41: A Middle Eastern Hour of Decision
In 2006, Hamas guerrillas in Gaza shot rockets into Israel, tunneled under the border, and captured Gilad Shalit, a nineteen-year-old IDF soldier, holding him hostage and trying to exchange him for nine thousand Palestinians in Israeli prisons. In response, Israel attacked Gaza with artillery and closed the Gaza borders to Palestinian workers.
Hizballah responded to Israel’s response by attacking an Israeli military patrol just over the Lebanese border, killing eight soldiers, abducting two more, and shooting rockets into Israel. Hizballah was also trying to get Sheba’a Farms returned to Israel and release three Hizballah prisoners held by Israel. Israel (under Ehud Olmert) mounted a strong attack and Hizballah gave back as hard as they got. It was similar to the U.S. in Vietnam with Israeli troops being ambushed by Hizballah guerrillas.
Hizballah shot even more and bigger missiles into Israeli population centers. “Nasrallah [Hizballah’s leader in Lebanon] made no claim that his militia’s developing ballistic campaign was directed at military targets. Rather, it was waged specifically as an instrument of terror against Israel’s population centers.” (1119)
Israel’s Chief of Staff Dan Halutz recommended air attacks against Hizballah strongholds in Beirut and central Lebanon. Olmert agreed, he also thought airstrikes could help turn Christian and Sunni Lebanese people against Hizballah. Israel attacked Hizballah in Lebanon by air, destroying Fajr-3 missiles as well as the roads between Lebanon and Syria that Hizballah was using to get weapons.
On July 30th, 2006, Israel used a smart bomb to destroy an apartment building in Qana, targeting rocket launchers in the area but the airstrike killed twenty-eight civilians. This inspired a large international outcry against Israel. In the aftermath of Qana, some Israeli Arabs mounted pro-Hizballah demonstrations.
After Qana, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called for a ceasefire. John Bolton (representing the US) and Jean-Marc de La Sabliere (representing France) came up with a plan to have a UN force take over Hizballah’s positions in south Lebanon. The Lebanese and other Arab governments objected because Israeli troops would be left in place. France agreed that Israeli troops should withdraw as well. Israel rejected the proposal because it would leave the fortifications open to Hizballah reoccupation and kept attacking.
The UN passed Security Council Resolution 1701, which “required Hizballah to cease all attacks against Israel and for Israel to ‘end its offensive operations’ in Lebanon.” A UN peacekeeping force and part of the Lebanese army would take over the fortifications before Israel would leave. Israel agreed. Fighting intensified before the August 14th ceasefire, but then stopped abruptly when the ceasefire went into effect.
Lebanon suffered 1,187 dead (civilians or Hizballah militants undifferentiated) and 700,000-800,000 displaced. Israel suffered 161 dead (44 civilians, 117 soldiers). 4,200 Israeli civilians were wounded in rocket strikes.
The 2006 Lebanon War was considered a failure in Israeli society because the air campaign failed to destroy more than a quarter of Hizballah’s missiles and the ground campaign failed to capture Hizballah’s bases. The fact that a small number of Hizballah guerrillas were able to fight off Israel’s huge military machine was demoralizing for Israel.
On August 18th, the commander of the Lebanese army battalion announced that the army would deploy alongside Hizballah, implying that they would not push Hizballah out or disarm them. France also said it would only contribute two hundred troops for the UN peacekeeping force. Ehud Olmert, Kofi Annan, and George W. Bush eventually got Italy to commit to three thousand troops. France offered another thousand. Germany offered two thousand sailors. It added up to less than half the troops anticipated, though. Sachar says more than that, the UN force’s decision not to interpret UNSC 1701 as calling for the disarmament of Hizballah was its biggest issue.
Sachar concludes with an argument for more Great Power intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says that small countries are rarely able to solve conflicts over land on their own. “It had been the initiatives of the Great Powers alone that legitimized the sovereign identities of perennially hostile smaller nations, that defined their mutual borders and arbitrated their reciprocal claims and grievances.” (1128)
“Did Great Powers have a celestial dispensation, then, to impose their own territorial and ethnographic templates upon the world’s minor players? To this cri de Coeur, loosed with much anguish in the ‘Revolt of the Small Powers’ at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, French Premier Clemenceau, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and United States President Wilson responded in almost identical language. It was specifically the danger of being sucked into a future conflict of irredentist claims and counterclaims, they emphasized, that obliged them to perform their own diplomatic surgery upon Europe’s fulminance of regional animosities. [emphasis mine] Had it not been for the Allies’ military sacrifices, after all, the very political existence of the successor states, whatever their ultimate dimensions, would have remained moot.”
He cites Greece, Belgium, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Albania as examples of nations whose independence was established by the Great Powers.
He argues that neither Israel nor Palestine would have been solvent without Great Power funds. “Finally, without the force majeure [uncontrollable circumstances] of uncompromising and unrelenting Great Power pressure, could Israelis and Palestinians accept a compromise formula for mutual quietude that each otherwise would reject as politically unpalatable? Not remotely likely.”
In his closing, Sachar seems more worried about tensions between different factions within Israel (mostly religious vs secular and left vs right) than about threats from outside.
Sachar’s call for more Great Power involvement is interesting because I often see people saying the opposite, that the Great Powers meddle too much in the Middle East. I don’t know enough about the formation of modern small nations to comment on the issue, though.
To sum up, I do recommend this book. It does lean pro-Israel, and how much so became more apparent as I was looking at some individual parts, but it seems like really good scholarship. You can’t take it as Torah, though, unfortunately, so it’s a good idea to cross-check with the internet or a pro-Palestinian book (I like using Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine) if there’s anything that strikes you as strange or biased. I feel like it gave me a good grounding in the basic events and it was helpful to go back and take notes on the last couple chapters just to make sure I was clear on more recent events. It does only go up to 2006, however.
I’m still not really comfortable calling myself a Zionist, but I think I moved a little more towards Zionism while reading this book. Howard Sachar’s apologia is good, convincing apologia, unlike a lot of pro-Zionist literature that comes off as unappealingly self-righteous and blame-casting.
I do wish it was easier to read. Hopefully my partial summary will help new readers glean some insights and help me remember what I read if I need to reference it in the future. Note that A History of Israel is intended to function as a reference book, so the index can be used to look up specific information on an as-needed basis.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a basic Israeli history book that’s unbiased but not so painful and slow to read, but if I do I’ll post it here.
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