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4 stars
Kudos to any author even willing to attempt to touch this hot potato with a neutral lens. Doubly so for a topic that's ever-changing with new developments; the original publication was in 2021, but my version had an updated Epilogue post-October 7th, 2023 that basically said, "while this book may now seem outdated, the historical events that set up what's currently happening are still relevant and important to understand." Hard to argue with that.
I've only ever had a surface-level understanding of the region because, frankly, I and most other Americans felt like we could ignore it for most of the past few decades. That time now feels like it's decisively passed, and having a grasp of how we got to this point feels important. This book does a competent job at walking the tightrope of depicting basically everything between the Ottoman defeat in WWI through the 2021 uprising as …
Kudos to any author even willing to attempt to touch this hot potato with a neutral lens. Doubly so for a topic that's ever-changing with new developments; the original publication was in 2021, but my version had an updated Epilogue post-October 7th, 2023 that basically said, "while this book may now seem outdated, the historical events that set up what's currently happening are still relevant and important to understand." Hard to argue with that.
I've only ever had a surface-level understanding of the region because, frankly, I and most other Americans felt like we could ignore it for most of the past few decades. That time now feels like it's decisively passed, and having a grasp of how we got to this point feels important. This book does a competent job at walking the tightrope of depicting basically everything between the Ottoman defeat in WWI through the 2021 uprising as detached and unbiased as possible, while also providing at the end of each chapter contemporary opinions and experiences of real-world Israelis and Palestinians for the given decade under discussion.
I do feel like there are some big aspects that are curiously absent (wish there was an explanation on when and why the US became such a close ally to Israel, discussion of how Israel's nuclear program developed, or literally any mention of Iran in the entire book at all), but in retrospect this is marketed as the shortest history of just two peoples after all, so maybe the narrower focus was intentional. Still, this could've been handled a lot less tactfully, and I walked away from this with new knowledge so that's a win in my book.