Rethinking the Middle East (Cass Series--Israeli History, Politics, and Society, 31)

Rating:
Summary: Eleven articles with a unifying theme
Review: Efraim Karsh has written a great deal about the Middle East. Eleven of his articles appear in this volume, which serves to give us all a wonderful taste of his scholarship.

Many people have written about the role of the Great Powers in Arab history. Karsh draws the line when Arabs are portrayed as hapless bystanders to their own history. And these eleven articles all help point out where Arabs have made some serious missteps in the past century that they would be best not to blame others for.

This book refutes claims that Arabs have never had anything against Jews or Judaism, only Zionists and Zionism. It also points out that the trauma of the dispersion of many Levantine Arabs in 1948 was a largely self-inflicted phenomenon, not some long planned grand design by Zionists to deprive Arabs of their patrimony.

History is not a free-for-all in which all statements are of equal value. Truth helps one understand what is going on, it helps us infer details that we are not yet sure of, and it permits us to make intelligent predictions about the future. We're lucky to have authors such as Karsh who show a respect for truth that makes their writings worthwhile.