LW - Book Review: Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict by Yair Halberstadt

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book Review: Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, published by Yair Halberstadt on June 25, 2024 on LessWrong. I originally entered this to the ACX Book Review competition. Since it has not been selected as a finalist I'm now free to post it here. In truth it's a followup to my review of Morris's history of Israel's War of Independence. In the wake of the October 7th attack on Israel and Israel's response, everyone seemed to agree that one side of the conflict was the epitome of evil, the reincarnation of the Nazis, with warfare in their blood and a pure unfiltered hatred of the enemy in their minds. The other side was a force for good, who just wanted peace and was doing the best they could in a difficult situation. The only problem is no one could agree which side was which. This is unfair. While the loudest voices may paint the world in black and white, as soon as you ignore them, you begin to encounter a whole range of more nuanced views - yet still find yourself no less confused. Now for the most part my view is that unless you're willing to put in the effort to deeply understand conflicts in far off lands, you're best off not having an opinion on them, and definitely not one fed to you by the twitter or tiktok feed. Expressing loud, confident opinions on unfamiliar conflicts often does more harm than good. Alas this conflict is not in a far away land. I live 20km from the border with Gaza. Most of my friends were called up to do reserve duty in the IDF. My children almost certainly will have to do the same once they grow up. Far too much of my income goes towards military spending rather than my bank account. I can't take the easy way out, so I have to do things the hard way. So I bought a copy of Benny Morris's Righteous Victims at exorbitant cost[1], and plowed through it. And I thought I'd share with you what I learned, so that if you do decide to opine on the Israel Palestine conflict, your opinion will hopefully be more educated. Righteous Victims is a history of the Arab Zionist conflict from 1881 till 2001, written by one of the most respected historians of this conflict. Bias Morris is a liberal Zionist, but one whose aim in studying history was to strip back the comforting lies he'd been taught as a child, and find out the actual truth. None of his (serious) critics accuse him of lying, and his mastery of the primary sources is undisputed. Instead there are two main accusations leveled against him. The first he readily admits himself in the introduction. Almost all sources about this conflict come from British or Israeli archives. Arab literacy was far lower, Arab historiography of this conflict is a relatively new and small field, and Arab documents have for the most part not been made publicly available even when they exist. Meanwhile a wealth of Zionist material has been released to the public, and we have plenty of contemporary documents to rely on. While he tries to decipher the Arab perspective from the Zionist one, and relies on Arab documents when they are available, this is naturally going to be both a blindspot and a source of systematic bias. The second is in choosing which events to highlight and which to ignore. This is an impossible task - over 120 years the amount of relevant information is going to outweigh by many orders of magnitude the amount of space you have in your book, and by carefully selecting which facts to tell you can paint any story you like without ever actually lying. In practice you deal with this by covering the most important[2] events in plenty of detail, picking representative examples of other events, and giving aggregate statistics[3] to place the representative sample in context. However hard one tries here, it's always possible to accuse the author of favoring facts which paint one side or...