Tuomo
Keeper of the Funk
Any suggestions for balanced history books about the 1948 Israeli war? I see plenty of offerings on Amazon, but reading the 1-star reviews tends to dredge up comments about the overall balance of the author's political/cultural perspective. I'd like it if the author touched on those aspects, but I'd appreciate some detachment/perspective/whatever. Plus the military stuff, of course.
Just finished The Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer, which purported to give a perspective on such things going back to WW1, but actually spent 90% of its time tracking various Middle East diplomats and leaders through WW1 - their comings and goings, their meetings and discussions, their points of contention, their waxing and waning of influence, etc., as the British encountered and eventually got behind both Zionism and Arab Independence as a way of subverting the Ottoman Empire. While courting the Ottomans themselves with bribes to several factions to detach them from the Triple (plus 1, apparently) Alliance.
Remember how the crappy Star Wars movies devolved into shots of spaceships taking off from or landing at new planets? "Oh, OK, now more people are going to talk for a while. Oh look, we're taking off again." This book is the literary equivalent of that - meeting after meeting after meeting, as if that's what I came to read about. The author does point out some historical signposts along the way, noting Britain's classic imperialism ("Perfidious Albion" indeed) that generally served itself in the moment without thinking ahead to the powderkeg of what they were helping to create in Palestine, but that's a very light patina on top of what's generally a massive tome of Who Met Whom. If I had been Schneer's editor, I'd have asked him to cut it down by 75% and just get to the military/historical events without the deep (and brother, I mean DEEP) dive into the minutiae of the meeting logistics.
Just finished The Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer, which purported to give a perspective on such things going back to WW1, but actually spent 90% of its time tracking various Middle East diplomats and leaders through WW1 - their comings and goings, their meetings and discussions, their points of contention, their waxing and waning of influence, etc., as the British encountered and eventually got behind both Zionism and Arab Independence as a way of subverting the Ottoman Empire. While courting the Ottomans themselves with bribes to several factions to detach them from the Triple (plus 1, apparently) Alliance.
Remember how the crappy Star Wars movies devolved into shots of spaceships taking off from or landing at new planets? "Oh, OK, now more people are going to talk for a while. Oh look, we're taking off again." This book is the literary equivalent of that - meeting after meeting after meeting, as if that's what I came to read about. The author does point out some historical signposts along the way, noting Britain's classic imperialism ("Perfidious Albion" indeed) that generally served itself in the moment without thinking ahead to the powderkeg of what they were helping to create in Palestine, but that's a very light patina on top of what's generally a massive tome of Who Met Whom. If I had been Schneer's editor, I'd have asked him to cut it down by 75% and just get to the military/historical events without the deep (and brother, I mean DEEP) dive into the minutiae of the meeting logistics.