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Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020
The history of modern Israel is a fiercely contested subject. From the Balfour declaration to the Six-Day War to the recent assault on Gaza, ideologically-charged narratives and counter-narratives battle for dominance not just in Israel itself but throughout the world. In the United States and Israel, the Israeli cause is treated as the more righteous one, albeit with important qualifiers and caveats.
In Mythologies Without End, Jerome Slater, a senior scholar on the conflict and a perceptive critic of Israel, takes stock of the conflict over time and argues that US policies in the region are largely a product of mythologies that are often flatly wrong. Because of their widespread acceptance, there have been devastating consequences to the true interests of both countries. However, the historical truth is very nearly the converse: it is Israel and the US that have repeatedly lost, discarded, or even deliberately sabotaged many opportunities to reach fair compromise settlements of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. As Slater reexamines the entire history of the conflict from its onset at the end of WWI through today, he argues that a refutation of the many mythologies is a necessary first step toward solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Focusing on US role in the conflict, this book exposes the self-defeating policies of both the US and Israel, which have served to prolong the conflict far beyond when it should have been resolved.
In Mythologies Without End, Jerome Slater, a senior scholar on the conflict and a perceptive critic of Israel, takes stock of the conflict over time and argues that US policies in the region are largely a product of mythologies that are often flatly wrong. Because of their widespread acceptance, there have been devastating consequences to the true interests of both countries. However, the historical truth is very nearly the converse: it is Israel and the US that have repeatedly lost, discarded, or even deliberately sabotaged many opportunities to reach fair compromise settlements of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. As Slater reexamines the entire history of the conflict from its onset at the end of WWI through today, he argues that a refutation of the many mythologies is a necessary first step toward solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Focusing on US role in the conflict, this book exposes the self-defeating policies of both the US and Israel, which have served to prolong the conflict far beyond when it should have been resolved.
495 pages, Hardcover
First published December 3, 2020
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198 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 25, 2025
We live in a world where most of the important events in Israeli history are obfuscated by hegemonic pro-Israeli talking points. This book refutes those. It's at its best as a reference work to pick up the next time you hear something like “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Its treatment of these various historical episodes is even-handed and rigorous.
There isn't really a strong overall thesis or treatment of nationalism. Of course this is a famously difficult subject. The author describes himself as sort of an ex-Zionist, and seemingly hasn't shaken off his old views on the inevitability and desirability of ethnic partition, although he is clearly wrestling with them. These critiques are well-articulated in a review on here by “C”.
Nevertheless this doesn't harm the book's value as a reference against talking points. I have not seen a similar work so wide-ranging and helpful in this regard.
There isn't really a strong overall thesis or treatment of nationalism. Of course this is a famously difficult subject. The author describes himself as sort of an ex-Zionist, and seemingly hasn't shaken off his old views on the inevitability and desirability of ethnic partition, although he is clearly wrestling with them. These critiques are well-articulated in a review on here by “C”.
Nevertheless this doesn't harm the book's value as a reference against talking points. I have not seen a similar work so wide-ranging and helpful in this regard.
January 22, 2026
Jerome Slater’s Mythologies Without End makes a powerful case for Israel’s long record of bad-faith diplomacy, territorial expansion, and systematic obstruction of Palestinian self-determination. Yet the book ultimately demonstrates something Slater himself seems unwilling to accept: there is no such thing as a morally coherent or politically redeemable Zionism. Despite acknowledging Israel’s crimes and its repeated sabotage of peace, Slater remains trapped within the assumptions of liberal Zionism, and it is those assumptions that fatally undermine his analysis.
Slater freely admits that “Israel has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.” One might expect that such a concession would lead to a serious reckoning with the structural violence inflicted on Palestinians and a clear-eyed assessment of how that injustice might be repaired. Instead, Slater repeatedly returns to the same ultimatum issued by Israeli leaders for decades: accept whatever fragmented and diminishing offer is placed before you, because the alternative will be worse. The history Slater synthesizes is largely sound, but the conclusions he draws from it are shaped less by evidence than by a persistent effort to rescue Zionism from its consequences.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Slater’s attempt to distinguish Zionism from settler colonialism. He argues that unlike European colonial projects, Zionism was not driven by economic exploitation, racial ideology, or imperial ambition, but by necessity and vulnerability. This distinction collapses under scrutiny. Many colonial projects were justified precisely through claims of necessity, insecurity, and flight from persecution. Slater emphasizes the “bedraggled” nature of early Zionist settlers, yet the same description could apply to indentured servants shipped to the Americas. Material hardship does not negate colonial structure.
Slater himself concedes that the Zionist project was endorsed and administered by the classical colonial powers through the League of Nations, which explicitly understood it as a form of colonial settlement. Early Zionist leaders used the language of settlers, settlements, and civilizing missions without embarrassment. To deny the colonial character of the project while relying on colonial sponsorship, institutions, and vocabulary is an exercise in motivated reasoning.
The Holocaust is asked to do enormous work throughout the book. Slater treats it as a near-universal explanatory variable: for American support for Israel, for Israeli political psychology, and for Israeli aggression. He suggests that the Holocaust created a moral obligation for the United States to back a Jewish state and implies broad Jewish consensus behind Zionism. Yet historical evidence complicates this picture. As critics such as Norman Finkelstein have shown, American Jewish opinion in the postwar decades was ambivalent, often anxious about questions of dual loyalty, and far from uniformly Zionist.
When Slater turns to the 1948 war, he again invokes the Holocaust as shaping Israeli attitudes, rhetorically asking how it could not have done so. But this claim lacks evidentiary grounding. The war of 1948 was existential in a concrete, military sense. Zionist leaders themselves estimated their chances of success at roughly fifty-fifty. Yet in their internal correspondence and planning, references to the Holocaust are conspicuously absent. Strategy was driven by logistics, arms acquisition, and territorial ambition, not by Holocaust memory. The retrospective insertion of the Holocaust as an explanatory motive functions more as moral insulation than historical analysis.
This pattern repeats in Slater’s discussion of racism. He insists that Zionism is not based on Jewish superiority but on vulnerability. Yet Israeli society has demonstrably become more racist over time, a fact Slater himself acknowledges. The treatment of Palestinians, African migrants, and Mizrahi Jews cannot be explained by abstract fear alone. Colonizers have always claimed fear as justification. The plantation owners of Virginia were afraid. The Afrikaners were afraid. Fear does not negate supremacy; it often produces it. If Zionism is not the source of this escalating racism, Slater never convincingly identifies what is.
Slater further argues that Palestine, uniquely, was necessary to solve the “historical problem of Jewish vulnerability.” This claim is demonstrably false. Israel has remained in a permanent state of insecurity throughout its existence, and that insecurity has fueled militarization, racism, and expansion. An ethno-supremacist state is vulnerable by design, regardless of where it is established. Geography cannot redeem the logic of exclusion.
Time and again, Slater acknowledges that Israel has been the primary impediment to peace, only to retreat from the implications of that fact. He documents cease-fire violations, territorial expansion, and deliberate stalling tactics, even quoting Ben-Gurion’s confidence that time would normalize Israel’s gains and erase Palestinian claims. Yet Slater continues to frame Israeli actions as tragically entangled with defensive fears, rather than as calculated policy choices.
The Holocaust reappears here as reflexive justification. Slater claims it is impossible to disentangle Israeli leaders’ defensive anxieties from their expansionist ambitions. But this assertion dissolves under scrutiny. Leaders who are genuinely afraid do not repeatedly provoke wars, salivate at territorial expansion, or openly discuss paying adversaries to start conflicts. The absence of Holocaust references in internal Israeli deliberations speaks louder than Slater’s assumptions. Holocaust memory, as a political instrument, largely crystallized after 1967, not before.
Once this Holocaust shield is removed, what remains is a state apparatus engaged in land theft, resource expropriation, and systematic deception, both domestically and internationally. Israel’s pattern of provoking hostilities during cease-fires and using them as pretexts for further expansion is well documented. To explain this behavior primarily through fear is to ignore the consistency and directionality of the policy.
Slater is more effective when dismantling certain Zionist myths, such as the myth of a universal Jewish diaspora rooted in ancient Palestine. He shows that ancient Palestine was ethnically plural, that no modern nation-state existed there, and that the Roman “exile” narrative lacks historical evidence. Yet even here, Slater stops short of drawing the full political implications of his own findings.
His treatment of Palestinian resistance is similarly compromised. Slater labels the PLO’s actions in the 1970s as a “turn toward terrorism” without adequately distinguishing between the legitimacy of armed struggle against occupation and the illegitimacy of tactics that deliberately target civilians. International law has long recognized the right of occupied peoples to resist, while simultaneously prohibiting attacks on civilians. Collapsing this distinction serves political narratives, not legal or moral clarity.
Perhaps the most grating feature of the book is Slater’s recurring lament that Palestinians failed to accept various peace offers. This framing ignores the structural reality that Israel and the United States have never acted as honest brokers. Negotiations were routinely used to buy time for settlement expansion. Offers were ambiguous, mapless, and required unilateral Palestinian concessions. The Arab Peace Initiative was dismissed without consideration. Later “offers,” such as those floated by Olmert, are treated by Slater with an optimism that borders on fantasy.
This disappointment is sharpened by the fact that Slater represents the liberal edge of Israeli historiography. He recognizes bad-faith bargaining, settlement expansion, and coercion, yet still concludes that Palestinians simply needed to do more. It is difficult to read his own account and imagine what alternative path Palestinians could have taken. Peaceful protest has failed. Armed resistance has failed. Diplomacy has failed. What has succeeded, consistently, is Israel’s maximalist project.
The book has aged poorly. While its documentation of past Israeli behavior remains accurate, recent events render its lingering faith in negotiation untenable. Settlement expansion has accelerated, not slowed. What was once framed as “security” policy now openly resembles demographic engineering. Gaza, declared unlivable years before its current devastation, has since been subjected to destruction on a scale that extinguishes any remaining pretense of restraint.
Slater dismisses BDS, rejects armed resistance, and derides the possibility of a single democratic state as utopian, while simultaneously conceding that even the United States cannot force Israel to change course. What remains, then, is not analysis but resignation dressed up as realism.
Mythologies Without End is most persuasive when it catalogs Israel’s systematic violations of international law and its long record of diplomatic obstruction. It fails when it attempts to reconcile those facts with the moral legitimacy of Zionism itself. Slater’s reliance on fear, vulnerability, and Holocaust memory as explanatory devices functions less as historical analysis than as ideological insulation. Strip those away, and the Zionist project appears not as tragic or defensive, but as structurally committed to dispossession and domination.
The irony is that Slater’s own evidence leads inexorably to a conclusion he refuses to draw. There is no version of Zionism capable of producing justice, equality, or peace. The constant invocation of catastrophe to justify permanent oppression is not a sign of moral seriousness; it is evidence of political exhaustion. The mythology does not end because the project itself has not ended.
Slater freely admits that “Israel has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.” One might expect that such a concession would lead to a serious reckoning with the structural violence inflicted on Palestinians and a clear-eyed assessment of how that injustice might be repaired. Instead, Slater repeatedly returns to the same ultimatum issued by Israeli leaders for decades: accept whatever fragmented and diminishing offer is placed before you, because the alternative will be worse. The history Slater synthesizes is largely sound, but the conclusions he draws from it are shaped less by evidence than by a persistent effort to rescue Zionism from its consequences.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Slater’s attempt to distinguish Zionism from settler colonialism. He argues that unlike European colonial projects, Zionism was not driven by economic exploitation, racial ideology, or imperial ambition, but by necessity and vulnerability. This distinction collapses under scrutiny. Many colonial projects were justified precisely through claims of necessity, insecurity, and flight from persecution. Slater emphasizes the “bedraggled” nature of early Zionist settlers, yet the same description could apply to indentured servants shipped to the Americas. Material hardship does not negate colonial structure.
Slater himself concedes that the Zionist project was endorsed and administered by the classical colonial powers through the League of Nations, which explicitly understood it as a form of colonial settlement. Early Zionist leaders used the language of settlers, settlements, and civilizing missions without embarrassment. To deny the colonial character of the project while relying on colonial sponsorship, institutions, and vocabulary is an exercise in motivated reasoning.
The Holocaust is asked to do enormous work throughout the book. Slater treats it as a near-universal explanatory variable: for American support for Israel, for Israeli political psychology, and for Israeli aggression. He suggests that the Holocaust created a moral obligation for the United States to back a Jewish state and implies broad Jewish consensus behind Zionism. Yet historical evidence complicates this picture. As critics such as Norman Finkelstein have shown, American Jewish opinion in the postwar decades was ambivalent, often anxious about questions of dual loyalty, and far from uniformly Zionist.
When Slater turns to the 1948 war, he again invokes the Holocaust as shaping Israeli attitudes, rhetorically asking how it could not have done so. But this claim lacks evidentiary grounding. The war of 1948 was existential in a concrete, military sense. Zionist leaders themselves estimated their chances of success at roughly fifty-fifty. Yet in their internal correspondence and planning, references to the Holocaust are conspicuously absent. Strategy was driven by logistics, arms acquisition, and territorial ambition, not by Holocaust memory. The retrospective insertion of the Holocaust as an explanatory motive functions more as moral insulation than historical analysis.
This pattern repeats in Slater’s discussion of racism. He insists that Zionism is not based on Jewish superiority but on vulnerability. Yet Israeli society has demonstrably become more racist over time, a fact Slater himself acknowledges. The treatment of Palestinians, African migrants, and Mizrahi Jews cannot be explained by abstract fear alone. Colonizers have always claimed fear as justification. The plantation owners of Virginia were afraid. The Afrikaners were afraid. Fear does not negate supremacy; it often produces it. If Zionism is not the source of this escalating racism, Slater never convincingly identifies what is.
Slater further argues that Palestine, uniquely, was necessary to solve the “historical problem of Jewish vulnerability.” This claim is demonstrably false. Israel has remained in a permanent state of insecurity throughout its existence, and that insecurity has fueled militarization, racism, and expansion. An ethno-supremacist state is vulnerable by design, regardless of where it is established. Geography cannot redeem the logic of exclusion.
Time and again, Slater acknowledges that Israel has been the primary impediment to peace, only to retreat from the implications of that fact. He documents cease-fire violations, territorial expansion, and deliberate stalling tactics, even quoting Ben-Gurion’s confidence that time would normalize Israel’s gains and erase Palestinian claims. Yet Slater continues to frame Israeli actions as tragically entangled with defensive fears, rather than as calculated policy choices.
The Holocaust reappears here as reflexive justification. Slater claims it is impossible to disentangle Israeli leaders’ defensive anxieties from their expansionist ambitions. But this assertion dissolves under scrutiny. Leaders who are genuinely afraid do not repeatedly provoke wars, salivate at territorial expansion, or openly discuss paying adversaries to start conflicts. The absence of Holocaust references in internal Israeli deliberations speaks louder than Slater’s assumptions. Holocaust memory, as a political instrument, largely crystallized after 1967, not before.
Once this Holocaust shield is removed, what remains is a state apparatus engaged in land theft, resource expropriation, and systematic deception, both domestically and internationally. Israel’s pattern of provoking hostilities during cease-fires and using them as pretexts for further expansion is well documented. To explain this behavior primarily through fear is to ignore the consistency and directionality of the policy.
Slater is more effective when dismantling certain Zionist myths, such as the myth of a universal Jewish diaspora rooted in ancient Palestine. He shows that ancient Palestine was ethnically plural, that no modern nation-state existed there, and that the Roman “exile” narrative lacks historical evidence. Yet even here, Slater stops short of drawing the full political implications of his own findings.
His treatment of Palestinian resistance is similarly compromised. Slater labels the PLO’s actions in the 1970s as a “turn toward terrorism” without adequately distinguishing between the legitimacy of armed struggle against occupation and the illegitimacy of tactics that deliberately target civilians. International law has long recognized the right of occupied peoples to resist, while simultaneously prohibiting attacks on civilians. Collapsing this distinction serves political narratives, not legal or moral clarity.
Perhaps the most grating feature of the book is Slater’s recurring lament that Palestinians failed to accept various peace offers. This framing ignores the structural reality that Israel and the United States have never acted as honest brokers. Negotiations were routinely used to buy time for settlement expansion. Offers were ambiguous, mapless, and required unilateral Palestinian concessions. The Arab Peace Initiative was dismissed without consideration. Later “offers,” such as those floated by Olmert, are treated by Slater with an optimism that borders on fantasy.
This disappointment is sharpened by the fact that Slater represents the liberal edge of Israeli historiography. He recognizes bad-faith bargaining, settlement expansion, and coercion, yet still concludes that Palestinians simply needed to do more. It is difficult to read his own account and imagine what alternative path Palestinians could have taken. Peaceful protest has failed. Armed resistance has failed. Diplomacy has failed. What has succeeded, consistently, is Israel’s maximalist project.
The book has aged poorly. While its documentation of past Israeli behavior remains accurate, recent events render its lingering faith in negotiation untenable. Settlement expansion has accelerated, not slowed. What was once framed as “security” policy now openly resembles demographic engineering. Gaza, declared unlivable years before its current devastation, has since been subjected to destruction on a scale that extinguishes any remaining pretense of restraint.
Slater dismisses BDS, rejects armed resistance, and derides the possibility of a single democratic state as utopian, while simultaneously conceding that even the United States cannot force Israel to change course. What remains, then, is not analysis but resignation dressed up as realism.
Mythologies Without End is most persuasive when it catalogs Israel’s systematic violations of international law and its long record of diplomatic obstruction. It fails when it attempts to reconcile those facts with the moral legitimacy of Zionism itself. Slater’s reliance on fear, vulnerability, and Holocaust memory as explanatory devices functions less as historical analysis than as ideological insulation. Strip those away, and the Zionist project appears not as tragic or defensive, but as structurally committed to dispossession and domination.
The irony is that Slater’s own evidence leads inexorably to a conclusion he refuses to draw. There is no version of Zionism capable of producing justice, equality, or peace. The constant invocation of catastrophe to justify permanent oppression is not a sign of moral seriousness; it is evidence of political exhaustion. The mythology does not end because the project itself has not ended.
January 28, 2024
Slater predicted October 7th. After reading a book review, I found out that he predicted a security disaster for Israel in the preface (which I ironically skipped, haha).
This is the most most useful book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I've ever read. It debunks a lot of myths, such as that Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank, and that all Arabs want to do is destroy Israel and kill Jews.
Slater is a (once passionate) Zionist, and he even wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy to help with its army against Egypt. Then he later found out the Egyptians were being reasonable while Israel was being a punk. Throughout the book, he demonstrates that it's been Arabs who were willing to make compromises that was often rejected by Israel. Now and then the Arabs would do some stupid crap. Like Nasser using genocidal rhetoric on a people only a decade removed from the Holocaust. U.S. intelligence showed that he wasn't going to attack, but that would scare Israel into launching a pre-emptive attack. Really dumb move.
A lot of new material I didn't know was included in the book, including:
- Had Israel stayed within its UN partition borders, it would soon have had an 80% Jewish majority without ethnically cleansing a single Arab. Then Jews could've had a refuge from the Holocaust without this conflict.
- The Palestinian Authority, and even Hamas, made a lot of efforts to constrain terrorists from attacking Israel.
- Of all the countries that attacked Israel after its 1948 declaration of independence, none of them wanted to do it and the ones that did only sent small forces, none of them would've done it had Egypt, the largest army, not entered the war, and Egypt wouldn't have entered the war had Israel not expelled Palestinians and created so many refugees.
This book can serve as a good answer book just like Alan Dershowitz's A Case for Israel, but for the other side, except that it's not plagiarized from a hoax and has been vetted by the peer-review process. After reading this, you'll be wondering how the Israeli propaganda machine has been able to pull the wool over people's eyes for so long.
This is the most most useful book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I've ever read. It debunks a lot of myths, such as that Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank, and that all Arabs want to do is destroy Israel and kill Jews.
Slater is a (once passionate) Zionist, and he even wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy to help with its army against Egypt. Then he later found out the Egyptians were being reasonable while Israel was being a punk. Throughout the book, he demonstrates that it's been Arabs who were willing to make compromises that was often rejected by Israel. Now and then the Arabs would do some stupid crap. Like Nasser using genocidal rhetoric on a people only a decade removed from the Holocaust. U.S. intelligence showed that he wasn't going to attack, but that would scare Israel into launching a pre-emptive attack. Really dumb move.
A lot of new material I didn't know was included in the book, including:
- Had Israel stayed within its UN partition borders, it would soon have had an 80% Jewish majority without ethnically cleansing a single Arab. Then Jews could've had a refuge from the Holocaust without this conflict.
- The Palestinian Authority, and even Hamas, made a lot of efforts to constrain terrorists from attacking Israel.
- Of all the countries that attacked Israel after its 1948 declaration of independence, none of them wanted to do it and the ones that did only sent small forces, none of them would've done it had Egypt, the largest army, not entered the war, and Egypt wouldn't have entered the war had Israel not expelled Palestinians and created so many refugees.
This book can serve as a good answer book just like Alan Dershowitz's A Case for Israel, but for the other side, except that it's not plagiarized from a hoax and has been vetted by the peer-review process. After reading this, you'll be wondering how the Israeli propaganda machine has been able to pull the wool over people's eyes for so long.
December 27, 2021
A thoroughly-researched, timely, and decidedly necessary account of the players in the Israel-Palestine/Arab-Israel conflicts. A bit of a "broken record" at times to the tune of Israel and her allies' ultimate blame for the breakdown of so many opportunities for resolution. Empathetic and humanitarian towards the struggles of everyone involved, this book sheds needed light on the historical accuracy of the held values and mythological narratives that pervade this region.
March 5, 2024
Good information but pretty unfocused.
November 14, 2025
There is a lot of good information in here, but in general I found the author's arguments unconvincing in terms of what might have happened if only Israel and done such-and-such. Thus, over all, I see this book as misleading and contributing to the problem.
I doubt I will read this book again. (But I might.)
I doubt I will read this book again. (But I might.)
Read
November 2, 2023Really good but dense! I feel much more educated. going to read some other books on this history now that I have a fair grasp of it
February 2, 2025
Dense and detailed - not an easy read. But well-researched and extremely helpful in gaining further understanding of Israel-Palestine. So many lost opportunities to live and let live.
August 31, 2025
Very interesting.
April 28, 2024
In this book, Slater offers a decent look at the role of narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And, in doing so, attempts a corrective at various mistruths surrounding the topic.
Slater, however, never entirely settles on what he wants its primary subject to be. It is, at once, an exposition of Zionist historiography relating to Palestinians, and literature review of historiography on the conflict in general. At times, it analyses the US-Israeli dynamic, at others it posits potential "solutions". Nowhere does it entirely rest on a central thesis.
His handling of nationalist narratives is especially shaky. On the one hand, he rightfully recognises the historical misrepresentations of nationalisms. He correctly notes how every 'every nation constructs a "narrative" [...] about its history, or rather its imagined history' (p.28). And he admirably observes that the Palestinian nationalist aspirations have significant historical weight (p.32). On the other, despite his observations on p.28, he fails to acknowledge that all nationalisms do this, including Palestinian. In spite of his saying 'the problem with national narratives [...] is that no matter how sincere and deeply felt they may be, they invariably include mythologies that can't stand up to serious and dispassionate scrutiny' (p.29), Slater nevertheless spends the remainder of the book trying to square the circle of nationalist boundary demarcation and seems to rather naively expect Zionist arguments to recede under the weight of their own irrationality. This is not how nationalist mythologising works. While greater historical education might go some way towards blunting the more insidious aspects of nationalism, people will continue to believe nationalised historical myths anyway - at least, until the fundamental normative assumptions of nationalism in general is deconstructed.
On pp.36-7, he assesses the supposed legitimacy of nationalist territorial claims in light of the passage of time, recognising the Bosnian right to reclaim dispossessed homes from Serbs taken during the Yugoslav wars, but then dismissing Native American claims to US territory because 'the passage of 150 years is too long' (p.36). Nowhere, however, does he offer a working criteria for what constitutes a passage of time "too long", yet he presents this argument as though it is commonsensical, universally established fact. Whatever criteria seems to exist only in Slater's mind.
Another minor fault is his claiming the Egyptian-Czechoslovakian arms arose out of Nasr's threats to go to the US if the Soviet Union proved unwilling to provide him with the arms he wanted.
About halfway through the book he warns that a century of 'mutual violence and hatred, [and] an influx of millions of Palestinians would be a formula for civil and religious warfare', then claiming: "There are no contemporary precedents or models of two peoples long at war with each other suddenly becoming capable of living together in peace and harmony within the confines of one small state" and names Northern Ireland as one (p.251). This is simply incorrect and there are no two ways about it. Either Slater doesn't know the first thing about Northern Ireland, or (more likely) he thinks the peace that exists there constitutes the "formula for civil and religious warfare" he refers to above. This assertion is laughable and totally ignores that the violence in both Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland is not some magical perennial disposition of two particular ethnically conscious groups, but the result of tangible, material and symbolic grievances to be redressed in any such settlement. Indeed, in Northern Ireland, recognition of this fact has helped generate a stable, albeit far from perfect, peace. For all it's faults, to not only ignore that NI was successful in largely ending the violence, but that it's actually an example where such a formula for warfare is ripe, is incredibly careless.
Other problems arise in his handling of the various peace processes (or lack of). While he dismisses binationalism as a "utopian fantasy" (p.369), for instance, he still seems unable to think outside of the linear, majoritarian nation-state box and stands stubbornly by the two-state paradigm. One wonders why, in spite of four decades of international bungling on this "solution", this is still seen as the sensible option, while other frameworks remain "utopic". Slater doesn't offer any answer and sticks blindly to the orthodoxy.
Slater, however, never entirely settles on what he wants its primary subject to be. It is, at once, an exposition of Zionist historiography relating to Palestinians, and literature review of historiography on the conflict in general. At times, it analyses the US-Israeli dynamic, at others it posits potential "solutions". Nowhere does it entirely rest on a central thesis.
His handling of nationalist narratives is especially shaky. On the one hand, he rightfully recognises the historical misrepresentations of nationalisms. He correctly notes how every 'every nation constructs a "narrative" [...] about its history, or rather its imagined history' (p.28). And he admirably observes that the Palestinian nationalist aspirations have significant historical weight (p.32). On the other, despite his observations on p.28, he fails to acknowledge that all nationalisms do this, including Palestinian. In spite of his saying 'the problem with national narratives [...] is that no matter how sincere and deeply felt they may be, they invariably include mythologies that can't stand up to serious and dispassionate scrutiny' (p.29), Slater nevertheless spends the remainder of the book trying to square the circle of nationalist boundary demarcation and seems to rather naively expect Zionist arguments to recede under the weight of their own irrationality. This is not how nationalist mythologising works. While greater historical education might go some way towards blunting the more insidious aspects of nationalism, people will continue to believe nationalised historical myths anyway - at least, until the fundamental normative assumptions of nationalism in general is deconstructed.
On pp.36-7, he assesses the supposed legitimacy of nationalist territorial claims in light of the passage of time, recognising the Bosnian right to reclaim dispossessed homes from Serbs taken during the Yugoslav wars, but then dismissing Native American claims to US territory because 'the passage of 150 years is too long' (p.36). Nowhere, however, does he offer a working criteria for what constitutes a passage of time "too long", yet he presents this argument as though it is commonsensical, universally established fact. Whatever criteria seems to exist only in Slater's mind.
Another minor fault is his claiming the Egyptian-Czechoslovakian arms arose out of Nasr's threats to go to the US if the Soviet Union proved unwilling to provide him with the arms he wanted.
About halfway through the book he warns that a century of 'mutual violence and hatred, [and] an influx of millions of Palestinians would be a formula for civil and religious warfare', then claiming: "There are no contemporary precedents or models of two peoples long at war with each other suddenly becoming capable of living together in peace and harmony within the confines of one small state" and names Northern Ireland as one (p.251). This is simply incorrect and there are no two ways about it. Either Slater doesn't know the first thing about Northern Ireland, or (more likely) he thinks the peace that exists there constitutes the "formula for civil and religious warfare" he refers to above. This assertion is laughable and totally ignores that the violence in both Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland is not some magical perennial disposition of two particular ethnically conscious groups, but the result of tangible, material and symbolic grievances to be redressed in any such settlement. Indeed, in Northern Ireland, recognition of this fact has helped generate a stable, albeit far from perfect, peace. For all it's faults, to not only ignore that NI was successful in largely ending the violence, but that it's actually an example where such a formula for warfare is ripe, is incredibly careless.
Other problems arise in his handling of the various peace processes (or lack of). While he dismisses binationalism as a "utopian fantasy" (p.369), for instance, he still seems unable to think outside of the linear, majoritarian nation-state box and stands stubbornly by the two-state paradigm. One wonders why, in spite of four decades of international bungling on this "solution", this is still seen as the sensible option, while other frameworks remain "utopic". Slater doesn't offer any answer and sticks blindly to the orthodoxy.
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