A book review from Josef Joffe…
Ghosts of a Holy War stands out as one of last year’s most under-reviewed and yet most read-worthy books on the Middle East. It spans the Hundred Years’ War between Arabs and Jews over a piece of real estate the size of New Jersey and was praised by Israel’s major papers. Apart from the Wall Street Journal, it was basically overlooked in the United States. It deserves better.
and,
On August 24, 1929, the old dispensation descended into a paroxysm of mass murder. Some 3,000 Arabs armed with daggers and axes invaded the Jewish Quarter, butchering 67 men, women, and children, including Shainberg. Fast-forward from Hebron to Hamas on October 7 in southern Israel, a far more deadly orgy exterminating 1,200 with unspeakable cruelty.
also this,
Depending on whose side you are on, you will point the finger at the other or invoke lots of “yes, but.” Or you might perorate about the ways of the world with its countless wars for aggrandizement. Yet that doesn’t explain why Egypt and Jordan made peace with their neighbor Israel half a lifetime ago—coldish as it is. Logically, there must be something else that keeps feeding Palestinian rejectionism. Ghosts of a Holy War lays out the reasons.
In other words, the cosmic battle was not against Zionists, but Jews. Nor is the Mufti a blast from the past. Listen to Yasser Arafat in 2002 when he hailed “our hero Husseini.” In 2023, his successor Mahmoud Abbas argued that the Nazis did not kill Jews “because they were Jews,” but because “they were dealing with usury and money”—a classic in anti-Semitism. Another routine: There was no Holocaust, or it was inflicted by Jews on Jews.
plus from the publisher,
In 1929, in the sacred city of Hebron—then governed by the British Mandate of Palestine—there was no occupation, state of Israel, or settlers. Jews and Muslims lived peacefully near the burial place of Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish and Arab nations, until one Saturday morning when nearly 70 Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors. The Hebron massacre was a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict, key to understanding its complexities. The echoes of 1929 in Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023, illustrate how little has changed—and how much of our perspective must change if peace is ever to come to this tortured land and its people, who are destined to share it. Noted journalist Yardena Schwartz draws on her extensive research and wide-ranging interviews with both sides to tell a timely, eye-opening story. She expertly weaves the war between Israel and Hamas into a historical framework, demonstrating how the conflict today cannot be understood without the context of ground zero of this century-old war, which began long before the occupation, the settlements, or the state of Israel ever existed.
Unlike other nations in the Middle East like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for Palestinians it is about the sadistic torture and murder of all Jews – now and forever.
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