Thus, Gorenberg writes, the accidental empire. An exemplary history of a phenomenon that is still unfolding—for, as Ariel...
Of hard choices and strange bedfellows: an illuminating account of a current controversy that extends back many years, namely, Israeli settlements beyond the bounds of Israel.
Well before there was an Israel, writes Jerusalem Report editor Gorenberg (The End of Days, 2000), there was a strong back-to-the-promised-land movement that urged that Jews “should return not only to the homeland, but to land itself, to the earth.” Leftist and even communist, this movement resulted in an unintended perimeter of kibbutzes that bore the first shock of attacks in a series of wars. When, in 1967, Israel acquired a comparatively vast expanse of territory from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan formulated a policy of “invisible rule,” though there was no mistaking just who ruled the conquered lands. In time, some members of Dayan’s circle alternately proposed giving the Gaza Strip back to Egypt and jointly ruling the West Bank with Jordan. Such magnanimity fell by the wayside with the massive sneak attack that was the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israel lost 2,656 soldiers in 19 days—the equivalent, Gorenberg points out, of a loss of 165,000 Americans in the same period. Determined not to be caught short again, Israel established defensive positions that threaded through Arab territories, occupying the high ground and joined by roads that bypassed Arab towns and villages entirely; Gaza was effectively cordoned off, while Israeli civilian settlements punctuated occupied territory precisely “to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.” This development was spearheaded by some of the same leftist kibbutzim, though now allied with members of the religious right whose stock rose through the 1970s, culminating in the Likud victory of 1977—another unintended consequence, but one that has conditioned Israeli politics to this day.
Thus, Gorenberg writes, the accidental empire. An exemplary history of a phenomenon that is still unfolding—for, as Ariel Sharon once urged, “Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.”Pub Date: March 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7564-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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