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The appendix, an interview with a Jewish-British critic of Israel (Isaac Deutscher?) conducted by Alexander Cockburn and others, is worth the price of the book alone!
I was just looking at the Amazon.com page for the name of this mentor of Ali's, and the review section leads off with a pan by a Tufts professor from Library Journal that calls it a work of "monumental vacuity" and then proceeds to miss several important points. :grr: Most irritating, it recommends skipping the book if you've read Bernard Lewis. In fact, this book is an antidote to Lewis's zionist apologetics. I bought What Went Wrong? about the same time, but I started reading Ali first. After being blown away by his chapter on Israel/Palestine, I checked Lewis's index for references to Israel or zionism. There were maybe three in the whole book. One was a paragraph-long chiding of Arab intellectuals for blaming Israel and the United States for the problems in the middle east! As if focusing on Israel/US's role in updating colonialism were mere scapegoating!
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