The historian-activist Howard Zinn was fond of saying, “If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”
There is nothing in the world today more in need of an accurate historical account than the violence in Palestine-Israel — or more infected with obfuscation. Many people’s historical reckoning seems to go back no further than October 7, 2023. Even those more committed to understanding the present in terms of the past often reach back only to the Six Day War and occupation in 1967 or the UN partition of Palestine in 1947 and the 1948 War for Independence — for Israelis — or the Nakba, the Catastrophe — for Palestinians. Or they may simply say: It began with the Holocaust.
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