Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: "An insurgency in the public relations war"
Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations is Rafael Behr's Paperback of the week for the Observer. Behr picks up on a particularly modern expression of the conflict: PR.
Avi Shlaim refers to Zionism as a public relations exercise. It sounds glib. But Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University, isn't talking about sales and marketing. He means a configuration of history that casts one side of a dispute as victim and the other as aggressor in the eyes of the world.... Shlaim does not aim at a comprehensive overview of the conflict so much as a running rebuttal of Israel's version of it; an insurgency in the public relations war.
Visit the Observer to read the review in full.