Although the UN plan for partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states was opposed by the vast majority of Arab leaders, most were long unwilling to go to war to prevent it from happening. What pushed the states to war, argues Matthias Kuenzel, was the persistent lobbying of the Muslim Brotherhood, its ability to shape popular Arab opinion with the help of Nazi-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda, and its support for Grand Mufti Amin Haj al-Husseini—a former collaborator with the Nazis who rejected any compromise with the Jews:

Founded in 2004 by IDF veterans, Breaking the Silence aims to expose the supposed wrongdoings of the Israeli military in the West Bank. In her recent Hebrew-language book Who Do You Think You Are?, Yuli Novak, who served as the group’s director until 2017, reflects on the internal turmoil she has experienced in the ensuing years and explains how she came to reject Zionism altogether. Einat Wilf finds the book cliché-ridden and solipsistic, while the author comes across as a “petulant child.” Moreover, writes Wilf, Novak’s argument rests on false premises: