Born to a priestly family in Jerusalem in 37 CE, Yosef ben Mattityahu was, at the age of thirty, sent by Jewish leaders to defend the Galilee from imminent Roman attack. Although faced with a much larger force than expected, he brought his troops directly into battle when he could have easily avoided a fight and left the civilian population exposed to the legionaries’ depredations. After his force was defeated, he declined to join his fellows in a mass suicide, and instead surrendered to the Romans, ingratiated himself to their general, and lived out the rest of his life in the comfort of the capital, writing successful books, in Greek, on Jewish history with the patronage of the royal family—under the name Titus Flavius Josephus.

According to numerous critics, many of whom have positions at prestigious think tanks and publications, the normalization agreements the Jewish state reached with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain constituted an abandonment of the Palestinians. Peter Berkowitz argues that, to the contrary, the Abraham Accords can help to improve the lot of the Palestinians, and to reduce the intensity of their conflict with Israel: