In An Army Like No Other, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner—a professor of film studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and himself a veteran of the Six-Day War—tells the story of Israel’s army from 1948 until the present day. The military historian Edward Luttwak begins his review by examining Bresheeth-Zabner’s insinuation that the IDF slaughtered some 200 Syrian POWs in 1967:
Israeli military actions—past, present and nonexistent—receive, I would wager, more scrutiny than those of any other army, and in the endless list of accusations against it—valid, semi-valid, improbable, or utterly impossible—no such prisoner massacre has ever previously been included. But I will offer no such probabilistic argument because I was there in the Hula Valley in June 1967.
Of course, Luttwak saw no sign of such a massacre, because one never occurred. But, he goes on to argue, the entire book is filled with similar libels and insinuations, unencumbered by excessive concern for the truth, or even for plausibility.
Bresheeth-Zabner is one of those Israelis who are warmly welcomed in London by the academics and publicists who, for reasons on which we need not speculate here, studiously overlook every other conflict in the world (including Syria’s, amazingly enough, with its own Palestinian casualties numbering in the many thousands) to campaign relentlessly against Israel. That warm welcome is available in exchange for the acceptance of a simple axiom: Israel has no right to exist; hence everything about it is illegitimate, if not also atrocious, beginning with the Israeli army of course.
That is a bargain that Bresheeth-Zabner is very willing to fulfil. We thus read: “The Israelis are the greatest warmongers in the Middle East.” . . . The author’s apparent need to blacken Israel affords him no license for the [book’s] countless factual errors—most of them easily avoidable via a little light googling.
As for the IDF’s supposed victims, Luttwak writes that Bresheeth-Zabner “does not like the Palestinians enough to tell them the truth, thereby insisting on Palestinian exceptionalism.”
Read more on Times Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/an-army-like-no-other-haim-bresheeth-zabner-book-review/