...Even by the skewed standards of this field of studies, Pappé's latest book ranks in a class of its own. Not only does it add no new facts or ideas to the anti-Israel literature, but the sloppiness of its research astounds. It contains countless factual errors and inaccuracies. Yasir Arafat's birthplace is Cairo and not Jerusalem. The U.N. Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) presented its report on August 31, 1947, not on November 29. Deir Yasin is a village near Jerusalem, and not in Haifa. Lawrence of Arabia had nothing to do with the Anglo-Hashemite correspondence that led to the "Great Arab Revolt" of World War I. Further, this correspondence was initiated by the Hashemites not by the British. Pappé even misspells the official English transliteration of President Weizmann's first name (Chaim, not Haim).

More serious is the book's consistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood. Readers are told of events that never happened, such as the nonexistent May 1948 Tantura "massacre" or the expulsion of Arabs within twelve days of the partition resolution. They learn of political decisions that were never made, such as the Anglo-French 1912 plan for the occupation of Palestine or the contriving of "a master plan to rid the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible." And they are misinformed about military and political developments, such as the rationale for the Balfour declaration:

Without Russia, there was very little hope of successfully surrounding Germany with a ring of enemy states, a strategy it was hoped would cause Germany to surrender. The British government expected that Russian Jews would become the agents of pro-British propaganda that would persuade the tsarist government to come out clearly in support of the Allies' effort to subjugate Germany.

But Russia was a member of the Triple Entente coalition with Britain and France from the time of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and so needed no encouragement to join the war three years later, least of all by its despised and persecuted Jewish minority. In fact, it was hoped that the Zionist movement, by virtue of its perceived connections to the Bolshevik movement, would help keep communist Russia in the war...

...Does Pappé count on the ignorance of the general reader to accept it? Does he expect his peers to give him a pass? That Cambridge University Press purveys this disgraceful work suggests that they just might. It also symbolizes the crisis in Middle East studies.