e Arab peoples are brief in the extreme, and faintly dismissive; he admits the achievements of Arab civilization in its great ages, but calls more attention (p. 8) to what he views as an exaggerated picture given in present-day schools in the Arab world. The reader will learn almost nothing from this book of why Arabs are conscious of their past, and still less of what implications the Arab sense of the past has for Arab perspectives on the present and future.
In the following chapters, Field provides some insights into the development of the Zionist movement and the practices of the Israeli state. He mentions the combination of force and pressure that the Israelis used to induce the large-scale flight of Palestinians from their homes in Israeli-held territory, and notes that "there was remarkably little international criticism of Israel, though the acts it was committing on its territories were much more brutal than anything it did in the occupied territories in the 1970s, 1980s or early 1990s" (pp. 48-49). Since Field provides no details, however, he leaves the reader with no real sense of what was involved, or what implications this policy had for subsequent Palestinian-Israeli relations.
Early in the book, Field asks the fundamental question, "what is an Arab?" He notes, correctly enough, that Arab national identity in the present-day sense is a modern creation, which hardly existed, or inde
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