Connecting with the Enemy purports to document a hundred years of civil society efforts to resolve or facilitate resolution of the conflict between Jew and Arab over the Holy Land. Sadly, Katz of the Berklee College of Music has produced a silly and often misleading book—as biased as it is banal.

The “Acknowledgements” alert readers to the book’s political bias. The list of individuals whom the author thanks for their “foundational input” is comprised almost exclusively of hard-line, far-left critics of Israel, with virtually all the Israelis strongly supporting Palestinian claims.
Nowhere in the book is there any attempt at balance.

Connecting is replete with factual inaccuracies. Thus, readers are told that the Jewish pioneers who arrived in the First Aliya, beginning in 1882, were motivated by an idea formulated almost two decades later by Theodore Herzl in his book Altneuland.[1] Likewise, readers are referred to “the Jewish-Arab town of Gilboa,” though no such town exists.

The author unquestioningly accepts the mendacious and outrageous, anti-Israeli blood libel that during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed a massacre in the town of Jenin. In fact, the IDF put troops at extraordinary risk, sending ground forces into booby-trapped houses rather than deploying the air force. In the resultant fighting, the IDF lost 23 soldiers and killed 52 Palestinians, most of them armed terrorists. Some massacre.

To its credit, the book includes numerous accounts of individuals on both sides of the conflict rising above personal tragedy and extending a hand in peace to their adversaries. However, its many factual inaccuracies and its blatant political partisanship unavoidably raise skepticism as to the unembellished authenticity of these accounts.

Connecting is a book best left unread, or read as a sobering example of what passes for scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[1] Altneuland (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902).