There is a bloc of humanity that will never read this book based on the title alone, and there is another bloc, that if they did read it, would immediately find great fault with it, assuming they didn't just write it all off as pure fictional propaganda. I read a lot of non-fiction and histories in particular, and this did not come across to me at any level as inflated hype, but rather as extremely well-researched journalism based on documents from "both sides" of the issues discussed, including the personal diaries of the main architect of what occurred. In short, I find it much easier to believe the bulk of what it reports than to discount it. Is the author biased at some level about his subject? Perhaps, but a ton of facts often lead to bias toward what those facts reveal. The premise of this book is really quite simple. The nation of Israel did not come to being around 1948, because a bunch of Palestinians in the territory decided to just nicely move out of the area. The author reports how the Jews in the area systemically "cleansed" hundreds of villages and hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish residents often in deadly and almost always ruthless fashion. In fact, I had to knock a point off my rating because the author insisted on somewhat tediously reporting nearly each and every "cleansing" drip by drip to avoid any criticisms of cherry-picking a couple "mistakes" in an attempt to obscure how peacefully the Israelis claim this massive vacating of Arabs in what is now Israel and the occupied territories. Perhaps more importantly, the book provides a solid basis for understanding why the Israeli-Palestinian issue may never become peaceful because of Israel's actions rather than that of any Arabs. Is there more that could have been reported in the book. Yes, how did the Israelis, not yet even a nation, obtain and get trained in advanced military weaponry that allowed them to so easily achieve this cleansing, including the blocking of any significant outside Arab intervention. Why were the united "nations" so specific about being "fair" to the Palestinians with UN resolutions and the like, but did so very little to make sure their wishes were followed? Or perhaps, an entirely different book: why is the Jewish holocaust regarded as so much more terrible than the genocide in Rwanda or the massive deaths from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or any other despicable crime against humanity...such as those mentioned in this book? Finally, it should be noted that the purpose of this book was not to be balanced in what it reported but to use what it reported to balance what others have reported. ( )