It is also an effort to place the massacre in the context of the bigger picture, to help the world understand the motivations, goals and the objectives of all the players that existed at the time. In researching this book, I recognized immediately that while the Israelis had meticulously documented their history, the Arabs had failed terribly in documenting their own history. In fact, Arab history is mired in the polemical rhetoric of politics. Events in the Arab history of Palestine, are not recorded as events, per se, but are analyzed for their political weight for application in today's dialectics. The Arab history of Palestine has been written and re-written repeatedly as an effort to justify an argument, rather than as a clinical record of events.
Arab history is filled with rhetoric prompted by the politics of the moment.
There was no long range plan to preserve information or record events. It is unfair to place all the blame on the Arabs by themselves, or even on the Israelis. History, in the hands of a very biased and prejudiced Western News Media, has a way of distorting and burying the facts. In what has been written by both Arab and Jewish sources, dates events and statistics are intermingled and confused. For example, the death of Abdel Qader al-Husseini, which is written about in this novel, has been recorded by scores of sources as having occurred on three different dates, April 7, April 8 and April 9.