Few modern political dilemmas have been more difficult to control and less comprehensible than dominance over Palestine. Overtime, various solutions have been proposed based on demographics, economics, nationalism, prejudice, and an unquenchable thirst for vengeance.Fred Kohler Holbrook’s Palestine—Whose Homeland? approaches this problem from a perspective founded, remarkably, not in zealotry or greed, but in what he calls “information seeking.” And, like a logical man, he begins at the beginning, in Biblical times, unraveling the intertwined stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Mohammed and Moses, and their involvement in Palestine.Mr. Holbrook weaves his religious and historical study with dozens of citations from the Old and New Testament, the Qu’ran, Jewish texts, and various books of commentary. If nothing else, the reader will gain a heightened appreciation of the complex interweaving of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures, to the vanished civilizations of the Babylonians and Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and modern contenders, notably the British imperialists, the Zionists, and the Islamics- which have fought over and occupied the Holy Land for most of recorded Western history.The author invokes more little known sources than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Qu’ran, including Abrahamist volumes and the scriptures of the Church, of which he is a member. The result is an erudite, well-balanced, and intriguing investigation of the endless strife that hangs over Palestine.
