How to Succeed at Actually THINKING about 'The Middle East': Rely Mainly on Primary Sources

I''m going to do something a bit out of my ordinary with this post: First, I am not going to advance any controversial claim. And second, I am going to recommend a book - a compendium, really - recently published by a friend.

The fellow in question is Gregg Rosenberg. I first became aware of Gregg in his capacity as an accomplished cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind. Fellow philosophers and AI professionals might know Gregg as a close friend and former colleague of David Chalmers; a doctoral student of Mike Dunn's, Anil Gupta's, and Doug Hofstadter's; and author of the highly regarded and well-reviewed A Place for Consciousness (OUP 2004), on what philosophers call 'the hard problem' presented by consciousness. Those who know Chalmers's field-changing The Conscious Mind (1997) might also recall Gregg as the fellow to whom David said he owed '[his] deepest debt.'

My purpose for name-checking Gregg here, though, is to commend to attention another of his books - his Zionism and Anti-Zionism (2025). What sets this book apart from virtually all others in the field of Levantine studies is its compendious wealth of QR Code links to PRIMARY SOURCES relevant to the recent history of the Levant. This is, I am convinced, indispensable right now.

As previous visitors to this site know, I have devoted some time to parsing out and then laying out what seem to me the inescapable criteria that a spoken phoneme-string or written morpheme-stream must meet to qualify as actual thinking - as distinguished, say, from mere mechanical repetition. Much of my resultant writing is at this very site. (See the multiple 'Nonthinking' posts I put up back in February and March.)

One such criterion, which I cannot imagine that anyone would find objectionable, is that the would-be thinker consider his or her would-be assertoric thought or pronouncement answerable to some form of verification or falsification. To emit sound-strings or symbol-strings with no such sense of answerability, it seems to me, is to untether ones proto-linguistic activity, and hence one's proto-cognitive activity, from anything one might call 'truth' or 'reality,' hence from truth- and reality-directed thought itself.

It is against this backdrop that Gregg's book proves to be as valuable as it is. We have long since reached the point, I suspect many will agree, at which so many self-styled 'hot takes,' 'interpretations,' and 'narratives' are ungrounded in evidence - or, yet more foundationally, even in awareness that actual THINKING is ANSWERABLE to evidence - that this form of would-be collaborative deliberation is now all but useless. In that circumstance, our motto must surely be: BACK TO THE PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL. BACK TO THE ARCHIVAL RECORD.

This is where Gregg's book adds real and unrivalled value. Virtually every page includes one or more QR codes linking precisely to primary sources. You needn't even read Gregg's connecting text to learn more than you'll likely have thought possible from his book.

If you're agnostic about current controversies, then, I recommend that you approach Zionism and Anti-Zionism in two stages. First leaf through it with smartphone in hand, and simply visit its QR Code links. Then, decide only after that whether you want to re-read the book as a narrative, moving from link-to-link via Gregg's connecting prose rather than simply directly.

If you start by just looking at the

archived historical record - 19th, 20th, and 21st century Ottoman, British, Arab, and Israeli documents, photographs, newspaper stories, etc. - the truth of the present-day ongoing Levantine struggle will emerge on its own, with no need of polemical midwifery.