This is a draft. It is the piece that will be read and argued with more than anything else on the site, so it should be in your words, not ours. Rewrite it or delete it before launch.
There is a particular kind of ignorance that is not the reader’s fault. You can be curious, literate and serious, and still know nothing accurate about a subject, because everything you were given about it came from one office.
For Persian speakers, Israel is that subject. It has been discussed constantly and explained once. A person who grew up reading Persian has heard the conflict described in detail for their whole life, and has almost never encountered an account of how the state came to exist that was written by someone not required to reach a conclusion first.
That is not a disagreement. A disagreement requires two arguments. This is one argument and a wall.
So the question we asked was not whether we agreed with Daniel Gordis. We asked whether a Persian reader had any way of disagreeing with him — of reading the case, checking the sources, and deciding. They did not, because the book did not exist in their language.
It does now.
We expect some readers to finish it and reject it. That is a completely acceptable outcome, and it is more than the current arrangement permits. What we are against is not a conclusion. It is the practice of deciding in advance which books a person is competent to read.