Who Is Right and Who Is Left: The Fate of Weak Polities Among Mighty Empires - Paperback

This volume deals with the dilemma of "just wars," if any war can be justified.

In fact, it is like many other things in life, in the eye of the beholder. For what is just in the eye of the winner and victor, will be wrong and unjustified in the eye of the victim and loser.

This is the reason history is written by victors, while the defeated indulge in lamentations and nostalgia.

In several historical chapters, this volume brings up several cases from antiquity to our days, of big powers that took the liberty to conquer small nations and subject them to their whims, in the belief that might was right, as well as reversals in history where the crushed victims ultimately gained the upper hand.

Therefore, the question of who is right and who is left to tell the story will remain a tale of relative narratives, leaving it to subsequent generations and their (usually biased) historians to rewrite history to their taste.

Raphael Israeli grew up in Fes, Morocco, and had a French education. At 14, he moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he is now a professor of history at Hebrew University. He is the author of 55 books and was motivated to write this book to show "the pattern of rise and fall of great empires, and of their subjected countries and peoples."