It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering.

All these things happened, and many more like them not just once, but perhaps a million times. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. It is a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony.“In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy one million deaths is a statistic. Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Christian Pineau, Imre Nagy and David Ben-Gurion.

Blood and Sand tells this story hour by hour, with a fascinating cast of characters including Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anthony Eden, Dwight D. Blood and Sand is a revelatory new history of these dramatic events, for the first time setting both crises in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November 1956, the twin crises of Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. Essential to our understanding of the modern Middle East, Blood and Sand resonates powerfully with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism and international unity that face the world today.

Blood and sand alex von tunzelmann