How Historically Accurate is 'The Case for Israel' by Alan Dershowitz

There's quite a bit of debate about that book and how Dershowitz wrote it. There have been many articles and at least one full length book written in response to it by critics, although most of the conversation revolves around claims of plagiarism rather than falsifying historical facts.

There is at least one passage where Dershowitz claims the number of Arabs who fled/were forced from their homes is between 2,000 to 3,000 while the author he is citing puts it 200,000 to 300,000, but that seems to be a typo more than an attempt at anything.

Given the structure of the book, there's a lot of a room for shading the truth. When Dershowitz is responding to claims like 'Israel is the worst violator or human rights on earth,' he can truthfully and easily say 'no, that's not true, look at these other places where really terrible things happen.' At the same time, that doesn't excuse or change the fact that Israel routinely engages in what most of the rest of the world considers human rights violations, but, funnily enough, that's not something that Ol' Dersh is too quick to mention.

On top of that issue, the precise historical facts aren't crystal clear in a lot of this, especially during the most chaotic parts of the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba. It's clear that a lot of Arab people who used to live in what is now Israel left their homes. How many? Did they leave to get out of the way of the war or were they forced out? Were massacres happening and if so were they frequent? Were there rogue violent actors or a coordinate system of driving out civilians? All of these are hotly debated questions.

Dershowitz is very, very partisan on this issue, and you should probably take that into consideration in regards to his work. If you want a counter balance to his book that's on the opposite end of the spectrum, you might find Ilan Pappé's work to be interesting.