The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most intense and intractable international conflicts of modern times. This book is about the historical roots of that conflict. It re-examines the history of 1948, the war in which the newly-born state of Israel defeated the Palestinians and the regular Arab armies of the neighbouring states so decisively. The book includes chapters on all the principal participants, on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus, and on the political and moral consequences of the war. The chapters are written by leading Arab, Israeli and western scholars who draw on primary sources in all relevant languages to offer alternative interpretations and new insights into this defining moment in Middle East history. The result is a major contribution to the literature on the 1948 war. It will command a wide audience from among students and general readers with an interest in the region.
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. Besides the military account, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Historian Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side--where the archives are still closed--is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials. Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. He examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. He looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world--a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.--Résumé de l'éditeur.
In Israel/Palestine, Reinhart traces the development of the Security Barrier and Israel’s new doctrine of "disengagement," launched in response to a looming Palestinian-majority population. Examining the official record of recent diplomacy, including United States–brokered accords and talks at Camp David, Oslo, and Taba, Reinhart explores the fundamental power imbalances between the negotiating parties and identifies Israel’s strategy of creating facts on the ground to define and complicate the terms of any future settlement. In this indispensable primer, Reinhart’s searing insight illuminates the current conflict and suggests a path toward change.
In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over 20 months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home, writing about everything from daily life to nationalism, colonialism, race, and the character of their enemies. Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 War through these letters, focusing on the people caught up in the conflict and its transnational reverberations. Dear Palestine also examines how the architects of the conflict worked to influence and indoctrinate key ideologies in these ordinary soldiers, by examining battle orders, pamphlets, army magazines, and radio broadcasts. Through two narratives--the official and unofficial, the propaganda and the personal letters--Dear Palestine reveals the fissures between sanctioned nationalism and individual identity. This book reminds us that everyday people's fear, bravery, arrogance, cruelty, lies, and exaggerations are as important in history as the preoccupations of the elites.
Since the 1970s, the Latin Based on new or newly interpreted Israeli, British and Arab documents, this book attempts to integrate present controversies concerning the development of the Jewish-Palestinian war from December 1947 to mid-May 1948 and the consecutive Israeli-Arab war. It follows the organization of both sides at the beginning of the war and the shaping of their respective war policies. Further, it describes the creation of the invading coalition and its disintegration in the wake of the Arab armies' military failure. The book stresses mainly the processes that led Palestinian society to its collapse and mass flight and the Israeli reactions and policies that turned this temporary escape into a long-lasting refugee problem. Emphasizing the different historical and cultural perspectives of the adversaries and the context of the war's development, it criticises the approach of the Israeli 'New Historians' who tend to isolate the refugee problem from the broader issues of the war and treat it separately. Includes a glossary of Arab/Israeli wartime operations.
The 1948 War is remembered in this special volume, including aspects of Israeli-Jewish memory and historical narratives of 1948 and representations of Israeli-Palestinian memory of that cataclysmic event and its consequences. The contributors map and analyze a range of perspectives of the 1948 War as represented in literature, historical museums, art, visual media, and landscape, as well as in competing official and societal narratives. They are examined especially against the backdrop of the Oslo process, which brought into relief tensions within and between both sides of the national divide concerning identity and legitimacy, justice, and righteousness of "self" and "other."
The war of 1948 in Palestine is a conflict whose history has been written primarily from the national point of view. This book asks what happens when narratives of war arise out of personal stories of those who were involved, stories that are still unfolding. Efrat Ben-Ze'ev examines the memories of those who participated and were affected by the events of 1948, and how these events have been mythologized over time. This is a three-way conversation between Palestinian villagers, Jewish-Israeli veterans, and British policemen who were stationed in Palestine on the eve of the war. Each has his or her story to tell. These small-scale truths shed new light on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as it was then and as it has become.
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past. By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress. The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost. Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present. Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles
