Palestine Betrayed

Palestine Betrayed
Author: Efraim Karsh
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2010-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300169450

The 1947 UN resolution to partition Palestine irrevocably changed the political landscape of the Middle East, giving rise to six full-fledged wars between Arabs and Jews, countless armed clashes, blockades, and terrorism, as well as a profound shattering of Palestinian Arab society. Its origins, and that of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, are deeplyrooted in Jewish-Arab confrontation and appropriation in Palestine. But the isolated occasions of violence during the British Mandate era (1920–48) suggest that the majority of Palestinian Arabs yearned to live and thrive under peaceful coexistence with the evolving Jewish national enterprise. So what was the real cause of the breakdown in relations between the two communities?In this brave and groundbreaking book, Efraim Karshtells the story from both the Arab and Jewish perspectives. Heargues that from the early 1920s onward, a corrupt and extremist leadership worked toward eliminating the Jewish national revival and protecting its own interests. Karsh has mined many of the Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli documents declassified over the past decade, as well as unfamiliar Arab sources, to reveal what happened behind the scenes on both Palestinian and Jewish sides. It is an arresting story of delicate political and diplomatic maneuvering by leading figures—Ben Gurion, Hajj Amin Husseini, Abdel Rahman Azzam, King Abdullah, Bevin, and Truman —over the years leading up to partition, through the slide to war and its enduring consequences. Palestine Betrayed is vital reading for understanding the origin of disputes that remain crucial today.

Betrayal Of Palestine

Betrayal Of Palestine
Author: Susan Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-03-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429981716

This definitive biography of George Antonius tells the life story of a man who lived during a dramatic period of history, amid challenge that remains unresolved: the Palestine-Zionist conflict. Betrayal of Palestine is an important and innovative work about the continuing controversy of empire and nationalism. This book traces Antonius's contribution and ideas on nation building and good governance and resonates for contemporary seekers of peace in the Middle East. As an archaeology of ideas and meaning, the book will be of great significance for the millennium. It speaks to the paradigm of a conqueror's code, and to the ever present danger of special interests capturing public policy and corrupting good governance.By rediscovering Antonius's message about institutions and nation building, and the true meaning of morality, conscience and public service, Betrayal of Palestine speaks to contemporary people in a voice that reconnects the past with the present. The book offers hope to a region where many solutions have failed, and a reminder that the solutions have been there all along, in the people and traditions of the Middle East, but they have been obscured by a conqueror's code of empire and nationalism. It is a reminder of the genius of democracy and the power of first principles: that ordinary people are important, that power must be shared, and that society as nation transcends tribalism and its more virulent contemporary form: nationalism.

Spies in Palestine

Spies in Palestine
Author: James Srodes
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2017-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640090053

Sarah Aaronsohn was a twenty–first century woman in a nineteenth–century world. She and her siblings were born as part of the first wave of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, settling in the province of Syria–Palestine. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the settlers had come a dramatic distance in creating the Eretz Israel of their Biblical prophecies. Sarah's home village of Zichron Ya'akov brought prosperity to their lands between the Mediterranean coast and the Mount Carmel range. But when the Ottoman Turkish Empire sided with Kaiser Wilhelm II and the other Central Powers in World War I, the Jewish settlements faced cruel oppressions. This book describes how the Aaronsohns, one of the most prominent families in the province, came to commit themselves and their comrades to the Allied side and how they formed the NILI espionage organization to spy against the Turkish Army. Late in the war, in 1917, Sarah assumed command of the spy network as the group's penetration of the Turkish army reached a critical juncture. Sarah was idolized by T.E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia who dedicated his flowery biography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to her.

In the Land of My Birth

In the Land of My Birth
Author: Reja-e Busailah
Publisher: Institute for Palestine Studies USA Incorporated
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2017
Genre: Blind children
ISBN: 9780887280009

In this remarkable book, Reja-e Busailah takes us on two parallel journeys. The first is to Palestine before the Nakba, which we discover with all our senses¿smelling, touching, and feeling the place thanks to an autobiographical narrative laced with poetry and the memory of words rooted in the land. And the second is to the self, which the author has fashioned into a reflection of life: here, the young boy uses the light of words to help illuminate our own vision, enabling us to transcend the surface of things and plumb their depth. What Busailah has done is to make words into eyes with which to see what the seeing eye cannot. He makes the reader privy to secrets that only sightless poets, from Homer to Abu al-`Ala¿ al-Ma¿arri, glean, beholding with words what their eyes could not discern.With In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood, Busailah has given us what life denied him, and in his hands, the memoir is transformed from a personal story into the chronicle of a country whose memory others have sought to erase. In this way, the tapestry of Palestine is rewoven, its map redrawn, thanks to the actual experience of life. This book also enriches the corpus of Arab and Palestinian autobiographical literature. On the Arab side, Taha Hussein's The Days is the iconic work. Its equivalent in the more specifically Palestinian realm is represented by at least two books, both of them by men of Jerusalem: The First Well by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Out of Place by Edward Said.

The Book of Disappearance

The Book of Disappearance
Author: Ibtisam Azem
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-07-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0815654839

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

The Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration
Author: Bernard Regan
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786632489

The true history of the imperial deal that transformed the Middle East and sealed the fate of Palestine On 2 November 1917, the British government, represented by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, declared it was in favour of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This short note would become one of the most controversial documents of modern history. Offering new insights into the imperial rivalries between Britain, Germany and the Ottomans, Regan exposes British policy in the region as part of a larger geopolitical game. He charts the debates within the British government, the Zionist movement, and the Palestinian groups struggling for selfdetermination. The after-effects of these events are still felt today.

From Ambivalence to Betrayal

From Ambivalence to Betrayal
Author: Robert S. Wistrich
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2012-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080324083X

From Ambivalence to Betrayal is the first study to explore the transformation in attitudes on the Left toward the Jews, Zionism, and Israel since the origins of European socialism in the 1840s until the present. This pathbreaking synthesis reveals a striking continuity in negative stereotypes of Jews, contempt for Judaism, and negation of Jewish national self-determination from the days of Karl Marx to the current left-wing intellectual assault on Israel. World-renowned expert on the history of antisemitism Robert S. Wistrich provides not only a powerful analysis of how and why the Left emerged as a spearhead of anti-Israel sentiment but also new insights into the wider involvement of Jews in radical movements. There are fascinating portraits of Marx, Moses Hess, Bernard Lazare, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and other Jewish intellectuals, alongside analyses of the darker face of socialist and Communist antisemitism. The closing section eloquently exposes the degeneration of leftist anti-Zionist critiques into a novel form of “anti-racist” racism.

Legacy of Empire

Legacy of Empire
Author: Gardner Thompson
Publisher: Saqi Books
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2019-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0863563864

It is now more than seventy years since the creation of the state of Israel, yet its origins and the British Empire's historic responsibility for Palestine remain little known. Confusion persists too as to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In Legacy of Empire, Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain's role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two decades Britain would facilitate the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants, ultimately leading to a conflict which it could not contain. Britain's response was to propose the partition of an ungovernable land: a 'two-state solution' which - though endorsed by the United Nations after the Second World War - has so far brought into being neither two states nor a solution. A highly readable and compelling account of Britain's rule in Palestine, Legacy of Empire is essential for those wishing to better understand the roots of this enduring conflict.

History Upside Down

History Upside Down
Author: David Meir-Levi
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2010-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1458766667

David Meir-Levi's ''brief encounter'' offers a solid approach to understanding the basics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, arguably the world's most persistent and polarized political issue. History Upside Down applies great common sense where demagogues and ignorami too often dominate. DANIEL PIPES director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America In order for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be resolved, the demonology will have to be taken out of it, and the historical and political facts allowed to speak for themselves dispassionately. David Meir-Levi shows how this can be done.