The Palestine Campaigns

The Palestine Campaigns
Author: Field-Marshal Earl Wavell
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2016-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 178625820X

In this thoughtful and well written account of the Palestinian campaigns, Field Marshal Wavell (at that time a Colonel) gives not only a very readable account of the actual campaigns themselves but also highlights the military maxims that gave success to the British Forces. Wavell himself was on the staff of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in 1917 and had a deep and firsthand knowledge of the operations and the theatre of war. As one of the most forward thinking leaders in the British Army of the time, Wavell’s conclusions on the future of war that he advanced in this book were quite prescient; the use of armoured vehicles and strategic mobility to mention but two. “The Palestine campaigns have been acclaimed as a triumph for cavalry and as the vindication of that arm in modern war. And quite certainly the skilful use of the mounted arm is the outstanding feature of the operations. But the true lesson is not so much the value of the horseman as the value and power of mobility, however achieved. “The campaigns are a classic illustration of this power, and are well worth careful study for this reason alone, since the chief aim of military thought at the present time must be to recapture the power of movement and manœuvre, which was lost in the principal operations of the late war in Western Europe.”—Extract from book

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
Author: Rashid Khalidi
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1627798544

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.

Palestine

Palestine
Author: Edward J. Erickson
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2016-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473880076

The campaigns fought by the Ottomans against the British in Palestine are often neglected in accounts of the Great War, yet they are fascinating from the point of view of military history and critically important because of their impact upon the modern Middle East. Edward Erickson's authoritative and absorbing account of the four-year struggle for control of Palestine between 1914 and 1918 of the battles fought for Suez, Sinai, Gaza, Jordan and Syria opens up this little-understood aspect of the global conflict and it does so in a strikingly original way, by covering the fighting from the Ottoman perspective. Using Turkish official histories and military archives, he recounts the entire course of the campaigns, from the initial attack by German-led Ottoman forces on Sinai and the Suez Canal, the struggle for Gaza and the outbreak of the Arab Revolt to the British offensives, the battle for Jerusalem, the Ottoman defeat at Megiddo and the rapid British advance which led to the capture of Damascus and Aleppo in 1918.