The war for Palestine : rewriting the history of 1948 /

Historians who claim to be reinventing the wheel can be very irritating, but occasionally they can be useful. Rogan and Shlaim, prime proponents of the "revisionist" school among historians of the Arab-Israeli conflict, have assembled a series of essays that seek to dispel many of the "myths" surrounding the events of 1948, which created both the Israeli state and the Palestinian diaspora. Benny Morris asserts that the Palestinian exodus partially resulted from deliberate, long-planned Zionist hopes for "transfer" of population rather than the mere vagaries of war. Laila Parsons places Israeli-Druze cooperation within the context of anti-Muslim bias. Although some of the data presented here is new, the conclusions are not; the general tone of this anthology is anti-Zionist, and the use of "facts" is highly selective. Still, some of the essays provide interesting perspectives, and it is useful to be reminded that historical struggles are seldom as simple or noble as they may appear from a distance. --Jay Freeman

More than half a century has passed since the end of the 1948 Palestine War. The war, which the Israelis call the "War of Independence" and the Palestinians refer to as "the disaster," has been the subject of passionate public debate and numerous scholarly writings in recent years. The official Israeli version of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem has been challenged by, among other people, a group of Israeli scholars who are variably called the "new historians" or the "revisionists." In this edited volume, Rogan and Shlaim, two prominent scholars of the modern Middle East at the University of Oxford, have brought together leading Israeli revisionist historians with noted Arab and Western scholars to explain the historical and contemporary significance of the 1948 War from various perspectives. In addition to the editors themselves, contributors to this erudite and immensely informative volume include Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Charles Tripp, Joshua Landis, Laila Parsons, Edward Said, and Fawaz Gerges. Their general consensus is that the Palestinian refugee problem resulted not from voluntary flight but from the specific policies of Zionist authorities during the creation of the state of Israel. Highly recommended for public and demic libraries. Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, AL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.