The Palestinian catastrophe : the 1948 expulsion of a people from their homeland /

Palumbo uses a collection of war crimes files in the same UN archives containing the dossier on Kurt Waldheim (about whom he is currently writing) to recount the tragic saga of the forced exodus of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Staggering revelations are based on genuine firsthand documentation, dispatched by observers on the scene of one of the most painful episodes (next to the Holocaust) suffered by any people in modern times. Palumbo uses this critical dossier, first uncovered in 1980, together with data from US, European, and Israeli archives, as well as memoirs and testimonies of Jewish veterans of 1948. He relates the story of anguish, suffering, and brutality visited upon 750,000 Palestinian Arabs forced to abandon their homes as a consequence of the first Arab-Israeli war and of the atrocities that led to such mass flight. Palumbo documents the numerous massacres reported by UN personnel and Israeli veterans, detailing tragedy after tragedy: Plan Dalet, Deir Yassin (which he shows not to be an isolated incident), the Haifa tragedy, the fall of Jaffa, the road to Safed, the Lydda death march, the troubled truce, operation Hiram against the Arabs of Galilee, and the ``theft of a nation'' (sic). Palumbo's style is lucid, direct, and agonizingly vivid. An introduction sets forth the theme after an emotion-wrenching prologue. Public and academic libraries at all levels.-C.E. Farah, University of Minnesota