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Title: 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
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Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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| 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press Too Many Military Details and not enough Big Picture | This mostly military chronicling of the first Arab-Israeli war, is a difficult read, because the prose is so dense and full of almost arcane military details. It is hard to get ones hands or head around the larger picture. I, for one was hoping for a much more coherent and self-contained piece, with larger explanatory themes to grab onto. I pretty much knew the outlines of the history here, but was hoping that this book would put the creation of the state of Israel into context, but sadly that is not what I got.
That said, it is difficult to argue with the profusion of details if one is willing to get knee deep and wade into military arcania. The story Morris tells as best I can decipher it is this:
Three years after the European Holocaust, and after the Jews had for 75 years been trickling into Palestine, a UN Mandate based on the arrangements of the Balfour Conference and a United Nations Resolution, brought the state of Israel into being.
Although the Arabs had anticipated that this would happen, they were still shocked and remained disorganized. Fighting broke out immediately, but since the Jews were more highly motivated and better organized, they set a pattern that would be repeated in all of the subsequent wars, of quickly routing the Arabs and immediately began taking over Palestinian lands as spoils of war.
At first the Jews were not bent on "ethnically cleansing" their new territory of all its Arabs. However, as Arabs who elected to stay under Israeli suzerainty were seen as traitors to the pan-Arabic cause, their voluntary exodus amounted to de facto and self-fulfilling ethnic cleansing, after which the new Jewish arrivals did not discourage.
As far as atrocities were concerned, there were enough to go around, but Morris in the kind of balanced and fair-mindedness reflected throughout the book, takes the Israelis to task as being the more brutal of the two. According to him they had less reasons to trust the Arabs and usually shot first and asked questions later.
Not enough non-military historical meat for me. Three Stars | | 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press An Accessible History of a War That Changed History | I approached this book with caution. I had not read any of Morris' prior books, fearful of his reputation (earned or not) for bashing the Israeli side without providing context for their actions. Though when I read history I already know how the story ends, I want something fresh, with context, and an attempt to give the losing side a chance to explain what it was thinking. To my delight, and to the benefit of those who like me devour serious histories written for scholars and non-scholars, Morris accomplishes this.
"1948" skillfully weaves together the political and military history of Israel's war of independence. The atrocities of war being what they are, he places those committed by Israelis, whose command was not always unified, against the Arabs' threats to destroy them Those threats remained largely (though far from completely) unfulfilled due to incompetence, and not a lack of desire. The Arab countries surrounding Israel had no interest in allowing the Arabs who lived in Mandate Palestine to form their own country, and the the Arabs who lived within the Mandate territory (whom we now call Palestinians) lacked the will to better their situation militarily, economically, educationally and politically. If they had succeeded in driving out the Jews, they would not have been Palestinians, but Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians. Their land would probably still be impoverished, disease ridden, and lacking any serious institutions of higher learning. They did not want a nation-- they just wanted the Jews to leave.
The men and women who formed modern Israel determined that they would be victims no more. Few gentiles complained when, wherever they lived, Jews' land, chattel and lives were stolen or destroyed. The Israelis' story, as told by Morris, is not always a comfortable one for Western sensibilities, but it holds up well compared to the birth of most other nations in the last one hundred years. That Morris could write a book that seems to contradict many of the theories he has put forward in the past is a credit to his intellectual honesty. That he can relate the tale in such an accessible package is to the history book reading public's benefit. | | 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press A Vital Work on the 1948 Israeli-Arab War | | In 1948 Benny Morris shows himself to be a first-rate historian with an accurate and detailed command of the events leading up to the first Arab Israeli War and the war itself. The book is primarily the military history of the conflict, and Morris is a well informed chronicler of military engagements. Morris, also considered one of the grandfathers of the "revisionist" school of Israeli historiography, here shows that he is not afraid to document both Jewish/Israel and Palestinian/Arab excesses and missteps in the war, opportunities missed or failed to be exploited. By and large Morris is very sympathetic to the Zionist enterprise in the Holy Land in this book. He views war in 1948 as inevitable given the demographic/strategic situation in Palestine since the arrival of the first Zionist settlers in the 1880s. This is in keeping with some of his more recent utterances about the Israeli Arab/Palestinian conflict. Given the pressure the Yishuv and early state of Israel were under, he states, conflict was unavoidable. In 1948 Morris seeks to show that calls for jihad against the Jews in Palestine was no mere bluster; that it was just as powerful (if not more so) source of Arab ire against Israel as the rising sense of Arab nationalism following WWII. It is here, I suppose, where Morris makes his most original contribution to the study of the 1948 war. | | 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press Benny Morris distorts history | In the past, Efraim Karsh presented evidence that forced Benny Morris to admit to distortions. Wikipedia has links to primary documents in the Morris/Karsh conflict.
Karsh presents a different view of the Arab-Israeli War in the May, 2008 issue of Commentary: "1948, Israel, and the Palestinians--The True Story."
For instance, in Gaza in 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo found that while the Palestinian refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. `We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes....I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over."
| | 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press At The Creation | | Less famous than the 1967 or 1973 wars between Israel and the Arab world, the 1948 War of Independence has faded from memory. Best remembered from the book "Exodus" by Leon Uris (or the Paul Newman movie of the same name), the 1948 War has been exhaustively researched by Mr. Morris now. The seeds of the current Israeli-Arab conflict were sown in 1948 where Israel was fighting for its life, three years removed from the Holocaust. Ironically, Israel would had an Arab majority soon, had not more than a half million Arabs fled during the fighting. The Arab nations were poorly organized and armed in comparsion to the Israelis. Mr. Morris notes the atrocities on both sides and spares neither. For the reader wishing a follow-up, they are referred to Michael Oren's "Six Days Of War: June, 1967." | | 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Yale University Press Product Description | This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny 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. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive 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. |
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