Books : 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

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Author name: Benny Morris

: 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.042
EAN num: 9780300126969
ISBN number: 0300126964
Label: Yale University Press
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 544
Printing Date: April 21, 2008
Publishing house: Yale University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 10627
Studio: Yale University Press



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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.





Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Balanced and informative
This is the best book on the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. Morris has matured as a historian since his very first book on the Palestinian refugees and puts various events into perspective. For example, Israeli behavior vis a vis the Arab population is seen in the context of fears created by the invasion of Palestine/Israel by the surrounding Arab states.

The book is very readable except for places when battles are described in detail apporpriate only for military historians.


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Benny Morris and his Critics
To understand Benny Morris and his critics, you must recognize two things. First of all, Morris is a fervent supporter of Israel who believes that most anything necessary for the creation and maintenance of a Jewish majority state in Palestine is not only morally justified, but is obviously so. Secondly, Morris believes that it is therefore safe, and even necessary, for Israel to abandon the myths surrounding its creation. What is there to fear from the truth when you have obvious righteousness on your side?

As a strong supporter of Israel, Morris will draw all inferences that he can in favor of Israel - differing thus from more critical historians like Ilan Pappe. But he is willing to acknowledge many unpleasant facts that horrify other supporters of Israel.

Morris collects two types of critics. The very first are those supporters of Israel unwilling to abandon the old mythology ("There are no Palestinians". "A land without a people for a people without a land".) The second are those, like me, who do not find it so obvious that anything and everything necessary for the creation and maintenance of a majority Jewish state is justified.

Look at the question of Palestinian refugees. Morris discards the old myth that the refugee problem was deliberately created by the Arabs themselves. He admits that nearly all of the 750,000 refugees were either deliberately expelled by Israelis or fled in fear of the fighting and chaos. Israel then refused to allow them to return to their homes. He goes further to say that the expulsion of refugees was implicit in Zionism and that the Jewish state could not have been created without it. In interviews with Avi Sharit of Haaretz and with the Atlantic Monthly he has gone even further to state that it was a "historical error" for David Ben Gurion to fail to drive out ALL the Palestinians. With Sharit he even defends ethnic cleansing as sometimes justified. See: www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm

Some supporters of Israel cannot forgive him for admitting so much. I cannot forgive him for trying to justify so much.

Morris differs with Ilan Pappe and others on whether one can find a `master plan' for ethnic cleansing in Plan Dalit - a minute analysis of Palestinian villages, their strengths, weaknesses and collaborators that provided what might be called a `Road Map' for elimination of the Arab population, and the regular meetings of Ben Gurion with a group of advisors that to Pappe seemed to oversee the implementation of this plan. Morris draws the inference favorable to Israel: there is no clear evidence of a master plan here, even though Palestinians were expelled, and this expulsion was both necessary to the creation of the Jewish state, and recognized as such by Ben Gurion and others. Pappe counters that in the post Holocaust world of War Crimes Tribunals, this is as clear a plan as you are ever likely to see. He says that Morris is biased by his reliance on Israeli sources and his failure to use Arab sources (which Morris, who writes primarily in English, cannot read) or to adequately use British sources.

On balance: you should read Morris, on 1948, in the overview "Righteous Victims", and on the Refugee question. This is ground breaking stuff for Israelis. But realize the strong pro-Israel biases here, and also read Pappe "Ethnic Cleansing". Would it be too radical to suggest actually reading some Palestinian sources, too?



Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Free From Political Dogmatism
I'm neither an historian nor an academic, so I can't vouch for the absolute accuracy of Morris's account. Nonetheless, his book is amply footnoted. In addition, it's easy to read and gives a good feel/flavor for the crises, times and battles surounding the creation of Israel as a modern nation. If you take a strong interest in Middle East affairs, you won't be disappointed in this epic narrative.


Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Too Many Military Details and not enough Big Picture
This mostly military chronicling of the very 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 very 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 very first and asked questions later.

Not enough non-military historical meat for me. Three Stars


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - 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 endeavor 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.

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