"In his compelling dialogue with a sparky adolescent living in a now-vanished Tasmanian mining town a hundred years ago, Dryburgh gives us a powerful sense of the forces that still do battle to shape our existence in this country, and on this earth.The glimpses Sylvia gives us of her too-short life were framed by far vaster forces - of migration, colonisation and settlement, of mining interests and endeavours to exploit the wilderness, of nature itself that she encountered in its near-unsullied state along the Frankland River. Her life was shadowed, too, by the things she does not mention - violence against the land's original inhabitants, by the wars that were building far away.In Dryburgh's sensitive engagement, this small female voice, so solitary that it sought connection through missives to a newspaper editor hundreds of miles away, reminds us that the settlers' place on this continent was never a given, and that sustainable existence on it requires acknowledgement of its fragility, and our own."Caroline Brothers, author of The Memory Stones and Hinterland.

The story of the rhetorical and practical assistance that Britain has given to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel since 1917.

In the middle of the First World War, the British War Cabinet approved and issued a statement in the form of a letter that encouraged the settlement of the Jewish people in Palestine. Signed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the Balfour Declaration remains one of the most important documents of the last hundred years. Jonathan Schneer explores the story behind the declaration and its unforeseen consequences that have shaped the modern world, placing it in context paying attention to the fascinating characters who conceived, opposed and plotted around it - among them Lloyd George, Lord Rothschild, T.E. Lawrence, Prince Faisal and Aubrey Herbert (the man who was 'Greenmantle'). The Balfour Declaration brings vividly to life the origins of one of the world's longest lasting and most damaging conflicts.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.

The first full analysis of the international thought of the British statesman A. J. Balfour (1848-1930).

“Comprehensive and compelling...a landmark study” of the Arab-Zionist conflict, told from both sides, by the author of Israel’s Secret Wars (Sunday Times, UK). Setting the scene at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources—from declassified documents to oral testimonies to his own vivid-on-the-ground reporting—to illuminate the most polarizing conflict of modern times. Beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government promised to favor the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, Black proceeds through the Arab Rebellion of the late 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust, Israel’s independence and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), the watershed of 1967 followed by the Palestinian re-awakening, Israel’s settlement project, two Intifadas, the Oslo Accords, and continued negotiations and violence up to today. Combining engaging narrative with political analysis and social and cultural insights, Enemies and Neighbors is both an accessible overview and a fascinating investigation into the deeper truths of a furiously contested history.

Once considered the "best American newspaperman London has ever had," Edward Price Bell (1869--1943) helped invent the ideal of a professional foreign news service at the late and great Chicago Daily News, which in its heyday had the second-largest daily newspaper circulation in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, professional overseas reporting was still an experiment. The Chicago Daily News's visionary owner and publisher Victor Lawson was not certain how to organize the service or even what kind of news it should cover. Bell, who had distinguished himself as a young reporter in Chicago, became the anchor for the service when Lawson sent him to London in 1900. The course he set established the standard for the New York Times and other prestigious American newspapers. Unfortunately, few journalists or scholars are familiar with Bell's contributions, in part because his autobiography remained archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In Journalism of the Highest Realm, Jaci Cole and John Maxwell Hamilton have edited and annotated Bell's story, focusing on his lively account of the early days of the Chicago Daily News's foreign service as well as the dramatic stories his correspondents covered. James F. Hoge, Jr., the last editor-in-chief of the Chicago Daily News and present editor of Foreign Affairs, sets the stage for Bell's memoir with an informative foreword on the evolution of foreign news gathering over the last century. A bright-eyed midwestern teenager who learned journalism on the job at a small newspaper in Terre Haute, Indiana, Bell quickly established himself as an enterprising reporter. Moving on to Chicago, he became the Daily News's go-to man. He was assigned big stories and landed interviews with leading politicians, a knack that became a trademark of his overseas reporting. Over more than two decades in London, Bell entrenched himself in politics and culture, sending back thoughtful background and analysis of current events. In his memoir, Bell recounts his exclusive wartime interviews with Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, and Lord Richard Haldane, the minister of war; a later sit-down with the charismatic Il Duce, Benito Mussolini; and his rather tense exchanges with former vice president Charles Dawes, American ambassador to Britain. The respect Bell commanded among British elites and his years of experience as a London insider thrust him into a diplomatic role. Bell became an unofficial envoy to the British government and also a conduit for British views to the United States and its leaders. After Bell returned to Chicago in the early 1920s, the Daily News dispatched him on special missions to Europe and Asia to interview leaders about world peace. His accounts were published in two books and earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1930s. Despite this acclaim -- indeed, to some extent because of it -- Bell fell out of favor when new owners acquired the newspaper in 1931, and he retired to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.With Journalism of the Highest Realm Cole and Hamilton put this great newspaperman into a broader context. As they show in their thoughtful introduction, Bell and the Daily News continually grappled with problems that still bedevil overseas correspondence. Foreign news, they show, has always been an enterprise that is at once valuable and vulnerable.