In this work, first published in 1986, the author shows how the Zionists of the late Thirties related to the Arabs of Palestine and of the neighbouring countries, to what extent they perceived the existence of an ‘Arab Question’, how they defined it and how they dealt with it. The Arab question is as old as the Zionist movement itself. From the moment that Zionists began to immigrate to Ottoman Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it became apparent that they were not ‘returning’ to an empty land and that they could expect opposition to their enterprise from the inhabitants of the country they considered theirs. Comprising diplomatic, political, social, economic and cultural history, this book is a close analysis of the spectrum of views and opinions pertaining to Zionist relations with the Arabs.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

The control of land remains the crucial issue in the Arab-Israel conflict. Kenneth Stein investigates in detail and without polemics how and why Jews acquired land from Arabs in Palestine during the British Mandate, and he reaches conclusions that are challenging and suprising. Stein contends that Zionists were able to purchase the core of a national territory in Palestine during this period for three reasons: they had the single-mindedness of purpose, as well as the capital, to buy the land; the Arabs, economically impoverished, politically fragmented, and socially atomized, were willing to sell the land; and the British were largely ineffective in regulating land sales and protecting Arab tenants. Neither Arab opposition to land sales nor British attempts to regulate them actually limited land acquisition. There were always more Arab offers to sell land than there were Zionist funds. In fact, many sales were made by Arab politicians who publicly opposed Zionism and even led agitation against land acquisition by Jews. Zionists furthered their own ambitions by skillfully using their understanding of the bureaucracy to write laws and to influence key administrative appointments. Further, they knew how to take advantage of social and economic cleavages within Arab society. Based primarily on archival research, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 offers an unusually balanced analysis of the social and political history of land sales in Palestine during this critical period. It provides exceptional and essential insight into one of the most troubling conflicts in today's world.

This volume examines the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and explores ethnic privileging and the dynamics of social conflict.

In Comrades and Enemies Zachary Lockman explores the mutually formative interactions between the Arab and Jewish working classes, labor movements, and worker-oriented political parties in Palestine just before and during the period of British colonial rule. Unlike most of the historical and sociological literature on Palestine in this period, Comrades and Enemies avoids treating the Arab and Jewish communities as if they developed independently of each other. Instead of focusing on politics, diplomacy, or military history, Lockman draws on detailed archival research in both Arabic and Hebrew, and on interviews with activists, to delve into the country's social, economic, and cultural history, showing how Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine helped to shape each other in significant ways. Comrades and Enemies presents a narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that extends and complicates the conventional story of primordial identities, total separation, and unremitting conflict while going beyond both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist mythologies and paradigms of interpretation.

The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT

The British Army's devastating effectiveness against colonial rebellion is exposed in this military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine.

Britain relied upon secret intelligence operations to rule Mandatory Palestine. Statecraft by Stealth sheds light on a time in history when the murky triad of intelligence, policy, and security supported colonial governance. It emphasizes the role of the Anglo-Zionist partnership, which began during World War I and ended in 1939, when Britain imposed severe limits on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Steven Wagner argues that although the British devoted considerable attention to intelligence gathering and analysis, they never managed to solve the basic contradiction of their rule: a dual commitment to democratic self-government and to the Jewish national home through immigration and settlement. As he deftly shows, Britain's experiment in Palestine shed all pretense of civic order during the Palestinian revolt of 1936–41, when the police authority collapsed and was replaced by a security state, created by army staff intelligence. That shift, Wagner concludes, was rooted in Britain's desire to foster closer ties with Saudi Arabia just before the start of World War II, and thus ended its support of Zionist policy. Statecraft by Stealth takes us behind the scenes of British rule, illuminating the success of the Zionist movement and the failure of the Palestinians to achieve independence. Wagner focuses on four key issues to stake his claim: an examination of the "intelligence state" (per Martin Thomas's classic, Empires of Intelligence), the Arab revolt, the role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, and the origins and consequences of Britain's decision to end its support of Zionism. Wagner crafts a superb story of espionage and clandestine policy-making, showing how the British pitted individual communities against each other at particular times, and why.

Counterfactual history of the Jewish past inviting readers to explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.