Introduction | |
1.Rashid Khalidi | The Palestinians and 1948: the causes of failure |
2. Benny Morris | Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948 |
3. Laila Parsons | The Druze and the birth of Israel |
4. Avi Shlaim | Israel and the Arab coalition in 1948 |
5. Eugene Rogan | Jordan and 1948: the persistence of an official history |
6.Charles Tripp | Iraq and the 1948 war: mirror of Iraq’s disorder |
7. Fawaz Gerges | Egypt and the 1948 war: internal conflict and regional ambition |
8. Joshua Landis | Syria and the 1948 war |
Edward Said | Afterword: the consequences of the 1948 war |
The Arab-Israeli
conflict is one of the most intense and intractable international conflicts of
modern times. This book is about the historical roots of that conflict. It
re-examines the history of the 1948 war, in which the newly born state of
Israelis call the
1948 war "The War of Independence" while Arabs call it al-Nakba or
the disaster. The conventional Israeli version portrays 1948 as an unequal
struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath, as a desperate, heroic,
and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In
this version all the surrounding Arab states sent their armies into
Since the late
1980s, however, a group of "new historians" or revisionist Israeli
historians have challenged many of the claims surrounding the birth of the
State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.