Reviews for Palestine and Jewish history

The average rating for Palestine and Jewish history based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-10 00:00:00 Theresa Kruse When I first took a look at the somewhat tendentious title of this text, I expected it to be an anti-Israel polemic. I was wrong. This monograph is neither a condemnation nor a exoneration of Zionism; it is an explication, pure and simple. With deft even-handedness, Anita Shapira looks at how the tenets, goals and implementation of Zionism evolved in a dialectical relationship to the exigencies it faced 'on the ground' in the crucible of 1881-1948 Palestine. The density of this book is commensurate to the nature of the beast it describes; the Arab-Zionist conflict is irreducibly complex. However, if there is any objective truth or axiomatic observation that can be drawn from a panoramic sweep of the history of the late struggle for Palestine, Shapira comes close to imparting it: that the Jews and the Arabs are both victims of circumstance. Only a confluence of unforeseeable developments, unfortunate experiences and just bad luck could lead both sides to where they are today. Although there is a tendency by some - especially those of dubious political persuasions - to conceive of Zionism as a kind of 'pre-packaged' corpus of beliefs or blueprints drafted by a shadowy cabal, Shapira incontrovertibly demonstrates that it is, in fact, an ad hoc response to the wretched plight of the Jewish people, who by all objective accounts have been subject to unspeakable persecution. The Arabs in Palestine have unfortunately been caught up in the whirlwind of one people's primeval struggle for existence. But it is so by accident, not design. There is a sense in which the Arabs-cum-"Palestinians" are the subject of the inexorable diktat of History, merciless and cruel as she so often is. But if so, they are not without good company. If one asks, in the spirit of Job's indignation, "for what reason hath the Arabs been made to suffer so?", one cannot evade the equally, if not more pressing question, "why, for two thousand years, the Jews?".

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-17 00:00:00 Neil Randall My review of Land and Power is available on my website at