One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

I recommend this book for the readers who seek to gain knowledge on the British Mandate of palestine between 1917-1948. This book is written as a life story of different arab, jewish and british characters during this period. The book gives more space to the Jewish and British different views of this period, for obvious reasons; the wealth of information that can be retrieved from the british...more

I recommend this book for the readers who seek to gain knowledge on the British Mandate of palestine between 1917-1948. This book is written as a life story of different arab, jewish and british characters during this period. The book gives more space to the Jewish and British different views of this period, for obvious reasons; the wealth of information that can be retrieved from the british and israeli archives, compared to the still unopened Arab-countries acrhives.Also, the outcome of the 1948 war was catastropic to the palestnian intellectual life, and currently there is no central archive for the palestnians. This book, in my view, is successful in presenting the following ideas: 1- The evolvment of the zionist idea from land purchase as a mean of building a national home for jews, to military struggle. 2- The palestnian national aspiration was strong, and did exist even before the mandate. 3- The birtish administartion in palestine was heavily contolled by pro-zionists, and provided all the neseccasry help to fullfil Balfour Declaration even with the mounting arab rage and pressures. 4- The Yishuv was successful in building the required elements for a state. 5- The palestnians were divided between themselves, and the Yishuv exploited this to thier favor. As the victor of a war writes the history, this book is no exception. Yet, I recommend it because it highlight in good detail and unbiased manner the period that led to the creation of Israel and the defeat of the palestnian national dream.   hide