Customer Reviews

A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel

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Content Summary: Kramer delivers what she promises: a history of the events that focuses mostly on the events from the Ottoman Empire to the founding of the State of Israel. Readers will learn something of both Jews and Palestinians and how power was exchanged from the fallen Ottomans to the British, and ultimately to the Jews who won the war of 1948. More ancient history (pre-Ottoman) receives some attention, but the book covers nothing after 1949. There is a great deal covered here for an intermediate length book!

Analytical Review: What readers will appreciate most about Kramer is her objectivity. It is hard to give a balanced account of this history that is not stilted towards Jew of Palestinian, but I believe Kramer has done just that. Kramer's book is mostly an engaging read and an important study. A few dry parts perhaps, but mostly very good. It is perhaps unfortunate that she did not go further to 1967 or later, but overall recommended.

This book cuts through the propaganda. There are so many aspects to this story and unfortunately the west is fed only one. We don't learn the truth about it in schools, it's brushed under the rug in our history books.
I felt this book presented the truth, and was sympathetic to the plight and tragedy on both sides. Knowing BOTH sides is the only way to understand this conflict.

After sweating out a University of Chicago dissertation and the publication of a monograph I was glad to see someone had made good use of my work. Gudrun Kramer covers a longer period of time than my work, but I am grateful for her careful footnotes. I am glad that my research in the Islamic court archives in Jerusalem helped to develop her work. Incidentally, Dr. Kramer supervised the dissertation of one of her students, Khaled Safi entitled, The Egyptian Rule in Palestine: 1831-1840: A Critical Reassessment (Berlin: Mensch & Buch Verlag, 2004 Ph.D. Freie Universitat of Berlin, 2003)which followed my dissertation very carefully, as documented in his footnotes. He has since written a number of articles based extensively on my dissertation. Perhaps readers would be interested in seeing my book, published by Brill Academic,in 2004. My study of Islamic and Ottoman land tenure, law, and history, the Muslim community in Jerusalem and their role in the city and beyond, and their relationships with non-Muslims during a time of great unrest and upheaval attempted to avoid the hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes the field of Middle Eastern History. Instead, I approach my subject in ways that run in a counter direction--my narrative approach is enthusiastically historicist and posits that Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire was grounded in a species of natural law, and that the positivist takeover of Islamic law by the political regime of Muhammad Ali effectively destroyed traditional Sunni Islam by manipulating the Shariah for ideological purposes. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and his emergence as the regional strong man, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim ruthlessly cut the local Muslim leadership off at its knees and brought southwestern Syria completely under his control just in time for the implementation of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms which, to a great extent, followed his lead.

Sacred Law In The Holy City: The Khedival Challenge To The Ottomans As Seen From Jerusalem, 1829-1841 (Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage)

According to Dr. Sondra Rubenstein (who was asked to review the book):

Islamic Studies Professor Gudrun Kramer's A History of Palestine begins with brief references to biblical times and then focuses on the period 1750 to 1948, the founding of the State of Israel. While ignoring vast amounts of historical evidence, her version of Palestine's painful history is based on carefully selected facts, making her framing and intent clear. While the author cites the continued presence in Palestine of small Jewish communities, she omits others.

Proof of her framing can be seen in the multiple mentions arguing that Palestine, while sparsely populated for much of its history, was never devoid of an Arab majority and that their Islamic culture was not stagnant.

Extensive archeological findings throughout Israel, attesting to a Jewish presence, are mostly acknowledged but summarily dismissed as postdating "Arab roots dating back over a millennium."

Thus, Masada, "whether it actually happened or not" (13), is simply identified as having been turned into "a symbol of Jewish national history." Qumran, for example, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls concerning the Essenes is not mentioned. This find was significant because it revealed more about the Essenes than any other Jewish group of the Second Temple period (which predates Islam by almost a thousand years, 536 BCE -- 70 CE).

Previous historians, Krämer states, criticized Ottoman rulers for their poor statistics (132) and their neglect of Palestine. However, "Critical historians no longer look primarily for external actors ... [but] pay greater attention to local or regional actors...." Thus, Prof. Krämer tells us, "the temporal horizon is broadened, and the boundaries of political change and economic revival are shifted."

Her conclusion is one example of her ignoring historical facts: "The year 1882--beginning of Zionist immigration--loses its status as the date of Palestine's entry into modernity" (40).

The book's theme laments the fact that Palestinian Arabs were disadvantaged as compared to the Jewish settlers, whom Prof. Krämer identifies primarily not as "Jews," but as Zionist settlers (269-270), perhaps implying an alien origin. At some point, however, she acknowledges that it became difficult to distinguish between them (290).

Krämer details the Jews' incredible effort, specifically during the 1920s and `30s, to develop the land, schools, universities, cultural institutions, libraries, industries and jobs, as well as to build new infrastructures, thereby improving the lives of the people (197-198). She also admits that the dynamism of the "Zionist settlers" attracted Arabs from neighboring countries to seek work in Palestine (113). In this regard, she laments the Yishuv's policy of preferring Jewish over Arab workers.

Regarding Israel's War of Independence, Prof. Krämer's research would have been improved had she read Harvard University's Prof. Nadav Safran's From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation. . . . Among the many unmentioned details in her book was the partiality of the British, who, on leaving Palestine, left vast quantities of military equipment and strategic bases, and flew reconnaissance missions for the Arabs throughout the war, providing them with critical information. Krämer's glaring omissions, innuendoes, and subtle historical distortions throughout this book diminish its potential value.

This review has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of The Historian, a journal of history published quarterly in the Unites States on behalf of the National History Honor Society, Phi Alpha Theta.