Customer Reviews

The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951

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Ilan Pappe is one of the "new historians", a group of Israeli historians who are determined to accurately account for how Israel came to be. It must take courage if you are a Jewish historian and a professor at the University of Haifa, Israel, to give an unvarnished account of how the Jews took the land that comprises Israel. In 1900, the Palestinians owned all 10,000 sq. miles that made up Palestine (now known as Israel, West Bank, and Gaza) - the Palestinians had a well-developed society with villages, civil administration, olive groves, literature, etc... it had been a Muslim society for 1,300 years. But by 2000, the Israelis owned 8,000 sq. miles and occupied the rest. How did this happen? Did the Israelis purchase the land or did they simply take it, driving the Palestinians off their land into refugee camps, poverty, and desperation? Ilan Pappe tells us. It is interesting to me how determined the Israelis are to change the history of Israel and how so few know the real story. It is doubly interesting to see how furious they get when one of their own departs the party line and tells how it really happened. This book is calm and careful with its facts; it is well researched and thoroughly referenced. It will surprise you... the story of Israel is different to what you probably now think. Israelis do not want you to read this book.

The Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict 1947-1951 is mainly a history of the diplomatic efforts to solve the problem of the mixed population of Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the UN Partition of 1947, during the "civil war" among Jews and Palestinians in late 1947 to mid-1948, when the State of Israel was declared and the regular armies of the surrounding Arab states invaded Palestine. Pappe lays out in great detail all the commissions, delegations, Security Council measures, mediation attempts, both before and after the war. He shows their strengths and weaknesses, and in the end, why mediation between Israel and the Arab states (and the Palestinians) failed by 1951. A meticulously researched work, it is abundantly footnoted and fairly presented making admirable use of primary and secondary documents. Perhaps most controversially, he argues against Benny Morris' assertion that Plan Dalet (D) was not primarily an order of expulsion of the Palestinians.

I've read quite a few books on the first Arab-Israeli conflict and find Pappe's work to be the best yet. If you like this one then you should pick up his other work about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Ilan Pape is an extremely unreliable 'historian'.Most of what he writes, I know from being alive at the time, did not happen the way he writes in this book.