Included On This Page:

Author's biograpy; Excerpt from essay by Rashel Rubenstein; Excerpt of Interview with Shalev; "Homing Pigeons Through the Years;" "The Palmach;" "The1948 War" by Mitchell Bard from Jewish Virtual Library; Review from the Guardian UK of 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris.

Author's Biography

(1948- )

Meir Shalev was born in Nahalal, Israel, the son of poet Itzhak Shalev. He grew up in an agricultural cooperative in Nahalal, and then moved to Jerusalem., where he lives today. He studied Psychology at the Hebrew University and produced and hosted several radio and television programs. He is a regular columnist in the Israeli press and writes essays and fiction for both children and adults.

Excerpt from Essay by Rashel Rubenstein

It is tempting to read Meir Shalev’s newest novel as a political fable about exile, diaspora and the desire for home. The novel alternates between scenes in the present, where a middle-aged shlemiel of an Israeli tour guide finally leaves his wife and buys a home of his own, and scenes from 1948, when two homing-pigeon handlers fall in love against the backdrop of Israel’s battle for independence. These characters are connected through two miraculous births which both occur in 1948: our hero, searching for a home in the present, is conceived in a most unlikely way just as Israel is violently birthed as the national Jewish homeland.

Meir Shalev too was born in 1948, under circumstances hardly less miraculous. He was conceived during the siege of Jerusalem, and his pregnant mother was smuggled out in order to give birth outside the beleagured city. Shalev grew up to fight in the 1967 war, and was badly injured not long after that war ended. Touring the newly acquired territories with his father after 1967, Shalev recalls that he told his father, “Israel has bit off something that will choke us.” Shalev has enjoyed a rich, varied career in Israel in radio, on television, and as a political journalist, children’s writer and novelist. He is the bestselling author in Israel of such novels as The Blue Mountain (Roman Russi in Hebrew) and Esau A Pigeon and a Boy has won multiple awards, including the Brenner Prize, Israel’s highest literary recognition, and the National Jewish Book Award in the U.S. All his fiction is profoundly preoccupied with Israeli history, taking on Israel’s most cherished national narratives, such as the Jewish pioneer settlements in Palestine a century ago (The Blue Mountain) and the bloodiest battle of the War of Independence (A Pigeon and a Boy). At the same time, these are not ideological or polemical novels; Shalev saves his polemics for his weekly newspaper columns, where he articulates a distinctly left-of-center point of view.

And thus we return to the temptation to read politics into A Pigeon and a Boy, a tendency that Shalev himself rejected on a recent visit to Amherst, Massachusetts. Writers of fiction, he explained to his audience on the Hampshire College campus, cannot be obligated to write about anything except what they experience and imagine. Readers can come to a novel with aesthetic or narrative expectations, but not political or ideological ones. Throughout the question period, Shalev continued to resist politicized interpretations of his fictional work. Rather, the whole story began, he said, with a house.

Weary of Jerusalem life, Shalev said, he and his wife found a small house in northern Israel, one of those cottages built for new immigrants in the early postwar period.........

http://yiddishbookcenter.org/story.php?n=10459

Excerpt from interview with Shalev

Yair’s mother has a list of what every person needs; a home and a story top her list. If you draw out her idea, you can argue that everyone needs a homeland and a national literature. Jews come from one of the oldest traditions in the world and yet the country of Israel is very young. How does this make you think about your literary history?

Shalev: Even though Israel is very young, we still have a very long literary history that starts with the Bible. We even write the same language, and what’s so astonishing about this is that I can read texts that were written three or four thousand years ago. This is something that does not exist in any other language. If King David came to visit Jerusalem today, he could read my book and understand most of it. So even though Israel is very young, we have the longest history today on Earth of written literature in one language.

So Biblical literature forms an Israeli national literature?

Shalev: Yes. For example, in my first book, The Blue Mountain, I described the pioneers of the second Aliyah who came to Palestine from East Europe and Russia. Of course, this is something that did not exist in Biblical time; it’s a new phase of the history of the Jews. But still, it’s the same land, the same country, the same language. Many of the seekers even relate to the fact that they speak this language and use Biblical expressions. So I really feel this sense of being one writer in a very, very long line of writers who started this profession so many years ago.

Yet you often get pegged as a “magical realist,” and put into a category of international writers that includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie.

Shalev: I don’t call it “magical realism” because that is a theory created by people who research and study literature. And naturally, they have this tendency to divide literature into categories because, while doing so, they feel so much more scientific.

I think it has to do with one’s imagination. We write fiction. We even call it—in English, at least—“fiction.” So things that are described in novels are not necessarily true, and they do not have to obey laws of physics and chemistry. There are two things that writers must know how to use: memory and imagination. And we all know that memory is not something we can trust. It keeps changing all the time, as if by itself. And it doesn’t work in linear mode. It’s a very jumpy, surprising process of ideas. And then there is imagination, which is, by definition, uncontrollable. My work is to give it some kind of a meaningful pattern in a book. So I don’t call it “magical realism”; it’s just my imagination.

That’s probably a welcome comment to readers who may not be fans of the genre.

Shalev: Look, each of us should know what he likes in literature. You don’t have to finish a book—even if it’s my book, I will not be insulted. I look at reading a book as a blind date, and you know after, say, twenty minutes if this blind date is good for you or bad for you. So it’s possible to leave a book after forty pages. You simply say, “You are very good, I am very good, but we are not a good couple together, and I will find myself another book to read.”

So what writers have you formed long-term relationships with?

Shalev: My parents were both teachers, and my father was a Bible scholar and a poet. They insisted that we children read only good books. And this is what they said, “good books.” They didn’t censor us by saying, “Don’t read this. It’s for grownups.” They always said, “Don’t read this. It’s a badly written book” or “Read this, it’s a beautifully written book.” My father gave me Lolita to read when I was fourteen years old, when it was just translated to Hebrew.

I love the Russian writers, Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov. And in America, it is Mark Twain and Melville. As a young man, I also liked very much the works of Thoreau. He gave me many answers and, in a way, some peace of mind. As a matter of fact, the first time I came to the United States, when I was twenty-five, the first thing I did was drive all the way to New England to see Walden Pond and then go to New Bedford and Nantucket. It was like a pilgrimage for me.

A few years ago when Mario Vargas Llosa was speaking in New York, he suggested that quality literature is rarely produced by writers living in peaceful countries. Do you think an artist needs political turmoil to create good art?

Yeah, maybe. I live in a non-peaceful country, and I am not able to write anywhere else. In my career I have been generously offered places to write, in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the United States. People and organizations have said, “Come to us. Sit here. You won’t be bothered by the Israeli news. Write your literature here peacefully for half a year, a year, or even more.” And I never did it, because I cannot write outside of Israel. I need my language, my atmosphere, even though it’s not a very relaxing atmosphere. I feel I lose my powers when I leave my place and my country. So maybe Llosa is right in saying this. But then I can think about writers who wrote in a very peaceful manner. Thomas Mann wrote some very beautiful literature in a peaceful time, living a very relaxed, peaceful existence. So it is not necessarily the truth for everybody.

Andrea Crawford is a writer living in New York City and a contributing editor for Poets & Writers. She last wrote about Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel Holy Week.

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=748ar.htm

Homing Pigeons Through the Wars

The history of pigeons as message carriers goes back over 5,000 years. However, none of the various types of pigeons used as the early message carriers were capable of flights much farther than about 40 miles. Nevertheless, by the middle of the twelfth century A.D., a well-organized pigeon post, with post office and postmasters, was being maintained. By 1819, however, the homing pigeon was developed sufficiently to fly 200 miles in a day, and at that time when the principle mode of travel was either by foot or horse, 200 miles was a great distance. For centuries, because Homers were the fastest and most reliable means of communication, leading newspapers of many countries used them to carry news of importance. And, in the early nineteenth century, Homing Pigeons were used in many Belgium cities to bring news of stock exchange quotations from London across the English Channel.

Homing Pigeons were used in antiquity to bring back results of the battles, and in World War I and World War II to carry vital messages. Many books have been written about their heroic feats, in which they were often injured by shell fire during their delivery of vital messages. Their vital messages have saved the lives of many thousands of combatants and civilians. When total radio silence is necessary or where radio communications have been cut-off, they may be the only means of communication. They have provided the balance between victory and defeat in many crucial engagements, unerringly delivering their vital messages even over large bodies of open water, through rain and fog over high mountains and against treacherous winds.

http://www.pigeon.org/pigeons_in_war.htm

The Palmach The Palmach, an acronym for “Pelugot Hamahatz,” meaning striking force, was established as part of the Haganah on May 19, 1941, due to fears of a German invasion of Palestine. The force originally consisted of nine assault companies: three in the northern Galilee, two in central Galilee, two in southern Galilee, and one in Jerusalem. Like the kibbutz movement, the Palmach promoted the values of mutual responsibility, assistance, sacrifice and contribution to the greater good. In fact, Palmach bases were situated on kibbutzim, so members of the Palmach were responsible for their agricultural tasks as well as their military training exercises. This social framework created by the Palmach was considered to be the core of the Sabra, or native born Israeli. The Palmach launched pre-emptive strikes into Syrian and Lebanese territory, frequently sending members fluent in Arabic in Arab dress into Syria and Lebanon to sabotage and scout targets. The Palmach grew to 12 companies. It played a central role during the War of Independence, the height of Palmach activity. Of the 12 Haganah brigades, three were Palmach brigades, considered the “tip of the spear” during the war and in the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces. Palmach leaders included Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev, Uzi Narkiss and Ezer Weizman. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Palmach.html

The 1948 War by Mitchell Bard Violence in the Holy Land broke out almost immediately after the UN announced partition on November 29, 1947. Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, had told the UN prior to the partition vote the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood . . . ."1 Husseini's prediction began to come true after the UN announcement. The Arabs declared a protest strike and instigated riots that claimed the lives of 62 Jews and 32 Arabs. By the end of the second week, 93 Arabs, 84 Jews and 7 Englishmen had been killed and scores injured. From November 30-February 1, 427 Arabs, 381 Jews and 46 British were killed and 1,035 Arabs, 725 Jews and 135 British were wounded. In March alone, 271 Jews and 257 Arabs died in Arab attacks and Jewish counter­attacks.2 The chairman of the Arab Higher Committee said the Arabs would "fight for every inch of their country."3 Two days later, the holy men of Al-Azhar University in Cairo called on the Muslim world to proclaim a jihad (holy war) against the Jews.4 The first large-scale assaults began on January 9, 1948, when approximately 1,000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in northern Palestine. By February, the British said so many Arabs had infiltrated they lacked the forces to run them back.5 In fact, the British turned over bases and arms to Arab irregulars and the Arab Legion. In the first phase of the war, lasting from November 29, 1947 until April 1, 1948, the Palestinian Arabs took the offensive, with help from volunteers from neighboring countries. The Jews suffered severe casualties and passage along most of their major roadways was disrupted. On April 26, 1948, Transjordan's King Abdullah said: [A]ll our efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine problem have failed. The only way left for us is war. I will have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine.7 On May 4, 1948, the Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion. The defenders drove them back, but the Legion returned a week later. After two days, the ill-equipped and outnumbered settlers were overwhelmed. Many defenders were massacred after they had surrendered.6 This was prior to the invasion by the regular Arab armies that followed Israel's declaration of independence. Arabs Take Responsibility The UN blamed the Arabs for the violence. The UN Palestine Commission was never permitted by the Arabs or British to go to Palestine to implement the resolution. On February 16, 1948, the Commission reported to the Security Council: Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.8 The Arabs were blunt in taking responsibility for starting the war. Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948: The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.9 The British commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb admitted: Early in January, the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria. Some came through Jordan and even through Amman . . . They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine.10 Despite the disadvantages in numbers, organization and weapons, the Jews began to take the initiative in the weeks from April 1 until the declaration of independence on May 14. The Haganah captured several major towns including Tiberias and Haifa, and temporarily opened the road to Jerusalem. The partition resolution was never suspended or rescinded. Thus, Israel, the Jewish State in Palestine, was born on May 14, as the British finally left the country. Five Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq) immediately invaded Israel. Their intentions were declared by Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."11 The Arab Invasion Superpowers Recognize Israel The United States, the Soviet Union and most other states immediately recognized Israel and indicted the Arabs. The United States urged a resolution charging the Arabs with breach of the peace. Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko told the Security Council, May 29, 1948: This is not the first time that the Arab states, which organized the invasion of Palestine, have ignored a decision of the Security Council or of the General Assembly. The USSR delegation deems it essential that the council should state its opinion more clearly and more firmly with regard to this attitude of the Arab states toward decisions of the Security Council.12 Military Situation On Effective Date of Cease-Fire (June 11, 1948) Harry S. Truman Library & Museum The initial phase of the fighting ended after the Security Council threatened July 15 to cite the Arab governments for aggression under the Charter. By this time, the Haganah had been renamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and succeeded in stopping the Arab offensive. The Bernadotte Plan During the summer of 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte was sent by the UN to Palestine to mediate a truce and try to negotiate a settlement. Bernadotte's plan called for the Jewish State to relinquish the Negev and Jerusalem to Transjordan and to receive the western Galilee. This was similar to the boundaries that had been proposed prior to the partition vote, and had been rejected by all sides. Now, the proposal was being offered after the Arabs had gone to war to prevent partition and a Jewish state had been declared. The Jews and Arabs both rejected the plan. Ironically, Bernadotte found little enthusiasm among the Arabs for independence. He wrote in his diary: The Palestinian Arabs had at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak. It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan.13 The failure of the Bernadotte scheme came as the Jews began to have greater success in repelling the invading Arab forces and expanding control over territory outside the partition boundaries. The United States Holds Back Support The Jews won their war of independence with minimal help from the West. In fact, they won despite efforts to undermine their military strength. Although the United States vigorously supported the partition resolution, the State Department did not want to provide the Jews with the means to defend themselves. "Otherwise," Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett argued, "the Arabs might use arms of U.S. origin against Jews, or Jews might use them against Arabs."14 Consequently, on December 5, 1947, the U.S. imposed an arms embargo on the region. Many in the State Department saw the embargo as yet another means of obstructing partition. President Truman nevertheless went along with it hoping it would be a means of averting bloodshed. This was naive given Britain's rejection of Lovett's request to suspend weapons shipments to the Arabs and subsequent agreements to provide additional arms to Iraq and Transjordan.15 The Arabs had no difficulty obtaining all the arms they needed. In fact, Jordan's Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British, and led by a British officer. At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949, British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Israel-Egypt border. On January 7, 1949, Israeli planes shot down four of the British aircraft.16 The Jews, on the other hand, were forced to smuggle weapons, principally from Czechoslovakia. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, the army did not have a single cannon or tank. Its air force consisted of nine obsolete planes. Although the Haganah had 60,000 trained fighters, only 18,900 were fully mobilized, armed and prepared for war.17 On the eve of the war, chief of operations Yigael Yadin told David Ben-Gurion: "The best we can tell you is that we have a 50­50 chance."18 The Arab war to destroy Israel failed. Indeed, because of their aggression, the Arabs wound up with less territory than they would have had if they had accepted partition. The cost to Israel, however, was enormous. "Many of its most productive fields lay gutted and mined. Its citrus groves, for decades the basis of the Yishuv's [Jewish community] economy, were largely destroyed."19 Military expenditures totaled approximately $500 million. Worse yet, 6,373 Israelis were killed, nearly one percent of the Jewish population of 650,000. Had the West enforced the partition resolution or given the Jews the capacity to defend themselves, many lives might have been saved. The Arab countries signed armistice agreements with Israel in 1949, starting with Egypt (Feb. 24), followed by Lebanon (March 23), Jordan (April 3) and Syria (July 20). Iraq was the only country that did not sign an agreement with Israel, choosing instead to withdraw its troops and hand over its sector to Jordan's Arab Legion. NOTES 1J.C. Hurewitz, The Struggle For Palestine, (NY: Shocken Books, 1976), p. 308. 2Facts on File Yearbook, (NY: Facts on File, Inc., 1948), p. 231. 3New York Times, (December 1, 1947). 4Facts on File 1948, p. 48. 5Facts on File 1947, p. 231. 6Netanel Lorch, One Long War, (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1976), p. 47; Ralph Patai, ed., Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, (NY: McGraw Hill, 1971), pp. 307­308. 7Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 322. 8Security Council Official Records, Special Supplement, (1948), p. 20. 9Security Council Official Records, S/Agenda/58, (April 16, 1948), p. 19. 10John Bagot Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs, (London: Staughton and Hodder, 1957), p. 79. 11Isi Leibler, The Case For Israel, (Australia: The Globe Press, 1972), p. 15. 12Security Council Official Records, SA/Agenda/77, (May 29, 1948), p. 2. 13Folke Bernadotte, To Jerusalem, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), p. 113. 14Foreign Relations of the United States 1947, (DC: GPO, 1948), p. 1249. [Henceforth FRUS]. 15Mitchell Bard, The Water's Edge and Beyond, (NJ: Transaction Books, 1991), pp. 171­175; FRUS, pp. 537­39; Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel, (NY: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1970), pp. 366, 370; Shlomo Slonim, "The 1948 American Embargo on Arms to Palestine," Political Science Quarterly, (Fall 1979), p. 500. 16Sachar, p. 345. 17Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem!, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 352. 18Golda Meir, My Life, (NY: Dell, 1975), pp. 213, 222, 224. 19Sachar, p. 452. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/1948_War.html

Review from The Guardian UK

• Saturday May 31 2008

1948: The First Arab-Israeli War
by Benny Morris
524pp, Yale, £19.99

"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation," wrote Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French philosopher. Israel is no exception. Nineteen forty-eight was a seismic year in the history of the Jewish people and that of the modern Middle East. It witnessed the birth of Israel and its first war with the Arabs. Israelis call it "the war of independence"; Arabs call it the nakba or the catastrophe. The literature on this conflict by Zionist and pro-Zionist writers is vast, but it also incorporates a number of myths. Like most nationalist versions of history, this literature tends to be one-sided, selective, demonising of the enemy, and self-congratulatory.

The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 war goes roughly as follows. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on November 29 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which called for replacing the British mandate with two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the UN plan despite the painful sacrifices it entailed, but the Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League rejected it. The United Kingdom did everything in its power to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged in the UN plan. With the expiry of the mandate and the proclamation of the state of Israel, five Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth.

The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring Arab states, of their own accord or in response to orders from their leaders. After the guns fell silent, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might, but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that persisted until President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem 30 years later.

For many years, this standard Zionist rendition of the Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. In the late 1980s, however, Israeli scholars, using official Israeli documents, began to challenge many of the cherished national myths. The small group of "new historians" included Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé and the present author. Benny Morris was a leading member of the group. He had impeccable left-wing credentials as a kibbutznik, as a journalist and as an IDF reservist who spent three weeks in jail for refusing to serve on the West Bank during the first intifada. His book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 was a milestone in scholarship on this acutely sensitive subject. He concluded that, while there was no masterplan for expulsion, the IDF played a significant part in precipitating the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. The Birth was followed by half a dozen books that helped to consolidate Morris's reputation as a rigorous revisionist historian.

Following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, Morris's thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict and its protagonists changed radically. He suddenly veered from the leftwing to the rightwing end of the political spectrum and placed all the blame for the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the return to violence at the door of the Palestinian Authority. Morris even co-authored an article with Ehud Barak pinning responsibility for the failure of the Camp David summit on Yasser Arafat alone and propagating the myth that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. The destroyer of national myths became the manufacturer of new myths that portrayed the Israelis as "righteous victims" (to use the title of one of his books) and the Palestinians as Muslim fanatics with unlimited aims.

The language used by Morris was particularly shocking for its racist undertones. In a 2004 interview with Ha'aretz, he described the Arab world as "barbarian" and the Palestinians as wild animals who had to be locked up in "something like a cage". Morris's personal journey is interesting to note because it mirrors the journey of Israeli society at large from the heady days of the Oslo accords to the dark pessimism of the second intifada.

Against this background, I must confess, I had low expectations of Morris's new book on the 1948 war. I expected it to be history with a political agenda, to display prejudice against the Arabs and partiality towards the Jews. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. This is Benny Morris at his best: immensely well informed, thorough, careful in the use of evidence, thoughtful and thought-provoking. While the entire book is underpinned by formidable scholarship and 72 pages of meticulous endnotes, it is presented in a fluent and readable style. Morris has used the full panoply of secondary and primary sources to produce a lively, absorbing and fast-moving narrative history of the war. All in all, it is a most impressive achievement of original research and synthesis.

The account proceeds chronologically, dividing the conflict into two distinct phases: the civil war and the inter-state war. The first phase lasted from the day after the UN vote in favour of partition to the expiry of the British mandate over Palestine and the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14 1948. The second phase began with the pan-Arab invasion of Palestine on May 15 and lasted, with two UN-decreed truces in between, until the ceasefire of January 7 1949. The first phase was between the two local communities; the second was between the army of the newly born state and the regular armies of all the neighbouring Arab states. Most accounts of the war concentrate on the second phase, but the early one was more critical. During the first five months of fighting, the irregular Palestinian forces were crushed, Palestinian society was pulverised, and the first wave of refugees was set in motion.

It was the collapse of Palestinian society which forced the Arab states, loosely organised in the Arab League, to commit their regular armies to the war for Palestine. But the regular Arab armies fared no better than the Palestinian militias. Conventional Zionist historiography attributes to the invaders a monolithic war aim: to throw the Jews into the sea. Morris recognises that the Arab coalition facing Israel was bitterly divided, disorganised and poorly led and that the inability of the Arabs to coordinate their diplomatic and military strategy went a long way towards explaining their defeat on the battlefield.

David Ben-Gurion, the diminutive, 62-year-old, tough-as-a-cob war leader, used to believe that the "secret weapon" of the Israelis was their spirit. But the second round of fighting persuaded him that, in fact, it "was the Arabs: they are such incompetents, it is difficult to imagine". The incompetence of the Arab leaders had been revealed even earlier, during the four-week truce in June-July. The Israelis exploited the truce for recruitment and reorganisation, and for importing heavy arms and ammunition from eastern Europe in violation of the UN arms embargo. Their enemies wasted the four weeks feuding over the future division of the spoils. When the fighting was renewed, the Israelis seized the initiative and retained it until the end of the war.

Morris subjects the conflicting national narratives of the 1948 war to rigorous scrutiny in the light of the evidence and he discards all the notions, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up to such scrutiny. One example is the tendency of Israelis to hail the "purity of arms" of their soldiers and to contrast this with Arab "barbarism". "In truth, however," writes Morris, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948." A contemporary Israeli official implicitly conceded the charge but pointed out that "There are no sentiments in war."

The only major departure from the evidence, and from common sense, is the stress on the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Echoing Samuel Huntington's silly and superficial notion of a "clash of civilisations", Morris depicts the 1948 war as "part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic east and the west". The empirical evidence for this view is utterly underwhelming, consisting as it does of a collection of random quotes. The bulk of the evidence presented in the book suggests that the first Arab-Israeli war was essentially a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. Despite this one serious lapse of judgment, the book is likely to stand out for many years as the most detailed, dispassionate and comprehensive account we have of the war for Palestine.

·Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace

Benny Morris is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University.