The Origins and Evolution of the Arab-Zionist Conflict
Cohen, Michael J.
^ichael J. Cohen has provided a balanced and mercifully brief corrective to ahistorical views of the Arab-Israeli dispute in his new book, The Origins and Evolution of the ArabZionist...
...The author, a professor of history at Bar Ilan University in Israel, has examined much of the period at greater length in his other works, Churchill and the Jews, Palestine and the Great Powers, and Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate...
...One hears the echo of the current Palestinian situation when reading of the first British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, and his many attempts in the early 1920s "to persuade the Palestinians to participate in the process of government...
...For the Palestinian Arabs," Cohen concludes, "the disunity of the Arab world and, perhaps above all, lack of internal cohesion and a dearth of administrative or military skills brought disaster...
...He offers a concise sketch of the early acts of a complex historical drama that is still unfolding...
...Land sales are but one aspect of this...
...In his latest work, the historian's necessary absorption with detail and color gives way to a need for compression...
...The final section deals with the period from 1945 to 1948, when an exhausted England, pressed by war losses, a decolonizing mood at home, and escalating tensions in Palestine, finally detached itself from the area...
...The book is rounded off by selections from key diplomatic documents concerning various plans for the region and some suggestions for further reading...
...The playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl makes a pallid appearance in these pages—sad fate for such a vivid megalomaniac...
...Cohen begins by sketching the intellectual and political atmosphere among Arabs and Jews prior to 1914...
...Ottoman power crumbled as the First World War swept over Europe and the Near East...
...Nascent pan-Arab nationalism surfaces in the form of the writer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, an opponent of Ottoman rule...
...He puts in motion the Micah Morrison, former Israel correspondent of The American Spectator, is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...Samuel put forward numerous proposals for granting self-rule to the Arabs, from advisory to legislative councils, to the idea of an Arab agency that would parallel the Jewish Agency constituted by the Zionist Organization...
...For this reason alone the book should land on the desks of all those writers and television-news types who so often neglect to look to the past for an understanding of the present dilemma...
...ichael J. Cohen has provided a balanced and mercifully brief corrective to ahistorical views of the Arab-Israeli dispute in his new book, The Origins and Evolution of the ArabZionist Conflict, a bare-bones account of how the bitch sisters of Arab nationalism and Zionism were born, grew, and struggled in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century...
...As he himself demonstrates elsewhere in the book, British policy was anything but consistent...
...The Jews won their state...
...The idea is interesting but muddled...
...As the fortieth anniversary of Israeli statehood draws near, much of the commemorative reports, debates, and symposia will focus on Palestinian unrest and the Israeli hold over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...One theme that emerges is a record of Arab disarray and the repeated betrayal of the Palestinians by their self-appointed leaders and elite families...
...Cohen examines the tangled web of ambiguous assurances and declarations the British passed on at this time to such key figures as the sharif Husayn of Mecca, leader of the Hashemite clan and great-grandfather of the current ruler of Jordan, and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann...
...All were rejected by the Arab leadership...
...Zionist movement, and vanishes...
...It could hardly be said, for example, that the 1922 and 1939 "white papers" on the Jewish population of Palestine were geared to promoting Zionism...
...He covers all the main points of the subject from 1914 to 1948, offering the book "as a guide for students of the Middle East and for the intelligent non-specialist...
...At one point he writes that "the THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF THE ARAB-ZIONIST CONFLICT Michael J. Cohen/University of California Press/$18.95 Micah Morrison THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 43 British promotion of Zionism in Palestine" was one of the two major processes that "ignited" Palestine Arab nationalism...
...Citing the Balfour Declaration, England's "novel bureaucratic methods and the support it gave to the predominantly European Jewish influx," and British acquiescence in the Arab elite's land sales to the Zionists, Cohen cobbles together a theory that either should have been developed at length or cut...
...The other process was the division of Ottoman Syria by France and Britain...
...Partisan wranglers undoubtedly will charge him with over-simplification...
...Cohen's book is a timely reminder that Israel's conflict with the Palestinians did not begin twenty-one years ago when Arab armies attacked from the now-occupied territories...
...Twenty-five years later, as the United Nations drew up a plan partitioning the area into Jewish and Arab states and the British pulled out, the Arabs were still rejecting compromise and planning to go to war against the Jews...
...A new period, rooted in the old conflicts, had begun...
...A lthough the book is for the most part written in clear if somewhat pedestrian prose, the author misleads when he strives for too much simplicity...
...Next, Britain's problems administering the mandate, its attempts between 1920 and 1945 both to contain the growing conflict between Arabs and Jews and to find avenues of compromise, while attending to its imperial interests, are handled in under forty pages...
...Brevity is the soul of the book...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
