Books on the Middle East
FRANK, M. Z.
Books on the Middl East By M. Z. Frank When the quiet scholar Itzhak Ben-Zvi was elected President of Israel, the young Jewish state was reminded that the days of heady intoxication were coming to...
...Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion have worked and fought side by side since the first years of this century...
...Tuchovitzky (I don't know who he is and don't care) but would have included his May 11, 1942 address in New York before an Extraordinary Zionist Conference...
...Israel is situated in the Middle East, which, according to J. C. Hurewitz,"is not a region in which the United States has excelled in solid accomplishments...
...1.50...
...10.00...
...5.00 4 The Palestine Problem Today: Israel and Its Neighbors...
...The result is a book on Israel as brilliant, provocative and profound as Simone de Beauvoir's on America, but, despite the difference in emotional approach, just as misleading...
...By Mnurico Snnmul...
...By Carl Hermann Voss...
...3 Israel: The Establishment of a State...
...David Ben-Gurion's new book is poorly translated and poorly edited--or, rather, not edited at all...
...By John Kimche...
...Beancon, 64 pp...
...As these lines are being written, the concurrently running farces in Egypt and Syria point up the West's pathetic pursuit of the ever-elusive mirage of political and social "stability" amid the shifting sands of Arabia...
...Harper, 272 pp...
...Important addresses delivered in New York in English are left out, while unimportant speeches, translated from excellent Hebrew into an English not half so good as BG's own, are included...
...2 Level Sunlight...
...Seven Fallen Pillars'' deals with the Middle East from 1945 to 1952 in a manner of which only a well-informed,alert and widely-traveled journalist is capable...
...By J. C. Hureitz...
...Level Sunlight contains some of the best ingredients of Maurice Samuel's writing: a beautiful style, erudition, passion, sincerity...
...It is the first serious book on Israel by an American Zionist...
...The author, perhaps because he is a Jew speaking from a platform where the Jewish point of view is suspect, misses an opportunity to comment on the different pressures which brought about these divergences--in the one case, public opinion and open political pressure spearheaded by Jews, and, in the other, oil interests working on the quiet...
...3.75...
...Hurewitz's book is a scholarly work "published for the Council on Foreign Relations" and deals with such topics as Iran, Egypt, "the Arab-Israel area," Turkey, "economic and technical assistance," and "United States dilemmas...
...Voss, a Christian theologian and student of social and economic questions, has made the Palestine question his special field of study since 1941 and has visited the country several times...
...It is borne out by the facts and the failures of recent years...
...The few editorial notes are almost worthless...
...Though different in temperament, they represent essentially the same philosophy and spirit, compounded of the best in the Jewish cultural tradition of Eastern Europe and the early revolutionary tradition of Russia, plus that unique Zionist mystique which is so grossly misrepresented in much current propaganda...
...Books on the Middl East By M. Z. Frank When the quiet scholar Itzhak Ben-Zvi was elected President of Israel, the young Jewish state was reminded that the days of heady intoxication were coming to an end and that it was time to return to the virtues of the early pioneers...
...To read his address to Mapai (Labor party) youth in 1944 is to know how Israel won its war against the Arabs...
...1.50...
...But diplomatic relations between Israel and England today are probably better than at any time since 1917, when Lord Balfour issued his famous Declaration...
...The rest is self-deception, empty chatter and plain waste of time...
...But it is full of contradictions, full of evidence of the author's inability to get the feel of the country...
...A few months later, Premier David Ben-Gurion stepped down to retire to a frontier settlement in the desert...
...In the early 1920s, when Samuel first met Weizmann, neither expected a Hitler...
...5 Middle East Dilomma...
...To read Ben-Gurion's reminiscences of his pioneering days in Judea and the Galilee is not only to understand why, at the age of 67, he went to the Negev, but also to feel the spirit of the makers of Israel...
...A good editor might also have gone further back than 1915, the date of the first piece in the book, to give some passages from Ben-Gurion's letters to his father in Poland, written from Palestine in 1907...
...Here are the early roots of his bitter quarrel today with the Zionists of America...
...The author, Harry Sacher, is a prominent British attorney and writer, a lifelong Zionist who spent several years in Palestine under the British Mandate...
...Knopf...
...Philosophical Library, 539 pp...
...By Harry Sacher...
...Jon Kimche cannot be accused of such timidity...
...If there is an occasional inaccuracy or exaggeration, the author's main thesis--that both British and American Foreign Service technicians, each group in its own way, lack imagination and perspicacity--is correct...
...A much shorter book, somewhat more comprehensive in the subject-matter it covers, is Carl Hermann Voss's The Palestine Problem Today: Israel and Its Neighbors.Dr...
...We learn from Middle East Dilemma that, until recently, the only countries in the region in which the United States did not leave all major decisions to Great Britain were Israel and Saudi Arabia...
...American leadership in this part of the world is essentially a postwar manifestation, a product of the Truman Doctrine and the containment policy to which it gave rise...
...It is most interesting as an illustration of a mind grown static on the rostrum and overwhelmed by an unexpected dynamism which he obviously resents...
...A better editor would have omitted Ben-Gurion's long-winded polemic with a Mr...
...The book was published in 1953, but there have been rapid developments since: It is doubtful whether British and American policies in Iran, Egypt and Syria are as identical as they were a year ago...
...British Book Center, 330 pp...
...A collection of articles and addresses by the greatest living Jew should give the discerning reader some insight into that spirit...
...His book is a lucid and vigorously written discussion of an intricate situation...
...To Samuel, as he watched Weizmann slowly dying at his mansion in Rehovot, the only Zionism was Weizmann--or, rather, his own image of Weizmann...
...A detailed account of the political and military events immediately preceding and accompanying the founding of Israel is knowledgeably presented in a book published by, of all people, the British Book Center in New York.It was not so long ago that the British Book Center was regarded by American Zionists as the arch-enemy of a Jewish Palestine...
...Praeger, 440 pp...
...By "the rest" Ben-Gurion meant "meetings and membership...
...6 Seven Fallen Pillars...
...Samuel now chides Israel for not being as he thought she might have been had there never been a Hitler...
...302 pp $4.00...
...Nevertheless, the collection is enlightening...
...Another important Zionist, the gifted writer Maurice Samuel, who has spent a lifetime speaking and writing about pioneering, still lives in the shadow of the urbane and elegant Chaim Weizmann, who, as the Homeland grew and the world of Balfour and Lloyd George receded into the past, gradually lost touch with Palestinian realities...
...1 Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, By David Ben-Gurion...
...The only kind of Zionism I recognize," wrote the enthusiastic young pioneer at that time, "is that of colonizing the Homeland...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
