The War That Made Nation:

...The chapter closes with an informed analysis of Ben Gurion's "most difficult decision of the entire war," in which the Gaza Strip was left to Egypt for fear of British intervention...

...It contains interesting new material on crises over strategy within the Israeli command during the heat of the fighting, one of which drove Premier David Ben Gurion to the verge of resigning...

...Some documents have been excerpted from Nazi Foreign Office archives which the authors have interpreted as agreeing with them...

...David Kimche fought in the war as an Israeli soldier and subsequently lectured at the Israeli War College...

...The descriptions of the battles and campaigns are illuminated by 16 maps...

...It also ignores the 1929 Jerusalem riots, the threeyear Arab rebellion in Palestine before World War II and the implacable Arab terrorist opposition to Arab landowners who sold land to Jews...

...Jon Kimche is the author of Seven Fallen Pillars, a study of British reverses and loss of influence in the Middle East from 1945-52...

...He is also the founder and editor of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, published in London...

...The authors believe that the decision was Ben Gurion's major mistake, quoting opinions that a real peace settlement would have resulted instead of the still-inconclusive armistice if the Egyptians had been forced to come to the negotiations at Rhodes with their Army cut off from their country...

...The "big picture," however, is more open to criticism...

...Its repercussions have been comparable to those of wars and revolutions on a much vaster scale...

...The significance of Palestine in the unique history of a people spread throughout the world dwarfs its role in Britain's imperial withdrawal...

...But scholars will find fault with the Kimches' characteristic journalistic failure to distinguish clearly between what they observed what they obtained from documents and interviews and what was picked up from unverified newspaper clippings...

...Jaffa Gate, Sheikh Jarrah, the Hospital of Notre Dame, Castel, Bab el Wad, the "Burma Road," Faluja, Jenin, Deir Yasin, Degania, Kfar Etzion, the Altalena: These names— of villages, buildings, crossroads, defiles, a ship—are a random few in the long index that acquired an epic resonance in the Palestine fighting...

...But it is an expansion worth the attention of persons interested in the Middle East in general and Israel in particular...

...The present lines, agreed under the tacit threat of Great Power intervention, have remained a source of trouble for both countries...

...In another global context, Israel today is being watched by virtually the whole underdeveloped world as a dramatic point of impact between modern technological culture and traditional society...

...The penultimate chapter, "Shin-Tav-Shin: The Battle That Remains to be Fought," recounts how an operation to occupy the so-called "northern triangle," the northern bulge of Arab territory west of the Jordan, was weighed and discarded in March 1949 in favor of the present armistice lines with Jordan...

...The present book also gives a lucid and detailed analysis of the hard calculations and painful decisions of the Israeli leaders that underlay the armistice agreements with the surrounding Arab League countries...

...Chapter two, "How the Arab Countries were Drawn into the Palestine War," is a dashing example of polemical argument designed to show that the Arabs probably would not have objected to the creation of Israel if Britain had not prodded them into action...

...The independence and partition of India in 1947 and, in that same year, the British withdrawal from Greek and Turkish affairs that led to the Truman Doctrine, were both of much greater moment to British imperial fortunes...

...The brothers had previously collaborated in writing The Secret Roads, a history of illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine in the days of British mandatory rule...

...Reviewed by Kennett Love Correspondent, New York "Times" The Palestine War of 1948-49 was relatively insignificant by military standards but as a piece of history it was a consequential prodigy...

...The Kimches have distorted the historical context in two ways...

...Jon Kimche was a news correspondent, part of the time for the British news agency, Reuters, and part for the journal of the British Labor party's left wing, the Tribune...

...First, they have presented the "clash" as intrinsically one between the "destinies" of the Zionist movement and the British Empire rather than between Israel and the Arabs...

...I was convinced neither that their contention was right nor that the documents cited supported their contention...

...The originality of the Kimche thesis is all the more remarkable in that it ignores the consternation of the Hashemite family and other Arab leaders when they learned of the Balfour Declaration...

...The story of how the Israeli army was built up amid the pressures and distractions of life-or-death war and diplomacy from 35,000 men on May 15, 1948, to 100,000 at the outset of 1949 is woven into the narrative as a clearly visible thread...

...It tells how the conquest of the Negev by the then Colonel Yigal Alon was coordinated with the "covering diplomatic action" fought by the Israeli delegate at the Security Council in Paris, in a race against the re-imposition of a ceasefire by the UN...

...Few of the many writers about the Palestine War can claim better credentials...

...Second, they have greatly exaggerated the role of the Palestine conflict in the postwar dissolution of the British Empire...

...A Clash of Destinies is basically an expansion of the middle section of Seven Fallen Pillars, which dealt with the emergence of Israel as a modern nation out of the chaotic collapse of the British Mandate in Palestine...

...Even though the forces involved were small, its campaigns had to be accommodated to a schedule of stops and starts imposed by distant powers at United Nations headquarters...

...Both preceded Palestine...

...These accounts, too, contain much new material garnered by the authors in five years of research and interviews with the responsible political leaders and officers...

...The arming and supplying of the Israeli forces by ships and by Dakotas hopping eastward across the airfields of Europe makes a fascinating tale...

...The Kimches ignore a good many other things in their contention that "Palestine thus was the watershed for British imperialism...

...Although the Kimches' historical analysis will be swallowed by few, their interpretive account of the war itself and the development of Israeli diplomatic and military strategy stands up independently of the misidentification of whose destinies were clashing...

...As a history of the fighting, the book is fair to both sides, and liberal in its criticism of the conduct of Israeli operations...

...The historical significance of the whole episode has endowed its battles and military developments with a legendary aura that may equal the story of Joshua's first conquest of Palestine for the people of Israel...

...They give a fascinating account of a new type of "combined operation" by diplomatic as well as military forces in the chapter entitled "The War Against Egypt...

...And the authors have not forgotten to deal with the explosive unfinished business left by the imposition of armistices before the fighting had run its full course to a military decision...

...In their book, A Clash of Destinies, the Swiss-born Kimche brothers, Jon and David, give a lively account of the military operations together with a broad historical interpretation that is interesting and original but wide open to argument...

...Both brothers were there when it happened—in the plains, the hill passes, the embattled towns and cities, the conference rooms...