Middle East 1948
Geyer, Georgie Anne
Middle East 1948 Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli-War, by Dan Kurzman. World Publishing Company. 750 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Georgie Anne Geyer Dan Kurzman's new book, Genesis 1948, is...
...He found a mention of a Major Nasser at the battle of Faluja, who was quoted as speaking about an Israeli Major Cohen's "beautiful driver" (the Israelis had women soldiers as drivers...
...The youth on both sides," he says, "do not know each other...
...He shows how the older generations of Arabs and Jews knew, and in many cases, loved each other...
...Its little kernels of news insight and flashes of passion are being quoted here and there in the national media as the Middle East's eternal war pregnancy grows and grows...
...For the first time, a fascinating story about the young Major Gamel Abdel Nasser is revealed— it seems that Nasser, stationed along the Egyptian lines at that time, became close friends with a Jewish officer named Yeroham Cohen...
...To do this, Kurzman, the author of three other books and a highly experienced former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, spent three years painstakingly interviewing approximately 1,000 persons in the Arab states, Israel, Europe, and the United States...
...President Harry Truman had not wanted the Clifford notes to be shown, Kurzman says, but Clifford agreed to share them because he thought it was time the entire story was told...
...The whole book reflects the miracle that happened," Kurzman says...
...But he also shows how, because of the archaic hatreds that infect that part of the world, too many moments of hope for peace have been lost...
...He further discovered the close friendship that developed between Major Nasser and Major Cohen, who later became ambassador to Ethiopia...
...He feels they were largely responsible for the war because they tried to maintain a state of chaos to force the Israelis to accept a solution which would permit the British to maintain their bases in the Negev...
...This was the special element of drama in it, and so I felt it could best be told through the individuals involved...
...But while the pages are filled with drama, stories of human courage and hope, Kurzman is not optimistic...
...It is the story of their bitter battling for that one tiny piece of land which throughout history has been one of the most sought-after hubs of the world...
...Then I cross-checked everything . . . everything...
...The author came upon one of the most intriguing stories of the book when, one day in Cairo, he was patiently going through old newspapers from 1948 with a translator...
...the Israelis won totally...
...Kurzman is not easy on the British...
...In addition to being the first really definitive work on the Palestine war of 1948, it is a book filled with actual news "scoops" that have lain dormant all these years...
...For the first time, the full story of the Jewish terrorist assassination of the Swedish mediator Count Berna-dotte is told...
...But most important is the dramatic story of the war itself, in which two peoples, both long humiliated by colonialism and the barbarities of a decadent Europe, turned against each other in their mutual struggle for manhood and nationhood...
...So I looked for the individuals involved in certain events and interviewed them intensively...
...The book reads so much like a novel that you have to remind yourself every now and then that it is fact...
...This was one of the most dramatic wars ever fought," Kurzman writes "and it was fought not between armies but between peoples...
...When Kurzman dug into this, he discovered that the Major Nasser, at the time a restless, rebellious young officer eager to overthrow the decadent, corrupt monarchy, was indeed the man who became President Nasser...
...He also went through hundreds of secret documents, including White .House adviser Clark Clifford's personal papers, which illuminate another "scoop"—the struggle between the State Department, which supported the Arab position, and the White House, which supported Israel...
...Their reasoning, Kurzman maintains, was that the Israelis, if they saw their new state about to be destroyed, would come to the British and make a deal...
...Using this method, Kurzman has ended up with a book that reads as quickly as a novel, with characters and events described as if the author —and the reader—were there...
...In 1950, Cohen sent Nasser some baby clothes for his new-born son and reflected that it was too bad a man like Nasser wasn't running Egypt...
...Reviewed by Georgie Anne Geyer Dan Kurzman's new book, Genesis 1948, is getting a lot of attention...
...Looking at the newspapers, of course, keeps all this in perspective since new troubles break out every day in that convulsed part of the world...
Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3
