Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Preface | |
| 1 | Palestine on the Eve | 3 |
| 2 | The Beginning of the Conflict: Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 1881-1914 | 37 |
| 3 | World War I, the Balfour Declaration, and the British Mandate | 67 |
| 4 | The Arabs Rebel | 121 |
| 5 | World War II and the First Arab-Israeli War, 1939-49 | 161 |
| 6 | 1949-1956 | 259 |
| 7 | The Six-Day War, 1967 | 302 |
| 8 | The War of Attrition | 347 |
| 9 | The October War, 1973 | 387 |
| 10 | The Israeli-Egyptian Peace, 1977-79 | 444 |
| 11 | The Lebanon War, 1982-85 | 494 |
| 12 | The Intifada | 561 |
| 13 | Peace at Last? | 611 |
| 14 | Ehud Barak's 19 Months | 652 |
| Conclusions | 676 |
| Notes | 695 |
| Selected Bibliography | 737 |
| Index | 753 |
Read an Excerpt
Many of the villages fought a continual if low-key battle against the Bedouin, who periodically sortied into the settled areas of Palestine from the desert east of the Jordan, from the Negev, and from the Sinai. There were also protracted land and water disputes between villages and sometimes between clans within villages. These feuds, and rivalries between leading urban families and between various towns, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, were to serve as continuous elements of division and weakness in Palestinian Arab society.
Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a'yan ), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers.
Almost all the large landowners (effendis) were urban notables, some of them living outside Palestine, many in Beirut, Amman, Damascus, and Paris. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Zionist land purchases from effendis contributed to the roster of dispossessed villagers. The second half of the century witnessed the rapid growth of citrus cultivation, mainly in the humid coastal plain, the produce destined for highly profitable export to Europe. Land became a more attractive investment,and the concomitant price rises led to further sales by impoverished fellahin.
By 1881 a third of Palestine's population was urban -- up from only 22 percent in 1800. Most of the Jews and Christians lived in the towns, making their relative weight there decidedly greater than in the country as a whole. By 1880 Jerusalem's population numbered 30,000, of whom about half were Jews; Gaza's population was 19,000, Jaffa's 10,000, and Haifa's 6,000. The notables in the towns were nurtured by the Ottoman Empire, which gave them various local positions and tax-collecting functions, and by the British authorities after 1917 - 18. The elite families -- the Khalidis, Husseinis, and Nashashibis in Jerusalem; the Ja'bris and Tamimis of Hebron; the Nabulsis, Masris, and Shak'as of Nablus, and others -- supplied municipal officials, judges, police officers, religious officials, and civil servants. Inevitably, given their wealth, power, and influence with the imperial authorities, the a'yan emerged as the Palestinian Arabs' local and eventually "national" leadership. A vast gulf -- based on disparities in educational level and social, economic, and political position -- separated the a'yan from the largely illiterate masses.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a gradual modernization of the country, accompanying the growing urbanization. While most villages and towns were connected by footpaths rather than paved roads, and people and goods still moved on foot or by horse, camel, or mule rather than in wheeled vehicles, a carriage-road, the first in Palestine, was constructed in 1869 between Jaffa and Jerusalem. The first railroad was laid down in 1892 (also between these two towns), and a second railroad, connecting Haifa and Deraa, running through the Jezreel Valley, was constructed in 1903 - 05.
The century also witnessed a steady increase in literacy. It is estimated that around 1800 only 3 percent of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine were literate (mostly elder sons of the a'yan). As the century progressed, an education "system" emerged, mostly owing to the penetration of European missionaries rather than to Ottoman or local Arab initiative.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, lighting was provided by candles and the burning of olive oil. In the 1860s, naphtha was introduced, and generator-produced electricity reached Palestine during the first decade of the twentieth century. Through the nineteenth century the population was plagued by diseases such as malaria, trachoma, dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever. Water supplies were inadequate and frequently impure. But the first pharmacy opened its doors in 1842; and the first European hospital, in Jerusalem, in 1843. By the end of the century, there were fifteen hospitals in the town, making it the center of European medicine in Palestine and beyond.
The Turkish Administration
The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917 - 18, was aware of the land's importance as the cradle of Judaism and Christianity but never made it a separate, distinct administrative district. In the 1870s Palestine was part of the province (vilayet) of Syria, which was ruled by a governor (wali) stationed in Damascus. The province was subdivided into districts (sanjaks), three of them in Palestine: Acre, including Haifa, the area of today's Hadera, the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys, the Sea of Galilee, Safad, and Tiberias; Nablus, including Beisan, Jenin, and Qalqilya; and Jerusalem, which included Jericho, Jaffa, Gaza, Beersheba, Hebron, and Bethlehem. The sanjaks in turn were divided into subdistricts, administered by local governors called kaymakams.
In 1887 the sanjak of Jerusalem became an independent mutasarriflik (subgovernorate) answerable directly to Constantinople rather than to Damascus. The following year, the rest of Palestine -- the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre -- were separated from the vilayet of Sam (Syria) and became the responsibility of a newly created vilayet of Beirut. The new entity, which consisted of the area of much of present-day Lebanon, thus also controlled the northern half of Palestine.
During a decade of Egyptian rule in Palestine (1831 - 40), the authorities had managed to impose more or less centralized government. The powerful Egyptian army, led by Ibrahim 'Ali, brushed aside most of the local magnates who had managed to carve out de facto fiefdoms in different areas of the country. They also staved off the Bedouin incursions from the eastern and southern deserts that had done so much to keep Palestine insecure and poor.
On their return, the Turks instituted a wide range of reforms (tanzimat) -- economic, administrative, legal, military, and political -- but with mixed results. The new, more efficient and centralized taxation resulted in massive impoverishment of the rural population, which in turn led to the steady depopulation of villages and an influx into the towns. Efforts to conscript villagers into the Turkish army, a return of brigandage on the roads, and renewed Bedouin incursions -- all had the same effect. The village rulers, or sheikhs, who before the Egyptian conquest had had considerable authority, lost much of it as their role as tax collectors for the central government passed into the hands of Ottoman officials and urban notables.
At the same time economic conditions as well as law and order in the towns vastly improved. Trade with the West picked up. The urban notables became wealthier and acquired more land. Turkish reforms of local government, both in Palestine and Syria, including the appointment of town councils, also resulted in increasing the power of the a'yan and religious leaders (the ulema) at the expense of Ottoman governors and subgovernors. These reforms proved to be milestones on the road to the emergence of centrifugal Arab "nationalisms." In other ways, too, the tanzimat -- which aimed at centralization and unity -- contributed to disunity in the Arab provinces of the empire. The impoverishment of the countryside and the growing prosperity of the towns drove a wedge between townspeople and the fellahin, or peasantry. And the Sublime Porte's firmans (decrees) of 1839 and, more decisively, of 1856 -- equalizing the status of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects -- resulted in short order in the dramatic alienation of Muslims from Christians. The former resented the implied loss of superiority and recurrently assaulted and massacred Christian communities -- in Aleppo in 1850, in Nablus in 1856, and in Damascus and Lebanon in 1860. Among the long-term consequences of these bitter internecine conflicts were the emergence of a Christian-dominated Lebanon in the 1920s - 40s and the deep fissure between Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs as they confronted the Zionist influx after World War I.
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