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Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists: Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problemby Yoav Gelber Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2001. 399 pp. $75 Middle East Quarterly Winter 2002 Reviewed by Daniel Pipes There have been flashier histories of Israel's war of independence and
longer ones, but none as well informed, more sensible, and more compelling
than Gelber's magisterial account. Making full use of the archives and
blending them into a lively account, he provides enough specifics to make
the hostilities come alive without ever bogging down in detail.
Gelber argues that the first phase of the war began just one day after the
United Nations decision to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947 and
continued through to the British retreat on May 15, 1948. During that
half-year, a civil war took place within the boundaries of Mandatory
Palestine, with the British not willing to expend lives to stop it.
He also makes the interesting point that the voluntary Arab flight from the contested areas fit into a cultural pattern; historically by-standers to the wars of their rulers, the farmers and townspeople escaped the hostilities temporary, then returned when the fighting ended. But Zionists came out of a Europe context in which abandoning the land was tantamount to forfeiting it. The second round began with the Arab armies' invasion on May 15. Those armies were almost as ill-prepared for fighting as the Palestinians had been and, like them, were soundly defeated, with shuddering consequences for all the regimes involved. But don't be satisfied with this potted version - read the full version Gelber so capably recounts in Palestine 1948. Excerpts from Will Durant's The Age of Faith Pages 162-186 Pub. 1950
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