Eugene L. Rogan

a history

The Arabs

Avi Shlaim

By all accounts, the 1948 Palestine war was one of the most significant milestones in the modern history of the Middle East and remains one of the most intractable conflicts of modern times. Israelis call the 1948 war "The War of Independence" while Arabs call it al-Nakba or the disaster. The conventional Israeli version portrays 1948 as an unequal struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath, as a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In this version all the surrounding Arab states sent their armies into Palestine to strangle the Jewish state at birth and the Palestinians left the country on orders from their own leaders and in the expectation of a triumphal return. Since the late 1980s, however, a group of "new historians" or revisionist Israeli historians have challenged many of the claims surrounding the birth of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. The present volume was conceived as a contribution to the ongoing debate about 1948. The War for Palestine brings together leading Israeli new historians with prominent Arab and Western scholars of the Middle East who revisit 1948 from the perspective of each of the countries involved in the war. The result is a volume that is rich in new material and new insights and which enhances considerably our understanding of the historical roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Eugene L. Rogan is a Lecturer in Modern History of the Middle East, Fellow of St. Anthony's College, and Director of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Frontiers of State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2000) and co-editor of Village, Steppe, and State: the Social Origins of Modern Jordan (St. Martin's, 1995). Avi Shlaim is a Professor of International Relations and Fellow of St. Anthony's College, University of Oxford, and he is also the Director of Graduate Studies in International Relations. He is the author of several books, the most recent one being The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, 1999). Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to newspapers and a media commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.

Rewriting the History of 1948

The War for Palestine

 Avi Shlaim

يوجين روغان 

آفي شلايم 

الحرب من أجل فلسطين كانت أهم الأحداث في تاريخ الشرق الأوسط المعاصر . الإسرائيليون يطلقون على حرب 1948 إسم حرب الاستقلال أما العرب فيسمونها النكبة إن هذا الكتاب الذي كانت الفكرة منه أن يكون إسهاماً في النقاش المستمر حول أحداث سنة 1948 يجمع بين مؤرخين كبار من إسرائيل وأساتذة بارزين وغربيين قاموا بإعادة كتابة أحداث سنة 1948 من منظور البلدان ذات العلاقة بالحرب ، لعل أفكارهم تنير وتحسن فهمنا لتلك اللحظة الفاصلة في التاريخ العربي الإسرائيلي . لعل أحد أهم العناصر في هذا الكتاب هو استكشاف المواقع المعقدة والاهتمامات والعلاقات المتضاربة للأطراف العربية ومن ثم المشاكل التي أوجدت الصراع ، والتي نتجت عنه أيضا وما تزال قائمة إلى حد كبير ، وبالطبع هي مأساوية وباعثة على الشؤم . فهم الماضي لا يستطيع حلها ، ولكنه يستطيع أن يسهم إسهاماً كبيراً في جهود حلها ،،، ناعوم تشومسكي العبيكان للنشر 2004

The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948

الحرب من أجل فلسطين إعادة كتابة تاريخ 1948

A theoretically informed account of how the Ottoman state redefined itself during the last decades of empire.

Transjordan, 1850-1921

Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire

The 1948 war led to the creation of the state of Israel, the fragmentation of Palestine, and to a conflict which has raged across the intervening sixty years. The historical debate likewise continues and these debates are encapsulated in the second edition of The War for Palestine, updated to include chapters on Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. In a preface to this edition, the editors survey the state of scholarship in this contested field. The impact of these debates goes well beyond academia. There is an important link between the state of Arab-Israeli relations and popular attitudes towards the past. A more complex and fair-minded understanding of that past is essential for preserving at least the prospect of reconciliation between Arabs and Israel in the future. The rewriting of the history of 1948 thus remains a practical as well as an academic imperative.

Eugene Rogan' major new book is at its heart about the extraordinary diversity of the Arab experience diversity of the Arab experience- a people united by language and religion, but separated by politics and sheer geographical range - from the Moroccan Atlantic coast to the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the writings and eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the tumultuous yeras of Arab history, The Arabs tries to balance different voices - politicians, intellectuals, journalists, students, men and women, poets and novelists, famous, infamous and the completely unknown - to give a rich, complex sense of life over nearly five centuries, starting in 1516 with the disastrous defeat of Arab forces and their subjugation by the Ottoman Turks. With the end of first of the Ottoman Empire and then of the European colonial empires in the twentieth century, most Arabs were at last ruling themselves again, and had their lives transformed by the astonishing accident of control over the world's supply of oil. The independent Arab states have since been buffeted by the creation of Israel, the vagaries of the Cold War and their own rivalries and instabilities. Eugene Rogan's multilayered, fascinating book is the essential guide to the states that lie at the heart of understanding the modern world and its future.

A History

Rogan's book is remarkable for its geographical sweep, covering the Arab world from North Africa through the Arabian Peninsula, and for the depth in which it explores every facet of modern Arab history. Charting the evolution of Arab identity from Ottomanism to Arabism to Islamism, it covers themes including the conflict between national independence and foreign domination, the Arab-Israeli struggle and the peace process, Abdel Nasser and the rise of Arab Nationalism, the political and economic power of oil and the conflict between secular and Islamic values. This multilayered, fascinating and definitive work is the essential guide to understanding the history of the modern Arab world -- and its future.

Tariq Tell

The contributors to this text on the origins of modern Jordan have based their approach on original fieldwork and archives in Jordan, rather than on foreign archives, and avoid viewing the Jordanian state in the context of British imperial policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Social Origins of Modern Jordan

Village, Steppe and State

Eugene Rogan, profesor de la Universidad de Oxford, ha escrito la historia de los pueblos árabes que necesitan los lectores occidentales del siglo XXI. Su libro arranca de las conquistas de los turcos, pero se dedica sobre todo a los tiempos contemporáneos. Su propósito es explicarnos las causas del fracaso de la modernización de los pueblos árabes y su compleja evolución en los siglos XX y XXI: la quiebra e los imperios coloniales, el desastre de Palestina, el ascenso y crisis del nacionalismo, la era del petróleo, el surgimiento del islamismo... Rashid Khalidi ha calificado esta obra de “magistral” y Sir Alastair Horne ha dicho que es la clase de libro que nos permite entender “los agravios que el mundo islámico estima sufrir de Occidente”. A lo que añade: “Pocos estudiosos conocen estas cuestiones como Rogan y son menos aun los capaces de explicarlas de manera tan agradable de leer”. Este es, en suma, un libro necesario para comprender mejor el mundo en que vivimos.

Eugene L. Rogan

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